heroes & villains

From: challenge oppression

"Perched on the end of a panel filled with writers who are throwing off the shackles of conventional publishing, surrounded by Kindle enthusiasts of every stripe, Mark Buckland found himself very much the odd one out at the Edinburgh international book festival. The head of the e-savvy independent publisher Cargo began by asking how many in the audience were self-published authors and wryly suggested he was 'going to get lynched.'

     It's no surprise that an audience which had paid £10 a ticket to hear about writing in a digital age was mostly made up of authors, with a sizeable minority already publishing themselves, but the hostility Buckland faced as a representative of the publishing industry was something of an eye-opener.
     Catherine Czerkawska, who described herself as a 'classic midlist author,' had already revealed how as publishers became bigger she found herself suffering from the 'rave rejection,' her agent telling her she was "too accessible … to be truly literary, but too literary to be popular,' how she had uploaded her backlist to the Kindle store and 'never looked back.' Maggie Craig had just confessed how, for the first time since she had begun writing, Amazon had given her 'a good monthly income,' joking that if big publishers find a writer is making money 'they call a meeting to find out what's going wrong.'"
— Richard Lea, The Guardian
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"All conversations between authors nowadays seem to revert to the single intriguing topic of eBook or 'Indie' publishing. This is because it's becoming more and more difficult for authors to find a conventional publisher for fiction. This is especially true if a significant percentage of your readers are likely to be middle aged and older women in search of a well told story. But now, our readers have Kindles, Nooks, iPads or other e-readers.
     Many writers are publishing their own novels and stories, old and new. Prices are low and you can usually try before you buy, so eBooks are an excellent way for readers to experiment with finding new authors or meeting old favourites. My novels and stories are now available in eBook form, with more to come."
— Catherine Czerkawska, from her web site
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Three-time Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlisted for 2012

From: This Is Horror

"China Miéville joins SF heavy-hitters Charles Stross, Greg Bear and Sheri S. Tepper on the shortlist for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award, putting him in line to win the prize an unprecedented fourth time.
     Miéville – who won the prize in 2001 with Perdido Street Station, in 2005 with Iron Council and in 2010 with The City & the City – is nominated for Embassytown, a deep-space exploration of language, truth and identity which was shortlisted for the British science fiction awards earlier this year.
     His 2002 novel The Scar was also nominated for the prize, which is awarded to the best science fiction novel first published in the UK in the previous calendar year.
     According to the chair of the judges, Andrew M. Butler, there's no reason why the prize shouldn't be awarded to Miéville again."
— Richard Lea, The Guardian
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From: Vasanth Seshadri writes

Arthur C. Clarke

1917 - 2008

"In 2007, Clarke completed 90 orbits around the sun. He was now in a wheelchair, but his mind continued to reach the farthest outposts of the universe. He marked his 90th birthday by speaking to his followers through a Youtube video. He expressed three birthday wishes: For ET to call, for mankind to quit his addiction to oil, and for lasting peace in Sri Lanka. He could not resist making more predictions. He declared this the beginning of the golden age of space travel. He predicted that thousands of space tourists will travel to the moon and beyond within the next 30 years."
— Vasanth Seshadri writes
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Buy books by China Miéville and Arthur C. Clarke here...

Read more about China Miéville here...

Spell-cheques

From: Securitymike

"A recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto has proved a little too spicy for Penguin Australia, after a misprint suggesting that the dish required 'salt and freshly ground black people' has left the publisher reaching for the pulping machine, rather than the pepper grinder.
It's a one-word slip that only came to light after a member of the public got in touch, and which has sent all 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible at Penguin's warehouse to be destroyed, an exercise which head of publishing, Robert Sessions, told the Sydney Morning Herald would cost $ 20,000. — Richard Lea, Guardian
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"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says [Susan] Andersen. "Shifted - he SHIFTED! I just cringe when I think of the readers who have read this. Hopefully, it's only in the iBook version that I bought, but if it's in yours as well, please let me know. I've contacted the editor and pray this will be promptly fixed. Too late for us...but for Gawd's sake." — Guardian
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