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28 Jun 2008: I've done it #2
Today has featured a lot less work than the last 10 days, which has been most welcome. And to celebrate, I finished the little cardigan I started making for Rowan The Baby a few weeks back:
I am absurdly proud of it, although I'm not providing any closer shots because proper knitters will be looking. Admire from afar, with your eyes scrunched a bit to blur out the slightly wonky seams and occasional over-loopy stitch. Ignore for the moment that it's missing a button - that will come - and a SnowKnits label - that will come too.
But still! Hey! Cardigan! It's hanging on my very own Country Living-type door, which is the door to my new home office. More photos to come on that if it's nice and sunny tomorrow. And this is my first ever Handknitted Item of Clothing Handknitted By Me. Next up: a bobble hat. If this cardigan project has been anything to go by, it'll be ready just in time for Christmas.
posted on June 28, 2008 06:23 PM | link | Comments (8) | Leave a comment
27 Jun 2008: I've done it!
I've got through the week! And everything's done! And all deadlines are hit (pretty much. Well, except one. But I'll do that tomorrow).
Hooray! I deserve a bowl of ice cream, which I am now going to go and have, at ten o' clock on a Friday night.
[in a quiet, not at all trumpety voice] Go me.
posted on June 27, 2008 10:10 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
27 Jun 2008: Doing the right thing
Currently I'm reading Winning the Oil Endgame, by the excellent Amory Lovins. I've got as far as the author laying out all the reasons and the central summary of the book and I'm about to get into the detail. Having read his work before, I don't think I'm likely to be let down by what follows. And the idea is this: being a gas-guzzling nation isn't a great idea for America even if (and it's a huge 'if') you set aside any thoughts of global climate change.
Continue reading "Doing the right thing" »
posted on June 27, 2008 07:24 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
26 Jun 2008: We interrupt this mega busy week to bring you...
... a haul for £25 from Ebay.
Continue reading "We interrupt this mega busy week to bring you..." »
posted on June 26, 2008 12:27 PM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
25 Jun 2008: Foolish
Rob and I, in our more foolish moments, practise a little trick we've been working on for a while. Whilst on the phone, one of us emits a steady cry of 'aaaagggggggggghhhhhhh', whilst simultaneously passing the phone from our right arm's length to our left. You get an excellent effect of someone running past at high speed, in a state of panic.
That is how I feel at the moment. I have three massive deadlines, all for this afternoon. I have to go to a thing in London tonight, so they have to be done by 3-4. It's never going to happen.
[quietly] aaaaaa [getting louder] AAAAAGGGHHHHH [trails off] hhhhhh......
p.s. I actually quite like this feeling. I'm a deadline junkie.
posted on June 25, 2008 11:22 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
23 Jun 2008: Shaping Things
For those among you who read non-fiction, do you ever get stuck into some new book and you realise that everything you're reading is now what you think, and if you thought anything before you picked up the book, you can't quite remember what it was? I've broken off from reading Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling because I know I'm in the middle of one of those experiences. He's talking about the relationship between society and the objects it makes. It doesn't sound exciting, but he's slicing the world and its history neatly at the joints and laying out the choice cuts in ways you've never seen done before. Oh so that's why we think that way! Ahh, I see how we got here now! Yes, that must be how it works! It's funny, personal, brilliant and grand. It's only a slim volume, and somewhat eccentrically typeset, but Amazon thinks you can pick up a copy for a fiver (plus postage). If you want to spend an hour or two thinking about how the future will be designed I recommend it. Two thumbs up; fine holiday fun!
posted on June 23, 2008 01:54 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
22 Jun 2008: Collaborative hackery
Just in case any of you didn't realise what a nerd I am, let me correct your misconception. I'm currently reading a book about how Microsoft's previous game console, the Xbox, was hacked in the early part of this decade. Games consoles have to be set up so that you can't just make a copy of a game rather than buying your own, for obvious reasons. In fact, most of the revenue comes from selling the games rather than the console. And if the console needs to be running validation checks then you obviously have to make it secure from hackers, otherwise they might just turn off the piece of code that does the checking. What's interesting is to look at the struggle going on between the hacker community and the Microsoft engineers. You might think that the professionals, with their engineering degrees, big budgets and well-equipped labs would have the upper hand, but the internet seems to have done something rather impressive to all sorts of communities, hackers included.
