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Independent Stacie
A fantastic article appears in the Independent today by Stacie Lewis, author of Taking the Plunge and mother of May.
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For the coffee tables of the geeky
It's a little bit of a coincidence, but my previous post mentioned reading Heinlein books when I was a teenager. He wrote some pitched at grown-ups and some pitched at what I suppose we'd call the YA crowd now. I can remember how excited I was reading Have Spacesuit Will Travel, wondering if it were possible to have an adventure like that. And last night I happened to sit down to look at a book I bought in Manhattan when we attended Tools for Change there earlier this year. powerHouse Books of Brooklyn have produced an amazing looking art-book charting the development of high-altitude flying suits into something you could walk on the moon in. There are some excerpts here, but they don't really do justice to the objet d'art quality of the book. High quality photos on black satin paper - tricky to read the white words by the illumination of a bedside light, but nonetheless a remarkable book to hold in your hands.
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Not one of ours
Really bad book covers? Thanks to BoingBoing I've just stepped up to my neck in them. Good Show Sir is full of awful sci-fi/fantasy covers like the one you're looking at now.
It really takes me back to when I used to stand in my local bookshop after school, trying to decide which ripsnorting sci-fi yarn to buy, with only horribly written blurbs and horribly designed covers to guide me. And later I could never figure out why the front cover might contain, say, a space gunfight with aliens that turned out not to occur in a story which might have been set, say, entirely on Earth with no aliens anywhere. And I can honestly say that it never occurred to me that the reason might be a publisher who didn't really care that much. Or to be charitable, a publisher who suspected they were a little out but didn't have the time or money to do anything about it. I have to say, looking back, that I see it now as a low-level sort of contempt. I wonder how many publishers thought sci-fi readers were so undiscriminating that it didn't matter. Whereas the truth was that I pored over books the same way I pored over album covers for favourite bands (which, back in the days of Roger Dean, might have contained exactly the same artwork). I'm pretty sure I even read 'The Star Beast' back in the day. If I remember rightly, it's a sort of precursor to ET, if ET were more like a brainy elephant than a brainy monkey. Good times.
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Yet more twists on a classic
One day I'm just going to sit around thinking of cool designs to put on t-shirts and mugs, and I'll buy gold planes with all the proceeds. This poster, like so many, is one I didn't think of. Available here.
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Colour me
By the way, that thumbnail image I used in that post about colour-correction came from Adobe's Kuler. If you're into selecting colours for graphic design or web stuff (or maybe choosing your tights to match your skirt) why not take a look. It's a clever website that'll let you assemble palettes based on complementarity and other forms of chromo-cleverness. Link.
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I'm in the wrong game
Blimes. Just got some paperwork through from a liquidator who was tying up loose ends for one of the many companies to go belly up in the last few years (although this one was because of a dodgy principal rather than a tricksy market). Guess what the hourly rate is for a liquidator? Nope, wrong. *£500*. Mind you, the job must be rubbish. Anyway, I got a cheque for £96 which is better than nothing I suppose, although it comes in at 0.02% of what we were owed. Hey nonny.
////Update////
Phew, thank goodness for Ol' Beady Rob who spotted that the 0.02% I stated above would mean we were owed about half a million quid. My language would have been stronger if that had been the case. The liquidator's letter was wrong: creditors didn't get 0.0218%, they got 2.18%. The total owed to the creditors was £306,422 but in total they received £6706.
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Correct me
When I've talked to publishers, they often seem to use outside agencies or freelancers for their graphic design, website design and, you know, anything involving colours. So I don't know if there are Photoshop gurus out there, but if you do spend your days tweaking images you might get a kick out of this tutorial for colour-correcting film footage to look like the big Hollywood movies. It's principally interesting for how it opens your eyes to the enormous extent that footage has been manipulated before you get to watch it. It takes me back to the feeling of my first Photoshop course where the instructor said to look at billboards and magazine covers on the way home and check the teeth and whites of eyes of the people in them. You suddenly realise you're surrounded by models with radioactive dentistry and eyeballs. Anyway, if you're into colour, and you have half an hour, watch post-production innovator Stu Maschwitz show you how (and why) it's done. Here (and then page down a little).
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Who Review
Doctor Who. The Time Of Angels. Liked every bit of it. Exciting, funny, clever and (if you find that sort of thing troubling) rather scary. Even Mr Matt Smith seemed to find a few lines to get his teeth into. Perhaps it was the good example he was being set on all sides that did it. More like this please. (Note to commenters: I don't watch the spoilers included at the end of each episode so please don't say something like 'really looking forward to next week when [this thing] happens'. And maybe write 'spoilers' at the top if you're going to get into the nuts and bolts of the episode, for the benefit of foreigners and old people who might not have watched it yet.)
