I’ll be lending my digital head to the Australian Writers Marketplace Industry Masterclass at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival. This industry seminar will introduce you to agents, publishers and writers and take you on a journey from manuscript development to published author promotion.  It will cover the role of agents in a writer’s life, the [...]

I read an interesting article (that that predates the iPad) from the Wandering Academic. Throughout, the post references Anne Fadiman’s celebrated essay where she characterises book lovers into two categories: ‘carnal’ and ‘courtly’, a concept that deserves its own post if there hadn’t already been a million of them. Anyway, I was struck in particular by [...]

A newly compiled and polished edition of my short story collection Saccades is now available in both print and digital editions. It’s the first of two releases from the web site over the next few months leading up to Off the Record‘s launch in October. Best of all, for the bargain hunters out there, the [...]

If you’re heading to the Byron Bay Writers Festival and you’re interested in writing (you poor sod), it may behove you to check out the Nuts & Bolts professional development workshop for writers. BBWF Nuts & Bolts is proudly sponsored by The Australian Writer’s Marketplace, and programmed and chaired by Queensland Writers Centre. Now in [...]

Tomorrow, I will host the second TwitterFEST session for the Emerging Writers Festival. The session today went down remarkably well, despite my turning up right at the end and contributing only by telling everyone that I was late. In fact, it was fast and furious with discussion flying all over the place. I only hope [...]

Yes, yes, the iPad has arrived in the United States, and yes, they’ve sold bucketloads already, but this isn’t yet-another-iPad-post because the one piece of information of interest to me is yet to trickle through from across the Pacific: which publishers have chosen to take up Apple’s DRM offer and what restrictions they are placing [...]

A timely post from Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords. Mark broke down a 100,000-strong sample of January’s eBook downloads from Smashwords by popularity. The results showed PDF to be the most popular format at 35%. Quite aside from the fact that I’ve been questioning the wisdom of offering my short stories exclusively in the [...]

I think I may have already established that I’m no fan of digital rights management. The technology has already broken the corporate spirit of the music industry (not necessarily a bad thing) and—despite its cheerleaders—has little impact on the film and television industries. But, despite all evidence, much of the discussion surrounding the iPad and [...]

Things appear to be speeding up in the  digital publishing world and finally the eBook is beginning to matter. No sooner does Apple announce their contribution to the continuing argument around what an e-reader should actually do than Amazon and MacMillan dive at each other’s throats in a way that would make even shareholders blanch. [...]

So, the iPad is here and along with it the words words words of people rushing to pass judgement on a device based on little more than watching Steve Jobs wave it around for an hour or so. Oh, alright that’s harsh, but even for someone with a deep appreciation of Apple’s products and design, [...]