Continue reading "Collaborative hackery" »
posted on June 22, 2008 03:54 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
21 Jun 2008: UK is biggest arms dealer
Continue reading "UK is biggest arms dealer" »
posted on June 21, 2008 07:29 AM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
20 Jun 2008: Little TV
There's seems to be less and less TV around me at the moment. I remember working with someone who didn't watch any TV years ago and thinking how weird they were. Although in their case they really were weird. But Em doesn't seem to bother with more than an hour or so of TV a week. Anna has just gone a fortnight without turning on the set. My pal Jenn seems not to own one (though somehow she's able to watch zombie movies). (And my friend Leila used not to have a TV although a job writing about what's on telly might have changed that.) At the moment, I'm watching about four one-hour shows a week, with the adverts all snipped out, courtesy of Sky+. So that's just under three hours. In my case it's not because a) I have so many exciting things to do instead or b) I disapprove of televisions (or anything with buttons, à la Amish-types). I'm just aware that I've seen it all before, usually done better. What I need is a hobby. Suggestions? (Apart from knitting)
posted on June 20, 2008 02:15 PM | link | Comments (7) | Leave a comment
19 Jun 2008: Helium dreams
Not sure about 'Zeppelin v Pterodactyls' as a movie concept, but Zeppelins on their own strikes me as a sound idea. I keep waiting for airships to make their inevitable and magnificent return. Picture a helium-filled Zeppelin, built using carbon fibre and up-to-the-second cleverness. Its skin would form one giant solar panel; its propulsion would be electric impeller engines. Just like the Zeppelins of old it would operate like a luxury cruise-liner of the skies: quiet, safe, comfortable. I can't quite decide whether to run them at a gentle hundred-mile-an-hour canter, so that the trip from London to New York takes a day and a half. Or slow them right down, and have them cruise four or five thousand feet above the waves at a sedate 35mph. That makes the Atlantic crossing a four day event, but you'd be able to walk around the promenade deck and even watch the dolphins through the telescopes on the rear sun terrace. If you have to fly, why not make it civilised?
posted on June 19, 2008 07:19 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
19 Jun 2008: Just dashing off to stinky London...
... but here is a fabulous post that I reckon will save me one million hours over the coming year. It tells you how to safely eject a USB external hard drive when the dialogue box 'the device cannot be stopped. Try ejecting the device later' comes up.
Hooray! Right, off to the smoke.
posted on June 19, 2008 05:41 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
19 Jun 2008: I would write a brilliant post on this...
... but I've got rather a large number of deadlines.
Retail sales in May were staggeringly high, catching out economists and causing City types to splutter a lot. In the Guardian, Brian Hilliard from Société Générale said: "It is amazing. I cannot believe this is a reflection of the underlying trend. A stunning number. We suspect weather as the explanation."
Rob, could you possibly do a blog post on retailers and the weather? You know, the thing, and the thing?* It's just I'm a bit busy today.
*Rob and I, having known each other for about 12 years, are like Daneel and Giskard in Asimov's Foundation novels. We can communicate complex thoughts and dialogue using high pitched frequencies in a matter of seconds that would normally take a good morning's worth of normal, human-rate dialogue. It's impressive - you should see it sometime.