Also, while I'm on the subject, surely it's about time for the BBC to take their flagship show and start shifting it madly around in the schedule as well as skipping a week or two. How can they resist with so many viewers? Think of the annoyance they could cause. Which in turn leads me on to linking to this blissfully brilliant clip from Being Human on the subject of emotional connection and TV scheduling (is too sweary for work - unless you work somewhere like Snowbooks.) The house-meeting in the clip comes after much death, horror and torment, in case you're seeing it for the first time. Genius, on about six levels.
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A Who Micro-Backtrack
Referring to the most recent Doctor Who episode, I would like to revise my previous statement that "everything and everyone else was horrible". There's an exception I need to add: the Dalek propaganda poster from the episode. The BBC are offering a nice big PDF of it here.
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#LBF2010 #ashtag
Day one of the London Book Fair: and you know what, I loved it! Not least because it was the first time in more than 20 months that I have worn heels. *And* I drank coffee on a train. Get me. This is because Ro stayed with his daddy all day long. Heavens, I missed him. But I did get to wear a skirt.
The Fair was a bit odd because, hmm, where was everyone? Stuck in Dubai / Dublin / insert city of choice accessible only by plane. Rather handily, though, the clearing out of 30%* of the expected population meant that a lot of people were just wandering round looking for something to do. A nice lady showed me photos of her baby. An important CEO stopped by to relieve the boredom. People who tried to avoid eye contact with me failed because there was no one else to hide behind, and so got pounced on by the catalogue-waving weirdo I was. Top moment: uber-important buyer from the Last High Street Retail Chain Standing declared Spring Heeled Jack to be his book to read on the train on the way home. Sweeeet. And masses of interest in Onix Central - of course, it being the most sensible thing you can do with £315 if you're a publisher.
It was fun! And I have a packed schedule tomorrow - meetings every half an hour, and that's after a raft of cancellations. Ironically, it's the busiest diary I've ever had.
And finally, here's a lovely picture of some horses and an ash cloud.
*completely made up estimate by me.
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Who Review
Sigh. On the million to one chance that you acted in or wrote tonight's Doctor Who episode stop reading now, because I'm going to be horrible about you. I still think Karen Gillan (=Amy) is great value for money - and Bill Patterson (=Bracewell) conjured up a bit of magic when called upon. But everything and everyone else was horrible. I'm afraid Ian McNeice's (=Churchill) talents are invisible to me; I don't care much for any of Mark Gatiss's scripts - charming fellow though he appears to be - and an unbearable thought is beginning to dawn on me: I am starting to suspect that Matt Smith can't act. My theory of bad acting is that those without ability can only do two things 1) confusion and 2) anger. That's all Martha Jones could manage and I'm starting to think it's all Matt Smith can summon up as well. Why couldn't David Tennant have put in one more year? Steven Moffat scripts, the marvellous Karen Gillan, and DT wringing every last bead of emotion from the drama. Alas. What might have been.
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A local fair for local people
I haven't been thinking much about the London Book Fair, even though it's next week, because my role tends to be less to do with moving and/or shaking and more in the line of holding people's coats. But it has been drawn to my attention that with no flights entering British airspace recently there might be a marked shortage of foreign visitors to the fair. Presumably it will be a strangely quiet, strange provincial LBF. I think we'll still be able to do all the things we planned to, but what about you? Is this a disaster?
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First their banks, now this
I've really got out of the habit of watching the news on telly, so you've probably all seen better images than this. But just in case you haven't, click on the thumbnail to see a vast, reddish cloud of volcanic ash encroaching on North-West Europe.
[Met office source]
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Smackdown!
This is fun: a smackdown, whatever that is, between three covers including our very own Flu.
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Invented DTP. Then lost way?
I know I'm iPad crazy at the moment, but it's making a splash and that stirs up lots of interesting responses. There's an article here about how disappointing the iPad's typography and internal typesetting is. I should imagine a lot of what's said applies to other attempts to get 'content' onto electronic platforms too.
Continue reading "Invented DTP. Then lost way?" »
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Flu
Oh smashing - take a look at this lovely first review of Flu by our own Wayne Simmons. "A highly entertaining addition to the zombie canon." Yes it is!
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Luminous utterances
Any William Gibson fans out there? And are any of you would-be or fledgling writers? The great man has been answering dozens of questions about his writing over on his blog. The internet being what it is, you could be over there in a jiffy. I'm not entirely certain whether you'll learn anything, but just reading the way he answers questions makes me want to write something.
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My Who View (for what it's worth)
Re: Doctor Who. Oh dear. Today's episode I found a bit boring. Then I watched Dr Who Confidential and was really impressed with all the clever ideas the story contained and how nicely they came together. Except those good points came across much more strongly from listening to the cast and Mr. Moffat talk about it than from watching the episode. Darn. But, still. Good cast, fundamentally good writing - but, for some reason, staged like an episode from the Seventies. So still plenty of hope for the future.
