You know those little words and phrases that seem to come from nowhere and suddenly pop up all around you like virulent pustules for where there is no known ointment? Do you have your own set of bête noires that haunt you and cause your ears to bleed and your eyeballs to pop out as [...]

I promise this is the last music-related twelve (an easy promise at part eleven). I got thinking about what made me such a music tragic in the first place. For me it was Saturday mornings watching music videos—mostly on Rage, but before that on some sad Channel Nine offering called Clipz (yes, with a Zed—I [...]

I made the call a while back that if the Australian Commonwealth accepted the recommendations of the Productivity Commission and lifted the restriction on parallel imports in the publishing industry, that I would lift a middle digit to my home and shift my fiction behind the closed walls of the United States.
I am pleased that [...]

Accepted wisdom in the publishing world states that sales of non-fiction titles routinely pulverise their fiction counterparts. At times it seems like fiction is only maintained by publishers out of habit, tradition, and, sometimes, charity.
So I found the headline of this article from the UK’s Bookseller.com an intriguing development. Dig a little deeper and you [...]

Surely by now we all know the adage to never judge a book by its cover is complete bullshit, right? A book can and often should be judged by its cover. When you’re standing in a bookshop what else do you have to go on? The cover contains all the relevant information: title, author, graphic, [...]