Continue reading "I would write a brilliant post on this..." »
posted on June 19, 2008 03:45 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
17 Jun 2008: I have internets!
Hello, hello! I have a connection again! Hello! I NEVER want to go through that again. Over 48 hours of complete enforced separation from my beautiful internets. It's Tuesday night, and since Sunday I have not:
- read any email
- read the paper
- blogged
- read blogs
- been able to amend my online to do list
- printed anything (I couldn't download the drivers to set up the printer)
- looked stuff up
Think of the knowledge I won't have because of this awful hiatus. Thank heavens for Zen internet and their mighty ADSL service who got me online despite the best efforts of BT to balls things up (who I had to pay an extra £100 for the pleasure of bypassing their cock-up). Despite existing in the awful void I have, however, got frighteningly up to date with all my paperwork, which was about the only task I could do offline.
I had 350 emails, but only 50 of those are important. So I'll be tackling them and their associated tasks first thing! Thanks for your patience, if you've been waiting for me! And thanks to Rob for coming over to my new house and setting up the server, ADSL filter (jacked into the master socket to eke a few more mbps out) and wireless network in record time. Clever, kind Rob.
Oh, and by the way? Even though the exchange is 5 miles away, this connection is about the fastest I've ever had.
Lots of pictures of new house and tales of moving will follow. Summary: it's all done, everything's unpacked, the artichokes and rhubarb are ready for picking and I'm in heaven. Gorgeous, silent countryside; fast internets; 3 minutes from the motorway; 13 minutes from the train station then a 55 minute journey to Marylebone; baby baking nicely; happy cats; perfect husband; idyllic cottage; business going well (except for a stupid returns request which I'm just not going to think about until tomorrow) - life is pretty perfect for me at the moment.
Internet! I have internet! I'm going to do some gratuitous looking things up now. Because I Can.
posted on June 17, 2008 10:00 PM | link | Comments (5) | Leave a comment
17 Jun 2008: The 1980s House
Before the Internet
Poor Em; she's having to live like folk did back in the Eighties, or maybe the early Nineties. No home internet connection. We've talked on the phone a few times and it's absolutely extraordinary how often some conversational topic gets derailed because there can be no checking, or looking up or sharing or keeping up with things if there's no internet. I mean there could be, but it would hard work. For instance, I bet teletext still carries perfectly good weather-on-demand pages - no tedious waiting for the next major news bulletin - just some tedious waiting around for lots of ugly squares to assemble themselves on your TV screen. Plus I'm sure we could hook up a fax to exchange book covers and other images if there's not enough time to let the postman do it. And, I imagine 35-volume encyclopedia sets have really come down in price for anyone who doesn't have access to Wikipedia and isn't fussed about anything that happened recently.
But in some ways it's a return to a simpler time. A simpler time when half our long-distance interactions with others and the world at large were either difficult, impossible or undreamt of. Fingers crossed that Em can hold out until the right wires get hooked up. (In the meantime, you take your life in your hands if you go round there with a web-capable mobile phone about your person, I'll tell you.)
posted on June 17, 2008 01:16 PM | link | Comments (5) | Leave a comment
16 Jun 2008: One lens or two
I was just about to step away from the blog when I noticed this wingéd thing excavating a troublingly deep hole in the Cotswold stone wall near my window (it belongs to my kindly neighbours). Of course before I could photograph it I had to swap lenses. I have a macro lens and a telephoto, i.e. one for close, one for distance. And every single time I want to take a photo I have to swap them over. In this case I had barely done so when the bird flew away so I didn't have time to get a sharper shot. There's now a single lens for my Nikon D40 that combines the macro with the telephoto. If I ever have enough money sitting around doing nothing to buy one I'll seriously consider it. It would double the usefulness of my camera. In the meantime, click on the photo to get a bigger version of the B&W Stripety Woodpecker, or whatever it's called.
posted on June 16, 2008 08:45 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
16 Jun 2008: Hybrid aesthetics
Not a serious contender as an e-reader for those who love paper and traditional styling, but still rather amusing. It's a Moleskine notebook with an Apple iPhone hidden inside upon which you can read a book (Click the picture to get a better look.). Learn how to make yours here.
posted on June 16, 2008 08:13 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
15 Jun 2008: Who Review
Well, I wasn't bored while watching 'Midnight'. But I can't see myself ever sitting down and wanting to watch that episode a second time. And you have to ask yourself how Russell T. Davies is feeling at the moment. [Contains spoilers]
Continue reading "Who Review" »
posted on June 15, 2008 07:21 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
14 Jun 2008: Evolution gag
I just came across a visual joke I knocked together a while back for my friend Leila's web-o-zine, All The Rage. Time to share it with you folks too. See above, and then click here to continue.
