Video on how a book gets made. Fiction apparently takes ’10 to 30 years to finish … many authors will supplement their income with blogging, a far more lucrative field, considered by many to be a higher art form’. One word: Awesome. (via Bibliobibuli)
Also:
- Self Publishing a Book, 25 Things You Need to Know.
- Stephen King fan self-publishes the Jack Torrance novel, from the Shining. Entire text consists of ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ repeated over and over again for 80 pages. On Blurb.
- For those of you considering a redesign of your blook: here are some notes from mid last year, on the design process behind the Monocle website. It’s one post that’ll make anyone crazy about web presentation. (And take heed of the colour choices, and the reasons behind them – the design team separate the mag into white for articles and black for videos, which I found really clever).
- Pride and Prejudice in Facebook format. No kidding.
- Saved this sometime back: book cover competition for the novel The Island At The End Of The World. Some of the user submitted entires are fantastic.
- Jason Santa Maria on using web design for storytelling. FYI Jason’s personal site is a marvel of web design – he manages to port over the concept of magazine layout to the web. And he does it really well.
- Inside the mind of a speed reader. Sarah Weinman read 462 books in 2008. Yes I know. Crazy. (via Book Oven)
And I’ll close on a quote from the great Salman Rushdie:
There is more well written fiction — creative writingese, bloodless, humourless competence – today than there has ever been at any time in history, and less really great literature. This thanks to an epidemic of writing classes.Craft is the one thing you can teach.
But you can’t teach eye — what to see/select. You can’t teach ear. Or a vision of the world that is interesting. Or how to develop a profound relationship with language.
In other words, you can’t teach people how to create great literature.
6 Comments
Hilarious video, especially the bit with the agent. Of the links, the book cover competition really caught my eye. Some of them were just incredible.
I particularly liked the part where they showed tree chopping footage. =) And, yes, I wonder how they came up with ideas for the book covers, considering they most of them hadn’t yet read it. Brilliant stuff.
Loved the austenbook. :D
After looking through all those book covers I looked up which one eventually won — wasn’t surprised by the result as that was the one I found to stand out most from all the others.
Personally I think the Austen Book is just cute. And as for the book covers, I’m afraid to say that I picked the wrong one. Oh well.
Some very interesting articles.
My favourite book cover was 25 but I do not think it was the right cover for that particular book.
I enjoyed reading the self publishing article – a friend has just gone down this route, been quite successful so far too and at a fraction of the costs quoted in the article :D
Miladysa, I thought the self publishing article would be helpful, too. =)
I still can’t believe that number 17 won! Le Sigh. I was vouching for 6 and/or 7. But I do have to agree that the quality of entries was extraordinarily high.