bROWSE BY TOPIC
PUBLISHING IN GENERAL
Publishers: no better than fund managers? - a better way of picking winners (possibly)
Confessions of a sexist reader - gender bias in publishing (or why I haven't read more books by female authors)
E-books: shaking up publishing, but not content? - why haven't ebooks prompted authors to explore non-linear narrative etc?
The (as yet) unfulfilled promise of web-fiction - why has reading fiction on websites never really taken off?
The curse of OCR - the sheer f*ing laziness of publishers when it comes to ebook conversion
Falling down the cracks in the genre map - on publishers' obsession with genre
theatre reviews
"Patriots" by Peter Morgan - a play about Putin, Berezovsky and Abramovich
"User not found" by Dante or Die - death and digital legacy
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" - adaptation of the Mark Haddon novel
MUSIC
"How Music Works" by David Byrne - the impact of technology on music
"The Speed of Sound" by Thomas Dolby - more on music and tech, but in the form of a memoir
Vangelis: an appreciation - beyond Blade Runner
london STREET libraries
3 posts on London street libraries:
technology, AI etc
Google ate my story! - self-published fiction as AI training data
Sci-fi, litfic and AI - Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Louisa Hall and Ted Chiang
Publishing: the hedge fund approach - can algorithms pick out which books will succeed?
Federov's dust - technology, religious belief and "revenge effects"
brexit
I wrote a lot of nerdy stuff about Brexit, which I suspect almost no one read - in hindsight, here are a couple of the more interesting ones:
"All Out War" by Tim Shipman - why did Leave win? And what does Shipman get wrong?
Inselaffen! - thoughts on the referendum result
COVID & chronic fatigue
3 posts on my experience of Chronic Fatigue and similarities with Long COVID:
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Book recommendation sites - whichbook.net, bookbag.co.uk, recommendmeabook.com
Librarything - better than Goodreads?
Free fiction review - my pick of the best free fiction by self-published authors
All my book reviews - non-fiction, thrillers, sci-fi/speculative fiction, humour, general fiction
POLITICS
"Theories of International Politics ...and Zombies" - yes, there really is a book called this (and this is my review)
The Greek bailout - review of "Adults in the Room" by Yannis Varoufakis
"How to be a liberal" by Ian Dunt - a history of liberalism
The end justifies the means: a bad motto to live by - thoughts on the 2019 UK general election
WRITING fiction
Novel-writing: dangerously futile?
In defence of miserable, depressing stories
The joy of procrastination - almost as good as the joy of sex (not really)
Self-publishing in general
See also my guide to self-publishing.
Why self-publish? - or rather, why I decided to go down that route
My self-publishing masterplan (hmm...we'll see) - NB I've updated this post with my thoughts on whether it actually worked
Alienated by social media: Facebook and Wattpad - on my feeble attempts to harness social media
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Self-Published Authors! - what happened when (horrors!) my novel got pirated on Amazon
Book promo services: do they work? - short answer: yes up to a point, but be careful which ones you use
SELF-publishing on AMAZON
- Using Amazon KDP to self-publish an ebook
- Self-publishing a paperback with Amazon KDP
- Making your ebook free on Amazon
See also the section on Amazon in my guide to self-publishing.