Continue reading "Evolution gag" »
posted on June 14, 2008 09:12 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
14 Jun 2008: This weekend and next week
Right, sleeves up. This weekend is weekend #2 of house moving. I mention it for a couple of reasons:
1) I won't be around to answer emails. Oddly, they tend to pile up at the weekend as fast as in the week. That's not normally a problem, except
2) Sodding, useless BT have failed thus far to connect our new phone line. Without a phone line, I can't set up the ADSL line. Without an ADSL line, I can't access the internets. And so, I won't be around to blog or, more crucially, read my email. [trembles involuntarily at thought of no email.] I envisage this problem being around for the whole of next week, knowing BT as I now do. I'll be in London Thursday and Friday so will likely reply then.
So, you can get me on the phone which is 0790 406 2414, and please do if it's urgent or important to you. Sorry about this. Feel free to address your complaints to BT.
posted on June 14, 2008 08:30 AM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
13 Jun 2008: Direct Utility Pricing
I might have shared this with you before, good webfolk, but I thought it worth mentioning again. If you glance at an economics books you'll see the concept of 'utility'. Utility is sort of the benefit a person gets from something expressed as a sum of money. If an ice cream buys you five pounds of happiness, but only costs two pounds then it's a bargain. It's a slightly weird concept, but you can think of it the other way round: once you know what an ice cream tastes like you can ask yourself what's the maximum amount you'd ever spend on one. That's its utility to you. Obviously it will vary from person to person. Now, ideally one would set the price of, say, a book equal to its utility for each individual. Any less and you're giving it away, any more and you'll lose the sale. But how to do that?
Continue reading "Direct Utility Pricing" »
posted on June 13, 2008 05:05 PM | link | Comments (6) | Leave a comment
13 Jun 2008: Divergence
Remember what I said about the book group I used to belong to having such divergent views about the books they liked? I was also glancing at some reviews for the recent Doctor Who two-parter that I liked so much and I was surprised to find there were people who weren't thrilled with it. And these weren't obviously crazy people either.
I know books and stories are complicated things and people are too, so it's inevitable that no two people will be alike, but I'm constantly surprised at just how much one person's black is another person's white. What I'm wondering is how many broad categories of reader there are. Ignoring small differences and pet peeves, might readers fall into three basic types or maybe seven or thirty? Or are we spread out across infinite axes and there are no groups at all. I can't help think that if we could draw out everyone's tastes as dots in a 3D graph, we'd see clusters - maybe not tight little clumps of identical views - but still, there'd be discernible groups, maybe just three or four of them. Then we could name them and label books accordingly. You might still love things in other categories, but they wouldn't be, at their core, quite 'you'.
posted on June 13, 2008 11:09 AM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
11 Jun 2008: Sad
For reasons that aren't easy to explain but involve the idea that one day I'd quite like to have a 4 colour printing press in my back garden, complete with a man in blue overalls to operate it, I subscribe to a newsfeed about printing presses, and their sale, auction and exchange. And this rather sad thing came into my in box today: the auction of Butler and Tanner's machines (click below to see the details). A sad day.
posted on June 11, 2008 03:00 PM | link | Comments (13) | Leave a comment
11 Jun 2008: Zuzu's Petals
There's a very touching and extensive piece in today's Sheffield Star about Sue Hepworth's latest novel, Zuzu's Petals, and her inspiration for it, stemming from the death of her father six years ago. Do have a read.
posted on June 11, 2008 12:53 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
11 Jun 2008: That Robert Finn story
If you want to read the short (2,000 words-ish) Robert Finn story in the most recent Litro, you can go to their home page and the links are (currently) next to all the chevrons (>>): Issue 74 Part II. I think it's rather fun, but then I would say that.
posted on June 11, 2008 09:53 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
09 Jun 2008: JKR's Harvard Commencement
Very much enjoyed Joanna Rowling's speech to the graduating class at Harvard (video and transcipt here). I had a very similar conversation to her take on the virtues of failure quite recently.
