My life on the borderland between text and tech started in adolescence as a sci-fi nerd, dreaming of a future that started to come true around the release of the first Star Wars film, and has since been outstripping most fancies from that era year on year, hand over fist. As a writer and editor, though, I only got into electronic text by chance when I took a job editing and localizing entries for the first generation of Microsoft's Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia in the mid-1990s, when multimedia, never mind the Internet, was only just getting going. I spent the next five...

Richard Gavin, the highly regarded “master of numinous horror fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft,” recently announced that his story collection, The Darkly Splendid Realm (also available on Kindle) was about to go out of print—on paper, at least. I took the chance to ask him a few questions about the whole notion of going out of print in these days of permanent e-book availability, and how he sees print and digital relating to each other. --- TeleRead: What's it like to have a print version go out of print nowadays, especially a limited edition? How do you...

Robert Ebert was my first and last source for movies and writing. The iconic film critic died Thursday at 70 years old, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. More than 10 years ago, movies were one of my main joys. With my film passion came the need to write. So I created a website for my movie reviews. I would watch a film, write a review and then read Ebert’s review. I felt inadequate every single time. But I didn’t hang my head in disgust. Ebert made me want to be better. I found his writing engaging and passionate, two qualities that stood out in...

Joanna Cabot has been writing about Evernote and her newfound love of it recently, and I thought it was time to share my thoughts about the usefulness of Evernote as a tool for authors. I love Evernote so much that I'm glad I wasn't an author before it existed. What are some of the challenges for writers, and how does Evernote help solve them? I'm glad you asked! 1. Capturing ideas Because Evernote is on all my devices, and my phone is always on my belt, I never have to worry about losing an idea. My husband has a "bad" habit of coming...

Self-publishing has a lot of advantages and just as many countervailing drawbacks. The biggest advantage is, of course, you get to be your own boss and can publish whatever you want to, without some publisher taking a cut of the money. But the dark side of this freedom is that it can leave you vulnerable if some big company with money and lawyers decides it doesn’t like what you’re doing. And even if their claims are completely outlandish, it will cost you money you don’t have—more money than your book will ever make—to fight them, and you don’t have any guarantee...

TeleRead's Toronto-based senior writer Joanna Cabot, currently our most prolific blogger by a long shot, wrote over 100 articles for this site in 2012. (And that's not counting her daily Morning Roundups.)  What were some of her best-loved and most popular stories of the year? For your holiday reading pleasure, here are a few you may enjoy revisiting ... or reading for the very first time!  —Ed.   • My Top Reads of 2012 • My eBook Market Predictions for 2013 • Is Digitization Enabling Minimalism for a New Generation? • Why Interactive Storybooks are a Bad Idea • What We Can Learn From the Troubles of Martha Stewart • It is Now Illegal to Break...

Well, it’s been fun, but I’ve just made my last post to TeleRead as a regular contributor. Starting tomorrow, I’m moving to The Digital Reader, to write for my friend Nate Hoffelder. It’s important to note that there are no hard feelings between me and NAPCO or new editor-in-chief Dan Eldridge, who I’m confident will do a great job keeping TeleRead true to the vision of founder David Rothman. I just don’t have the time to write as much as I used to anymore. Still, you may see the occasional bit of content from me pop up here from...

Fantasy author Holly Lisle (whose books I’ve read and enjoyed) has a series of writing lessons that she sells in e-book form. One of these, “Lesson 6: How to Discover (or Create) Your Story’s Market,” discussed techniques for using Amazon’s software and databases to place stories in alternate genres. It had links to Amazon in it, and Apple quickly rejected it (as it did one of Seth Godin’s e-books in February, for a similar reason). So Lisle revised the e-book to remove the Amazon links and resubmitted it—and this time it was rejected for mentioning Amazon. In...

Is the era of the professional writer drawing to a close? At least one contemporary British author thinks so. In a recent article, the Globe and Mail quotes UK writer Ewan Morrison’s contention that advances from traditional publishers have declined so much in recent years that he is practically working for free. Morrison sees self-publishing, book piracy, rampant e-tailer discounting, free writing online, and the “free culture” movement as killing off traditional writing and publishing. While consumers may be happy to get a lot of stuff for free, he insists, they’re killing our culture, and “There will be no...

The “Writer Beware” blog usually warns of scams and fly-by-night publishers trying to take advantage of inexperienced writers, but a guest post from writer and writing instructor Marcia Yudkin warns of something else—inexperienced writers apparently trying to take advantage of readers. I’m reminded of the aphorism, “Fast, cheap, good: pick any two”—because Yudkin is talking about writers who write fast, and self-publish for cheap, but may not actually be any good. Yudkin talks about communities she’s encountered where writers, enamored of the way they could make money right away by listing cheap e-books on Amazon, share tips on how...

Last week, author Charlie Stross posted his review of the process of writing using Scrivener, a specialized story-based word processor I’ve mentioned a few times. Stross has a good overview of the program’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a professionally-published writer. The program’s biggest weakness, he finds, is that it essentially becomes useless at the point a novel is finished and submitted to the publisher—because the Word document output isn’t quite ideal for submission, and then the publisher will send revisions in the form of Word documents, and expect them to be processed accordingly. Since...

The BBC reports on Glaswegian crime author Denise Mina, whose novel The End of the Wasp Season recently won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, expressing her feelings about e-books. And unlike some writers, she doesn’t feel threatened by them—indeed, she thinks that they are in the process of revolutionizing publishing. Calling e-publishing “a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world,” Mina feels that it will change things previously taken for granted in print publishing, such as book length or the practice of having cliffhangers at the end of every...