Am I exceptionally gifted in all of these media? Of course not. But I’m clever, creative and curious enough to know it’s in the best interest of my career to bust beyond any self-inflicted Perception Prison and just be a “writer” or “novelist.” I’m a multifaceted Storyteller. If I can’t stellarly execute a particular multimedia storytelling element, I’ll ask around until I find someone who can help realize me. That’s what the Internet is for.
THIS!!!!!
Those who claim the novel’s time has passed ignore its value. Nothing captures the quality of consciousness like fiction. Only a great novel can make you truly feel what it is like to be someone else, alive in a different place and time. Literature exercises our empathy, salves our loneliness, and helps us learn how to live. Without Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevski, and Joyce, our understanding of human psychology would be greatly impoverished.
What doesn’t really matter, though, is how people choose to read. Literature is important; the choice of paper or plastic is not.
(via Publishers Weekly: Literature, Plugged In)
Tweet of the Week: Rana June Sobhany on enhanced ebooks and devaluing content.
“And as I’ve said stubbornly for a couple of years, I believe that soon it will matter again what one publishes more than how one publishes it. Quality will out.”
—Fred Ramey, co-publisher of Unbridled Books
(via Shelf Awareness: Robert Gray: Hearing Voices About Indie Publishing)
Like Haroun, we in publishing can sometimes become filled with a sense of hopelessness and failure. But like Haroun, we have been taken in by the magic of the Ocean. And like Haroun, we’re perched atop a tapestry of breathtaking complexity.
Undeniably, it is a time of remarkable opportunity in publishing, one in which we are able to find and build upon those strands of stories, in context.
—Brian O’Leary, Founder and Principal, Magellan Media
(via Context first)
Tweet of the Week: @eBookNoir on publishers and transmedia
2. George Orwell’s publisher didn’t feel the title to Orwell’s novel The Last Man in Europe was terribly commercial and recommended using the other title he had been kicking around—1984.
5. Ernest Hemingway’s original title for The Sun Also Rises was used for foreign-language editions—Fiesta. He changed the American English version to The Sun Also Rises at the behest of his publisher.
(via mental_floss Blog » What 10 Classic Books Were Almost Called)
A lovely little poetry animation just in time for Halloween! Edgar Allan Poe “reading” his classic THE RAVEN!
Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically. His intention was to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explains in the follow-up essay: “The Philosophy of Composition”. The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty by Charles Dickens.[3] Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett’s poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”.
(via housingworksbookstore)
The Roundtable is a live, interactive webcast gathering some of the most outspoken industry professionals to debate the hottest publishing issues of the week, as being discussed in…
In the midst of the gloom-and-doom naysayers and pundits, there’s a thriving community of publishers, editors, marketers, agents, booksellers, librarians, authors, and readers of all kinds who are passionate about the book, in all its forms, and are working within the industry to help change it for the better.
That’s the description of a DBW Member.
Hey all! I’ve been called in last-minute to give an improv PowerPoint...
goodnight moon. you too, esb.