"The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention."
posted on June 9, 2008 10:20 PM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
09 Jun 2008: The cat
Just rested her chin on my keyboard, pressing one of the F keys which deleted a long post about this and that. I am not going to write it out again, so in brief:
- I have had lots of power cuts today. It's like the 70s. What pleases me is that I have those power supply things that you plug things into and it keeps the power going for a few minutes. They've worked like a charm. The server, firewall and my PC are all running fine. Hooray.
- Here is a photo of the garden of our house in London which has just been done. It's a sort of badly done montage I've knocked together in Photoshop from lots of photos. There's no 'before' photo - just imagine dense undergrowth starting a foot from the camera position, extending for 100ft.
Will quickly post this before Amber finds any other new exciting ways to help. I explain to her that it's simply not professional, but she just looks at me. My parenting skills are going to need to improve, fast, if my cat management skills are anything to go by.
posted on June 9, 2008 05:34 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
09 Jun 2008: Age ranging on children's books
I'm a bit behind the curve here, but wanted to draw your attention if you hadn't seen it in every blog, paper, and place of news: publishers are pushing on with proposing age banding on kid's books. My view is similar to that of many - it's a foolish, simplistic idea, which will stifle a love of reading and is a symptom of the nanny state. Do take a mo to subscribe to the petition at www.notoagebanding.org.
Continue reading "Age ranging on children's books" »
posted on June 9, 2008 02:23 PM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
08 Jun 2008: Who Review
Well, what can I say? If all I got for my license fee was one program a week like Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, I'd consider it money well spent. When next Saturday's episode turns out to be rubbish, it's going to be all that much more disappointing. [slightly spoilery comments]
posted on June 8, 2008 10:49 AM | link | Comments (4) | Leave a comment
06 Jun 2008: Book group verdict
A few years ago I was one of the early members of a book group. In fact I know exactly how long ago it was because last night was the five-year anniversary. My pal Céline compiled the list of what had been read to date (mostly after I dropped out) and it was generally agreed that the total topped a hundred titles. What was interesting was how little agreement there was on whether a particular title was a hit or a waste of time. There was only one book that everyone seemed to have got a kick out of: Sacred Hunger. So that’s a 1% hit rate when it comes to crowd-pleasers.
Continue reading "Book group verdict" »
posted on June 6, 2008 04:24 PM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
06 Jun 2008: Genius!
You have to go to this website. It's genius!
http://www.readatwork.com/
It's like a fake desktop which means you can read at work without it looking like you are. The strapline is "Make yourself look busy. Start reading a book."
I love it!
posted on June 6, 2008 10:58 AM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
06 Jun 2008: Email
I haven't been to the office for about three weeks. A combination of clutch problems on our car, resulting in a lot of time spent in the garage, and a deep seated sense of how much I'm over London has kept me in the countryside. However, today I am, in fact, in the London office - which is presumably why the connectivity gods have conspired to make our server go a bit funny. Goes without saying that it's been fine for months, when it's within kicking distance in my spare room. Now, of course, that I'm 60 miles away, it's decided to have a day off.
