Glenda A. Bixler is the latest reviewer of my novel Iraqi Icicle.
Glenda writes she had never heard
of the band The Go-Betweens which is a regular motif in the novel. Ms Bixler
went to the trouble to present a Go-Betweens sampler which heads her review.
Ladies and gentlemen, please
put your hands together and give a big shout out to our guest reviewe,r Glenda
A. Bixler.
JOHN Lennon
famously returned his MBE in protest about the war in Biafra
and the Beatles single Cold Turkey
slipping down the charts. I won’t be receiving any Australia Day (January 26)
award to return but I am mightily miffed at my novel Iraqi Icicle slipping down the charts.
I TRY
not to trouble myself unduly with matters of commerce.
For
five days next week, I am giving away my enovel Iraqi Icicle. I do this not because I think it makes a lot of
commercial sense but because others tell me it does.
It
seems the Amazon algorithms will discover me this way.
No. Comment. "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in
Your Movie" http://nyti.ms/ZvOCJe
American Psycho author
Bret Easton Ellis has left a cryptic response to the instantly famous New York
Times Magazine article on the film The
Canyons which is in limbo awaiting distribution.
Critics praised Lindsay Lohan for the 2006 film Chapter 27
on the Lennon murder and now they're gonna crucify her
A GAME doing the rounds is one in which we emerging/ nobody authors
are asked to name our dream cast for the film of our novel.
I
played recently and said I definitely wanted Lindsay Lohan to play Crystal Speares, the femme fatale of my novel, Iraqi
Icicle. I said I thought she would make a good fist of the role. Besides, I
added, think of the pre-publicity she would attract.
THE
flat-earth priests from the Wall Street Journal have joined their counterparts on
The Guardian in pre-emptively performing the last rites on ebooks.
Nicholas
Carr in a recent WSJ article made this quite extraordinary prediction:
…‘the initial e-book
explosion is starting to look like an aberration.
‘….E-books, in other
words, may turn out to be just another format—an even lighter-weight, more
disposable paperback.’
Of course, the WSJ lives
and breathes hallowed statistics and this is what Carr’s argument rests on.
‘Sales of e-readers
plunged 36% in 2012, according to estimates from IHS iSuppli, while tablet
sales exploded.’
As with much internet
news, you get the opinionated background in the main piece and the real story,
succinctly put, in the comments.
In this case, Michael
Fawkes wrote:
‘The 36% reduction in stand-alone e-readers is
irrelevant. The question is how many e-book reading devices (including tablets)
were sold in 2013?’
Major etailers such as
Amazon and Barnes and Noble this year made FREE ereader apps readily available
for tablets and smart phones. In other words tablets (with explosive sales) became
ereaders as well as retaining other functions.
Carr admits ebook
sales increased by a third last year but he puts it in such a convoluted way it
sounds like failure.
‘…the annual growth rate for e-book sales fell
abruptly during 2012, to about 34%.’ Bugger me, the industry is in crisis
because ‘it is a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth rates of the
preceding four years.'
The ebook critics like to toss around that one about pass-ons because they know the ebook commercial model cannot sustain private lending in the digital world. But the fact is being able to pass on a dead-tree book barely informs the reader's buying decision. Commenter Steve
Shelton nailed the real problem with ebooks. ‘I prefer printed books because I have found so
many spelling and formatting errors in e-books.’
That is it in a nutshell.
Publishers are using automated programs to create books for eReaders and the programs
just do not work properly. This is a technical problem which will soon be
solved as with the header/ footer and page numbering omissions.
When these drawbacks
are overcome and a cheap dedicated 6in X 9 inch ereader, capable of storing 1000
books is created, we will all want one.
RUSSELL Brown is an Aussie newspaper photographer.
He
and I have worked on the same newspapers, the Pine Rivers Press and the Northern
Times for more than a decade and we live in neighboring suburbs in the
Pine Rivers district of Australia.
Because
he is Australian, Russell has been honored with the nickname, Rusty.
Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese is
a new columnist for xojane.com. They tell me hers is a stripped-down style.
YOU learn something new every day.
Today I discovered xojane.com. It did not change my life.
It
seems xojane is one of the top-10 women’s lifestyle internet sites. I am not a
woman and many say I am lifestyle-free. Maybe that is why I am not raving about
the site. To me, it looked like a online glossy tabloid.
