Wednesday, April 1, 2009

March Links & Things

These links are from my previous tweets over the past month. I've listed them here, all in one post, and with additional detail. This allows me to have a somewhat permanent file of all these links. And hopefully you'll find something of interest here, especially if you're not following me on Twitter.

PublishingCentral.com – a hub for all things publishing: Associations, Bookbinding, Careers, Copyrights, Distribution, Editorial, Indexing, Libraries, Literary Agents, Printing, Publishing, and much, much more – for book, audiobook, magazine, newsletter, e-book, and e-zine publishing.

From the
blogdoctor.me: an article on how to "upload" files (other than image and video files) to your Blogger blog. [Note: the article recommends setting up a Google Pages account, but Google has recently announced that they are no longer accepting new accounts; so, read the "Comments" section in this article, in which the author recommends a MediaFire.com account in place of Google Pages.]

Author Tobias Buckell's book on writing, A Draft in Progress, will be published in segments online; he’s using previous blog posts as the basis for the book. The
Introduction and Chapter One are currently available.

Courtesy of Gwenda Bond:
The Second Pass -- a new website that reviews both old and new books. Check it out, and you can sign up for their e-newsletter.

Courtesy of Matt Staggs: Mississippi's Clarion Ledger for March 12 has a piece on MidSouthCon, March 20-22; mention is made of Andrew Fox's new book, The Good Humor Man, Or, Calorie 3501.


Lifehacker.com introduces a free PDF-to-Word Web Tool that converts PDF documents to Doc or RTF files. (Currently, if you send in a PDF scan, i.e. an image of a document, you will receive an image-based Doc or RTF file.) The tool is available from PDFtoWord.com. [Note: Most quality OCR software (I use ScanSoft's OmniPage Pro 16) will read in a PDF file, convert it to OCR, and then the file can be saved as a Doc or RTF file.]

From Twitip.com: "How to Follow A LOT of People on Twitter and Still be Engaging using TweetDeck." Includes a YouTube video by Jesse Newhart demonstrating how he follows approximately 20,000 people using
TweetDeck. [Update: @JesseNewhart is now following 27,365 people as of March 31 at 5:00 P.M.]

Mick Rooney's
Most Reputable POD Publisher Poll-Results with links to reviews of more than 20 POD & Self-Publishing Companies. [This link courtesy of author Judith Moffett, who wrote an essay entitled "POD Self-Publishing: Caveat Emptor" for the New York Review of Science Fiction.]

From
Folio Mag: "Looking for Someone to Blame for the Industry’s Implosion? Try Editors. It's not just the economy, stupid." Be sure to read the "Comments" section.

Shimmer #10 'zine now available as a free download. A dozen new stories and an exclusive interview from Cory Doctorow. Publisher Beth Wodzinski (@bethwodzinski) writes: "It's my favorite issue yet, and a pretty great way to celebrate reaching ten issues."

Author R. N. Morris (@rnmorris) serializes his novel on Twitter; read his blog
"Roger's Plog" for details and insight.

Countryman Press (@countrymanpress), Woodstock, Vermont, released its entire Fall 2009 book catalog on Twitter. (via mediabistro.com)

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, reveals a
memo from Publishers Weekly to freelance reviewers informing them that the fee to review books for PW has been reduced to $25.00. Read the "Comments" section, which includes a response from Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW, in which she refers to this new, reduced fee as an "honorarium" rather than a "salary." Another commenter stated that PW places new reviewers on a three-month probation in which they must successfully complete six book reviews for no pay whatsoever. [So, my questions: Are we still judging the success or failure of a book by an anonymous $25.00 PW review? Are libraries still basing their purchasing decisions on these anonymous $25.00 PW reviews? (Or maybe one of the mandatory freebie reviews?)]

POD People presents a blog entry entitled "The Consequences of Crap Editing."

And lastly, author David Nygren (@davidnygren) has written a complete story within an Excel spreadsheet; he provides details and insights –- as well as the free story download –- on his blog
"The Urban Elitist."

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