All this is to say that our email's a bit hit and miss today. I have to catch emails in the webmail box before they get processed, and I might miss some. I'll get back to you tomorrow, once I'm back in the countryside where, upon questioning, the server will say 'What? I didn't do anything. An older boy told me to do it,' and so forth.
posted on June 6, 2008 10:47 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
05 Jun 2008: Outsourcing Badwill
In a previous life, I used to think about things like out-sourcing and who should or shouldn't risk it, and under what circumstances. Em's been telling me about her difficulties in reasoning with BT about the provision of a phone line when she moves to her new home. If you think of customer service as the process of nipping customer dissatisfaction in the bud, then naturally you'd keep it pretty close to your core business and out-sourcing would be far from your thoughts (think perhaps of Zen Internet and their remarkable help desk). If, on the other end, you view customer interaction as a source of complaints which need to be deflected, without making the situation too much worse, then you might well hand the whole thing over to a call centre in Mumbai.
Now, you might say that grumbling about having to talk to Indians is racist, but I think perhaps it's the opposite.
Continue reading "Outsourcing Badwill" »
posted on June 5, 2008 01:42 PM | link | Comments (3) | Leave a comment
05 Jun 2008: Rob is going to write a sensible post on this later
But for now all you need to know is this:
BT SUCK.
Must... breathe... keep... calm... not... go to BT head office and throw a brick through their window.
posted on June 5, 2008 11:31 AM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
05 Jun 2008: You may as well.
It's getting a bit silly, the number of times I link directly to Seth Godin's blog. But he is simply brilliant. Look, just cancel your RSS feed to the SnowBlog - or at least, the bits written by me - and get a feed straight from him. It'll be more efficient. Here's his latest post about email.
posted on June 5, 2008 09:24 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
04 Jun 2008: I'm definitely buying these chaps' book
Did you see this piece in the Guardian today? I thought it was fascinating and exciting. That's my weekend's reading sorted (as well as it being weekend one of moving house. Hmm. It is possible I won't get much further than chapter 1.)
posted on June 4, 2008 05:00 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
04 Jun 2008: Feeble excuse
Er, you know those royalty cheques you'll be getting any time now, Snowauthors? Erm, I've run out of cheques. This has to be the worst excuse ever. Still, the bank say I'll have a new chequebook by Friday, so that's good. Thankfully I started at the beginning of June, when end of June is my deadline, so I'm not late yet - but honestly. I blame Crafter's Companion with its 17 contributors. They ate away at my cheque stash.
(Yes, I know. I am terribly antiquated for using cheques. The thing is, posh bank Coutts charge £25 for chaps payments and £35 for bacs payments. Plus I like my chequebooks - the stubs are reassuring and proof that I have paid things and help me with my bookkeeping. And I like doing a bit of longhand writing from time to time.)
posted on June 4, 2008 02:55 PM | link | Comments (7) | Leave a comment
04 Jun 2008: Book of Love is a loved book
Wow - check out Elaine's review of The Book of Love at her blog Random Jottings!
posted on June 4, 2008 11:35 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
04 Jun 2008: Good news indeed
I've just received in a payment from our distributor for £18,000, when I was expecting anything from zero to, well, pick a number. Now that is most welcome (and a rather huge relief as I was starting to panic about July cash flow - hence the reminder about the cover design services we provide, below!) More windfalls like that, please, universe.
Does anyone else, by the way, have tremendous trouble forecasting how much cash is going to come into the business? It's weird because our US distributors forecast it to the cent, four months in advance, but in the UK I pretty much have to wait until I see what arrives in the bank. Even when we ask them to manually calculate a forecast, it always varies. Our distributor says it's for a number of reasons: one is that customers may pay late, or have invoice queries (and since our invoices are batched with other publishers, there can be a lot of these). There's also a reserve on our account which varies by thousands each month. Each month, the distributor has a shortfall of collections for reasons ranging from invoice queries to non-payments, and allocates that difference between what is owed and what is collected by looking at the returns profile for each publisher. So last month I had a reserve of more than £16,000; this month it's £10,000. It's a hell of a lot of money, that's owed to us, sitting in a place other than our bank account. Another reason for the discrepancy between forecast and payment is that we're invoiced in a month for the cost of distributing the sales of that month, but only receive the money a matter of months later since we provide credit payment terms, and as it's a percentage you don't know what you'll be invoiced until the sales are in.
