Month: May 2013

Man Booker prize goes to one liner | The Australian

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AN author who pens stories the length of a sentence has scooped this year’s Man Booker International Prize.

American writer Lydia Davis has written some short stories of conventional length, but most range from one to three pages, while others are just a paragraph or sentence long.

Davis was picked from a short list of 10 names to win the fifth Man Booker International Prize, which is presented once every two years for “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.

The STG60,000 ($A93,000) prize is awarded to a living author for a body of work published originally in English or available in translation in English.

Davis’ stories are among the shortest ever written and she has been described as “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention”.

One of her shortest stories, A Double Negative, read simply: “At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.”

via Man Booker prize goes to one liner | The Australian.

Author Discovery Tip of the Week: Promote your Editor! – Authordiscovery.com

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“It’s not just the $.99-$2.99 price point and Free e-book specials that have the traditional publishing establishment worried. It’s the .99 cent e-book with the terrible cover and the typos, grammatical errors, and poor story development that have them concerned. If readers are willing to buy these types of books, then traditional publishing truly is lost.”

Read more via Author Discovery Tip of the Week: Promote your Editor! – Authordiscovery.com.

Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown – Telegraph

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This is just brilliant…

‘Renowned author Dan Brown smiled, the ends of his mouth curving upwards in a physical expression of pleasure. He felt much better.
If your books brought innocent delight to millions of readers, what did it matter whether you knew the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb?
“Thanks, John,” he thanked.
Then he put down the telephone and perambulated on foot to the desk behind which he habitually sat on a chair to write his famous books on an Apple iMac MD093B/A computer.
New book Inferno, the latest in his celebrated series about fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon, was inspired by top Italian poet Dante. It wouldn’t be the last in the lucrative sequence, either. He had all the sequels mapped out. The Mozart Acrostic. The Michelangelo Wordsearch. The Newton Sudoku.’

Read more via Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown – Telegraph.

The Alliance of Independent Authors Welcomes Legal Action Against Author Solutions and Penguin | Successful Self-Publishing. The Alliance of Independent Authors’s Blog.

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No surprise, really. ASI have one of the worst reputations in the publishing world, yet for some reason, authors keep going to them.

EXTRACT:

“The Alliance of Independent Authors welcomes the news that three authors have filed suit against self-publishing service provider Author Solutions (ASI), and its parent company Penguin.

Law firm Giskan & Solotaroff, on April 26, filed a class action complaint on behalf of writers Kelvin James, Jodi Foster, and Terry Hardy. The complaints listed in the action won’t come as any surprise to those who follow the behaviour of ASI in recent times: overcharging for services, up-selling editing and marketing packages of poor quality, deceptive practices,  poor royalty reporting and nonpayment of monies due. (For a full list of ASI iniquities, see this earlier post.)

The company’s true business is not publishing, the complaint stresses, but selling services to authors. And not doing it well. As we point out in our recent book, ASI is a company about whom we regularly receive the most complaints from a wide variety of authors.”

Read more via The Alliance of Independent Authors Welcomes Legal Action Against Author Solutions and Penguin | Successful Self-Publishing. The Alliance of Independent Authors’s Blog..

The Complicated Relationship Between Horror and Video Games | Gamer Girl Tay

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“Action plus co-op is fun, but scary? I’m not so sure.The room is dark, cold, and unusually calm. The once bare walkways are now riddled with blood and severed limbs. In the distance, a faint hum can be heard echoing throughout the metal encampment. Its repetition is a solid reminder that you are alone. A solitary light flickers in the corner, and shadows crisscross the floor. You take a step forward. Then pause. After a brief intermission your pace continues. With another wary stride you’ve nearly traversed the makeshift graveyard. As tensions begin to lift, the door beckons you to embrace its promise of safety…”

Read more via The Complicated Relationship Between Horror and Video Games | Gamer Girl Tay.