http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQAcIyOYaF0&feature=youtu.be

Snowbooks.com will not so much be 'down' as 'patchily populated' for about 45 mins this evening. I'm pushing a fairly hefty change which will require an upload of data as well as code, which can take a bit of time. So forgive any rather spare-looking pages you come across between about 8 and 9pm tonight. I thank you.

(I should say that once the push is completed, you won't see much difference - it's a big change to the code of the website, rather than the look and feel or content. If you see something remarkably different after about 9pm, then something's gone horribly wrong...)

Cracking interview with Mark Hodder at his Forbidden Planet signing last week. Thanks too to our indefatigable printers CPI for pulling out all the stops and getting copies there on time. Nowt like a signing with no books...

Charlie Stross has clearly thought it through. If you have a few minutes, why not read what he has to say about the current state of publishing, the dangers of an Amazon monopoly (and monopsony), and what publishing's next move has to be. Sneak preview: ditching DRM on e-books is the only way to open up the market and put some pressure on Amazon. Read the post here.

What's the collective noun for reviews? 'Splurge' will do.

Look! Here's one for Bound. And here's one for Wildthyme Beyond! And now here's another one for Bound!

[pants]

I like it when a newspaper picks up a topic important to publishers, like the threat of an Amazon monopoly. I don't like it when someone like James Heneage steps forward to give the media a quote and blows it by mumbling about irrelevancies. Perhaps he is being misquoted or the paper is focussing on what were intended to be peripheral remarks, but this article makes it seem like his main objection to Amazon is that they're not really members of the club. Have a read.

Firstly he seems to believe that great authors need to be nurtured by publishers: eliminating publishers imperils literature. I personally am quite sure that great authors will continue to emerge if 'publisher' goes the way of 'lamplighter' or 'footman'. He also seems to believe that publishers have an important role spotting those great writers: without publishers we wouldn't notice the diamonds in the rough. I agree that's a role publishers fill... for now. But if what replaces the current model is readers reading any old thing, including lots of self-published novels, and then blogging and tweeting about them, I think we'll see books with lasting appeal being taken up more not less quickly. I won't lament the loss of the 'kingmaker' role in publishing. And there will still be prominent figures who can champion new writing.

Heneage also thinks that Amazon is not 'investing' enough in the industry, in (implied) contrast to the way that publishers do. He doesn't elaborate, but single-handedly developing and popularising a global e-book platform sounds like investing to me. As does allowing any solvent reader with an internet connection to get any book through the mail in a day or two - including titles that 99% of bricks-and-mortar stores never carried. And it may not be the sort of investment Heneage likes, but Amazon have also made books cheaper. In fact I would say that the problem is that Amazon is investing too much rather than too little.

source

I mentioned The New Aesthetic a while back. I certainly shouldn't be in the business of defining it, but I suppose if I were to try, I'd say it's a kind of reverse flow of imagery from the virtual world to the real. That's to say, when you see designed objects in the real world which take their stylistic cues from the features, artifacts and peculiarities of digital imagery you're probably in the realm of the New Aesthetic. (Alternatively, just go here and look at the pictures until you see what they have in common.)

What I also mentioned was that the person most responsible for bringing the term and the ideas behind it to people's notice is James Bridle, who for a couple of years spent his time finding and publishing innovative fiction for lil' ol' Snowbooks. Whereas now he has influential thinkers like Bruce Sterling singing his praises in venues like Wired magazine. Here's the excerpt that caught my eye: "James Bridle is the master of that salon. James Bridle has never yet claimed to be the Andre Breton-style Pope of the New Aesthetic, but in practice, nobody ever asks the central questions of anybody else but him. So, Bridle’s the guru there. "

I regularly see James's thoughts retweeted by people I look up to like William Gibson and Tim O'Reilly. And now he's the manifesto-writing guru behind an art movement. When James chaired a panel at SXSW this year, Bruce Sterling described it like this: "When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped. I’d suggest getting right after it." Nice work, James. Read the full article here.

