Celebrating Zumaya Publications’ Birthday
Zumaya Publications celebrates its fourth birthday as an American Company (it used to be Canadian before; it’s been around a long time!) by having a month-long celebration at Coffee Time Romance and More!.
Along with their publisher, a bunch of Zumaya authors will hang around to talk books and any other thing we like to talk about, such as… cats! A writer must have a familiar, right?
We’ll also set up polls for people to answer. The current one is about multi-media ebooks and you can find it here.
One of the exciting events is a writing round robin, which I’ll start. Each author will write in his or her style and genre. It should be a lot of fun. For that purpose, Zumaya has setup a blog at Worpress.com called Tales from Zumaya Books. Come and visit and see what we’re up to, either on the blog or at Coffee Time Romance and More!. The site is for all readers and genres and there are a lot of interesting people hanging around.
See you there!
Expat Harem
A year ago through Twitter, during a discussion on literature at #litchat, I met a fantastic woman, Anastasia Ashman, a US expatriate living in Turkey. She was talking about her new book, Tales from the Expat Harem, and anthology of stories written by expatriate women living in modern Turkey. Tales evolved into a huge project and blog, a “neocultural hub for global citizens, identity adventurers, Turkophiles, identity travelers and culturati of all types.” It is a place where “common interest + experience defines us better than geography, nationality — or even blood.”
Expat Harem has its regular contributors but also visiting ones. I am such a one, discussing the feeling of being an expatriate in my own country because of differences in language, culture, behavior. The in-country expat forced me to inspect and introspect what it meant for me to live in a different culture, and it reinforced the empathy I feel for all new immigrants to our country, and to my town.
Get out!
Alan Baxter posted this YouTube video on his site today and I liked it so much I thought I’d do the same.
The Future of Publishing
I Tweeted about this video and sent it to my friends, but I like it so much I decided to have it here for a while. Last week was Read an ebook Week and this video would have been most appropriate. For at least ten years I’ve said that content is more important than format. This video explains it in a very clever way.
The Self-Publishing Dilemma
This week on Twitter’s #litchat was a discussion about “indie” authors, a euphemism now used instead of self-published authors, including those who start their own publishing company to sell their own books and those who use vanity publishing.
Indie publishing is touted as the new publishing model. Self-published authors claim that they are able to retain their own voice, that they are not constrained into a mold, that they are able to have control over all aspect of publishing the book, from writing it to marketing it. That’s all very well and good, but how about filtering?
In her article, When anyone can be a published author, Laura Brown asks the question. In all of the talk of the new publishing model, she argues that one element is being forgotten: the reader. How, amid potentially millions of self-published books, is one to find something good to read? »» The Self-Publishing Dilemma
Friday, June 25th, 2010, by M. D. Benoit, Filed under: Books and Reading,Commentary,Publishing| books, ebooks, indie, Publishing, self-publishing, slush pile, Writing| No Comments