It would save a lot of hyperventilating on my part if I could get cash receipt forecasts nailed down. Any tips?
posted on June 4, 2008 11:13 AM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
03 Jun 2008: You do know, don't you
That as well as being ONIX geeks, we design book covers for other publishers as well as our own? Here are some covers we have done. They sell books. See more in our catalogue and on SnowAngels.
You should really get in touch: we charge £595 per cover, all in, for paperback and hardback, including finishes (spot UV, embossing, foiling etc) and printer ready PDFs, inclusive of any original or licensed artwork. Once you've paid, there are no ongoing royalties or anything - we'll send you the layered .psd files to do with as you please. And we'll keep tweaking until it's right.
I have been approached by lots of external designers wanting to pitch for Snowbooks covers, and so I know that our prices are definitely a bargain. No, we don't charge less just because you're tiny. The cover is the greatest selling tool you have, and £595 is a small investment to get it right.
Get in touch if you'd like more examples of our work or to discuss things.
posted on June 3, 2008 09:42 PM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
03 Jun 2008: Snowknitters #2
This one's from long time Snowblog commenter KatharineC, who made this pillowcase set with handknitted lace for a wedding present. Exquisite!
posted on June 3, 2008 09:25 PM | link | Comments (2) | Leave a comment
03 Jun 2008: Just wondering
I'm not a proper Archers fan. I only listen to it maybe once a fortnight, and then halfheartedly. But I'm wondering if I'm the only one who thinks that Ruth Archer sounds gorgeous. It's just me, isn't it?
posted on June 3, 2008 08:54 PM | link | Comments (6) | Leave a comment
02 Jun 2008: Hey! Publishing! Wake up!
And read The Lord My Godin's latest post.
posted on June 2, 2008 09:25 PM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
02 Jun 2008: SnowKnitters unite!
Sue H had an excellent idea to display Snowblog readers' knitting projects - and here's hers! And wow, she's a proper knitter who can do patterns and everything. Puts my rather homely bear to shame.
I have no idea what this has to do with publishing - but thank your lucky stars I'm not giving you a blow by blow account of the joys of pregnancy.
Continue reading "SnowKnitters unite!" »
posted on June 2, 2008 06:11 PM | link | Comments (5) | Leave a comment
02 Jun 2008: A handy tool
Always missing book development deadlines? Not even aware that there was a deadline in the first place? Why, you need SnoTT: the Snowbooks Tracker Tool!
Continue reading "A handy tool" »
posted on June 2, 2008 10:09 AM | link | Comments (0) | Leave a comment
02 Jun 2008: The beginning of the end
I've just switched my system default display to Large Fonts. It's downhill from hereon in.
posted on June 2, 2008 08:12 AM | link | Comments (1) | Leave a comment
02 Jun 2008: Due to popular demand
Here is a bear I knitted for my little, unborn as yet, baby. His name is Bear (the bear, not the baby). This is the first thing I have knitted since I was a child, so I'm quite pleased that it has come out roughly bear-shaped.
Coming soon: a small cardigan. With tiny mini pockets.
posted on June 2, 2008 07:15 AM | link | Comments (7) | Leave a comment
01 Jun 2008: Do you want
to see a bear I knitted for Rowan? Or is that getting so massively off topic that it's beyond a joke?
posted on June 1, 2008 10:44 AM | link | Comments (5) | Leave a comment
01 Jun 2008: Dr. Who Review
Our library theme continues
Now that's what I'm talking about. A questionable but very fruitful premise executed with ability, style, humour and intelligence - not to mention a gift for tension - so that one finds oneself inevitably shifting towards the edge of one's seat. [contains spoilers]
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posted on June 1, 2008 08:30 AM | link | Comments (6) | Leave a comment