As you may know, I don't read a lot of fiction these days because of my very sensitive prose allergies, but I'm reading one now. It's a thriller and I'm about a third of the way in. The plucky heroine knows the bad guys are after her but can't work out why. But I know why. The back-cover blurb explained it to me. I know who they are and what their plan involves. You can imagine how that undercuts the drama as the main protagonist searches for answers. And she's still so far off working it out that I'm wondering what percentage of the story the blurb has spoiled. We're already at 35%, but I wouldn't be surprised if I have to get to the 60% mark before I've caught up with what the back cover already told me. If I were the author I'd be furious. And this is a very well-researched book, carefully structured, so for some editorial assistant to breeze in after it's written and drain the tension out of the first 150 pages with a few badly chosen words must be immensely frustrating for the writer - I know it is for me. And this is Macmillan, who presumably know better.

So, just for the record, blurbs are about whetting the appetite not sating it. You don't summarise the plot; you hint at it. A blurb is not a précis.

Update: My guess was pretty good: at page 175 of 301, the story has finally caught up with the blurb. That's 56% of the way through the book.

This is such fun. Go here to see some gorgeous gory types entering Wayne Simmons' latest competition, and to get a sneak peek at the wonderful cover arts we've commission from top tattoo artist Chris Jones. You might want to enter yourself...

The Snowbooks website was unavailable for a few hours early this morning and it seems that it was my fault. Many apologies to our authors and those who tried to visit our site. I screwed up some 'DNS' settings and mayhem/confusion ensued.

As well as an apology I thought I'd use this as a 'learning opportunity' and explain what DNS is and why you need to know about it if you want to administer a website. Then, if you're interested, you can read about what it was I actually did wrong.

There's a lovely article by Baldur Bjarnason here about the possibilities for visual design in the world of e-books. Excerpt: "The problem with generalising about publishers is that you can’t generalise about publishers. Big or small, they are all uniquely crazy." (link) Lots of other interesting articles by the same author here.

I've just been reading some of the conclusions about the UK riots of last year.

Briar

Have you noticed how much the topics of privacy, secrecy, surveillance, leaks, spying, censorship and the role played by social media in uprisings have been in the news lately? Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen have pitted their ability to censor criticism and suppress online dissent against the ability of disgruntled citizens to share what they know and what they plan to do about it.

And yet if you were to attend a conference of bleeding-edge security experts like, say, the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin, you might be horrified to find just how insecure all modern communication is. (Note: CCC is the kind of conference that's full of brilliant girls and guys with piercings and tattoos who know what they're talking about, not the kind with guys in suits offering to sell you a new firewall-in-a-box.)

Even if you're not that technically-minded you might like to scare yourself a little by watching one of CCC's presentations on, say, how easy it is for someone to clone your mobile phone's ID as you walk down the street, and then to intercept your calls or pretend to be you (link). Police forces routinely track citizens via their mobiles - and in some places they set up their own temporary cell phone towers to give them greater access - which extends not just to the supposed bad guy's communications, but everyone whose phone is captured by that tower. At home that's troubling, in some parts of the world you'd have no way of knowing whether your calls home or to your office were now a matter of record at the local Ministry of Truth.

So I know how *we* make ebooks for Amazon (as you'd hope). I was wondering, though - how do *you* do it?

We make our own ebooks, from their typesetting files in InDesign CS 5.5. We use the Kindle InDesign plugin that Rob's mentioned before, which helps a bit, to create the Mobi file, along with a lot of custom macros. If you want, I can write them up. Then we upload said file, along with an ONIX message and the cover design measuring no less than 500px wide, to the Mobipocket FTP site. From there, I follow a series of not very obvious links to get the files from the upload folder (which is a mobipocket site, but which is called ebookbase.com, to my endless confusion) to the 'import cabinet' (more confusion) and thence live onto the interweb for to be vended.