(Really didn't like the silly CGI graphic that depicted what the <spoiler> would look like if you could get a view of it. Again, straight out of the Seventies.)
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Polished Apple
I want to say something about iPhones, but before you start thinking that this is a technology blog, I'm only bringing it up to talk about corporate attitudes rather than about bits and bytes. The more I look at what Apple are doing at the moment, the more it seems like they're working hard to take over the world. And I don't mean that in a bad way. They really seem like they're trying hard and doing a more grown-up job of joining the dots than any of their competitors.
Apple have just announced a new update to the iPhone's operating system. OS updates sound like dull things, but in these days of clever software, changing the OS changes the phone. 90% of the things that made the iPhone revolutionary are in the software. If the iPhone had merely been a phone - a piece of hardware - and it had run, say, Microsoft's mobile phone OS, no one would even remember it by now. And the thing is, the OS update Apple have just announced contains a lot of features that people were half-expecting to see three years ago when the phone first came out. But Apple weren't ready then. They knew if they added those features in the wrong way, it would compromise the phone's appeal and usefulness, so they waited. They looked at how everyone else did it and what worked. They looked at what sorts of features actually conferred useful benefits and which were just marketing glitter. They looked at the privacy and security considerations and three years down the line they came up with their own approach. And now, to recycle a cliche, the best will be even better. And my point is, I don't think I've ever worked in a big company that would be capable of acting that way with that level of both perfectionism and restraint. But that's what you need if you want take over the world.
Continue reading "Polished Apple" »
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Warts and all
If you've been keeping up with the iPad-launch hype but you'd like some ammunition to fire back with, Ars Technica have a veerrry detailed review that points out heaps of drawbacks and caveats. You could just learn about the problems using the device to read books if you wanted. Or go on a negative spree and read the lot.
Not that any of that puts me off. I'll still get one. Even seeing the iPad referred to as a £400 Etch-A-Sketch only serves to amuse (but not dissuade) me. We don't mind the nasty words, do we Prrrrecious.
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Barriers to self-publishing. Crumbling.
Would it be fun to make a list of all the reasons you couldn't or shouldn't self-publish in 1950 and then check that against an updated list for 2010? I mean, I don't even know how a novel was typeset back then, but I'm fairly sure it couldn't be done on the same bit of technology used to write the manuscript (i.e. a typewriter or a fountain pen). And how was it delivered to the printers? Hmm, I don't know that either. Likewise cover art - though I assume that was done with photographic plates of some kind. Anyway, the point is, that a person these days could write a book and then get someone to typeset it, design a cover and produce print-ready PDFs without spending much money at all. They could even get it printed by, say, Lulu. But what to do with it after that? Even listing it on Amazon is a pain because how are you going to distribute stock to them and sort out the paperwork? So, phew, still a few reasons to involve a publisher. Unless e-books take off. I mention all this because it's just got a bit easier to go the e-book route. Bibliocore will put your book up on Apple's iBookstore, ready for iPad owners to buy it. And they'll even let you keep the royalties. So what does that leave for publishers to do that it's tricky to do for yourself?
1) Decide whether the book is any good or not. Though perhaps the first wave of readers could do that in a pinch. (Might authors give away the first 200 copies of their book for that reason?)
2) Market the book.
What else am I missing? I mean it might be nice if someone proof-read the thing, but an author could pay an outside proof-reader to do that just the way a publisher currently does. What else?
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New Who
Just in case anyone would like my non-spoilery verdict on the first new episode of Doctor Who, here it is:
| New doctor | Not sure yet |
| Scriptwriting | Brilliant!* |
| New companion | Brilliant! |
| Rescored theme music | Not too impressed |
| Optimism levels | High |
*clever interlocking plot points that actually make sense, nicely handled pivotal character moments and a welcome absence of overwhelming existential angst.
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The new era starts... tomorrow
If you have a moment - and you haven't already done this - why not have a look at the e-book capabilities of Apple's new iPad. Go here, click on the video, and see what you think. To me it looks sensational. Us Snowbookers always used to say that 'one day' Apple would release an 'iBook' (or whatever it would be called) and then we'd see whether the world liked reading e-books or not. Well, tomorrow, that's happening. And this is just Apple's first try. They've shown, with the iPhone especially, that they're pretty good at a) getting it right first time and b) building on that success slowly but surely. So does anyone think this won't be big?
Continue reading "The new era starts... tomorrow" »
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Interview
Here's a cracking interview with Andrew Sanger, author of The J Word.
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5 spider review
Hee, here's a glowing (or should that be 'scuttling') review of Prey.