Hey all,
Has everyone had a chance to check out our new front page, www.gredunzapress.com? We're beginning to really like it. But don't take it as us abandoning this part of the site. Far from it! We have lots and lots planned. What we are doing today is putting the focus of the site on the members themselves (that's you guys) by putting blog posts and photos front and center and moving the forum over to the left. Basically, everyone on the left is stuff from the main site (forum, twitter, and…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on September 24, 2009 at 2:24pm —
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Daniel Kaszor gets it right entirely as
he reviews (and nails to the wall) The Lost Symbol:
The Da Vinci Code has sold an estimated 80 million copies in more than forty languages; critically, however, it is generally — though not universally — reviled (and if the critical response isn’t negative enough, you should spend some time on-line in book and writ…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on September 17, 2009 at 1:46pm —
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I've got a small problem with
this article I just came across:
Clearly, literary fiction sells less than mass market popular fiction.
Now, I love books of all kinds. I have a lot of literary fiction, stacks of non fiction and many popular fiction novels (although those often get recycled through second-hand bookshops!)
I go to Writers Festivals, I have taken writing courses.…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on September 7, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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Today, Sony held the press conference to announce the two previously rumoured readers,
plus a new one.
The first one is a no-brainer. It's $199, 5 inches, and built for portability and to do one thing extremely well: read novels.
The second one sort of suffers from middle-child syndrome: touch screen (which creates glare, which destroys the point of an ebook…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on August 25, 2009 at 2:24pm —
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Seems inevitable, and it's the only one on the market (not to mention the projected market) that is in any way open (epub!), accessible (sold in every country!), hackable (Soduko!) , and portable (ie, not a 10 inch tablet). Also, I look at my bookshelf and I just don't want another bookshelf. I'm kind of sick of killing trees, and the 300 Reader looks like the best version of the future any of these companies have come up with.
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on August 14, 2009 at 10:27am —
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Yesterday on the Gredunza news and links, I linked to
this blog and gave this incredible quote:
"Never mind the bollocks. You are not writing for Amazon, or to fit a staff proofreader’s vacation schedule, as important and real as those considerations may be. You are writing for readers, a duty as sacred, in its way, as parenting. If you don’t believe the previous sentence, if you think writing is mainly abou…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on August 10, 2009 at 5:00pm —
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The ebook world is all a flutter over rumours of new Sony readers coming out
as soon as next month. Sony does a lot of things wrong, and their current readers haven't been perfect (touchscreens on readers is a bad idea), but these two new models, if they are in fact what we're going to receive as consumers, don't appear to be all that great. The higher end mo…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on July 31, 2009 at 1:25pm —
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I swear, Chapter 5 of my book nearly made me scrap the whole project. It's the lead-in chapter to the big montage of chapter 6 where every single of my characters change directions in one way or another, and so chapter 5 was all about putting the pieces in the right places for that to happen. I am not a choreographer. My best scenes have always just been two people talking about something inane that leads to something (hopefully) sublime. This whole "move the characters around" kind of writing d…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on July 26, 2009 at 1:50pm —
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As
John Scalzi explains. This is a fantastic blog post by him that everyone should read. Choice quote:
2. Most people’s first novels well and truly suck. Oh my, yes they do. Which again is perfectly fine. Writing anything over 60,000 words that still recognizably tells one single story is a hell of an achievement in itself. Asking that it also be good is just being mean to the author, and the…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 29, 2009 at 3:30pm —
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Here's a completely different take on the ebook argument. All too often, we are bludgeoned with the importance of "owning" your digital products. DRM is the devil. We live in an age of leased items, and the only things we truly own are from a previous generations' tech. Tapes. Records.
physical books. But what if this progression into a leased world is actually, well, progress?
That's what…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 29, 2009 at 12:35pm —
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Zoe Winters is a little tired of cynicism when it comes to self-publishing, and I agree with her entirely. The publishing world has changed entirely, and in most cases for the benefit of writers who may or may not have the patience/wherewithal to jump through the dozens of hoops one has to conquer in order to publish a book. Agent queries, publisher studying, market analysis,…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 27, 2009 at 3:38pm —
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Here at Gredunza Press we believe two very hard-line things: the first is that the publishing world is changing for the better, regardless of what people might tell you about nobody reading anymore. The second thing we believe is that this road can be rocky, so people in the know should do everything they can to help those who might need a little assistance getting through it. It's why we will never, ever charge for consultations, advice, or information about how to make a book, sell a book, bur…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 25, 2009 at 10:47am —
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I'm a big fan of developmental blogs for written works, and they're rarely more exciting to read than when a graphic artist doles out sketches and first draft scripts.
That's what Jon Evans did today in
the Walrus:
There’s no fixed format for comics scriptwriting, nor for how much of their art is dictated by the writer and how much the artist improvises around the rhythm section of the script. It’s still a re…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 23, 2009 at 10:26am —
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Related to my last blog post earlier this morning, I thought I'd link to my own developmental blog for my new novel:
You can subscribe to it and everything. Updates will be semi-regular. I'm putting the third one up today at some point, detailing various news stories that help craft the back story of the book, including op-eds on Elliot Spitzer and Perez Hilton.
You can read the blog here.
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 23, 2009 at 10:00am —
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From
Goonie.US
Pretty photos of the machine, but is that price $115,000 or $115,00? It says the latter, but the comma is in the wrong spot. If that machine is around ten grand, every mid-level retail business in the world is going to want one. If it's over a hundred grand, you will see it in every University with a surplus budget on library books.
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on June 22, 2009 at 11:44am —
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Ebook readers are beginning to carry a following in the press, if not necessarily customers. Journalists and Authors champion the idea, if not any specific device, since it gets their words to readers in a way that's truly revolutionary in both speed and currency (it's really easy to charge people for ebooks/mobile enewspapers/blogs, etc in terms of micropayments). The idea of ereaders is fantastic. It connects your reading experience to the cloud while saving on paper and allowing for multiple…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on May 8, 2009 at 1:49pm —
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on April 17, 2009 at 9:55am —
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This is the first in a sort-of diary regarding the characters in my upcoming novel,
A Record Year For Rainfall.
Album Yukes is a Perez Hilton-type professional blogger, a 27 year old video game addict living in Las Vegas. His website is the destination for gawkers looking for celebrity photos, stories, and rumours from LV. He rarely leaves his house, choosing instead to entertain himself online playing war games and responding to hate mail. He is the the orchestrator for the political sc…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on April 7, 2009 at 2:13pm —
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So Éisee and I had a discussion last night about the Google Books thing, and how even though they have omitted a majority of the book, they are still infringing on even fair use copyright. I brought up the fact that if, say, a blogger wanted to talk about my book (good or bad) and use excerpts, I would be fine by it, much in the same way it's largely become acceptable to post mp3s on a music blog whilst talking about the artist. Yes, it's copyright infringement, but promotion makes fair use fuzz…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on March 10, 2009 at 4:46pm —
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So first off, thanks for everyone for putting their two cents in. Two things have happened since I posted my query. It was brought to my attention that the Google Books settlement has ended (I thought it was still ongoing), and that I have the choice to stay opted into the settlement (which will undoubtably trickle down to me as $0.02 or something equally insubstantial) or I can opt-out and sue Google myself. The second thing that happened was that Google actually fixed the preview for my book.…
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Added by K Sawyer Paul on March 9, 2009 at 5:52pm —
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