News From The Colony
Litopia is celebrating another major success story following the publication of the debut book from Donna Ballman, the Colony’s legal eagle and deadly debriefer.
The Writer’s Guide to the Courtroom: Let’s Quill all the Lawyers has been published in the US by Behler Publications and sees Donna (and her cool, dry wit) run the rule over everything and anything a writer could want to know about US civil law.
For Donna, who is a young...
Star Columnists
Martyn Daniels
Today’s trade press is littered once more with assumptions about the state of book piracy and its impact on revenues and the market. This is an emotive subject which has many issues, much sensitivity and is often divorced of real facts.
Attributor, who monitor the access to illegally posted content through their FairShare Guardian service, have released a report based on their tracking of 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009. It estimates from this that over 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked. So they extrapolate, estimate and come up with figures which make many...
Agent
My first column of the year in the British publishing trade magazine The Bookseller has just been...
Martyn Daniels
So when is it right to apologise to one group of people but not apologise to another when you have done exactly the same thing to both...
Martyn Daniels
It now appears that anyone electronics firm standing has created their own ebook reader. Everywhere you turn you find a new one and as we have said many times, differentiating between them is very...
Martyn Daniels
In our New Year Predictions we made reference to the opportunities and dangers that face the digital public library in the UK. We have written previously on the views expressed by the UK Minister...
Martyn Daniels
In the article which was published in the New York Times today,‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’,Jonathan...
Martyn Daniels
Having already made seven predictions for 2010 and into the next decade, we continue and offer our final three.
8.Publishers
We have talked about bookstore...
Litopia Blogs
worldper
I used to write inane articles about family life and my lack of a clue in it all, so I thought I would start again with the blog. Please note these are more or less actual converstions - the profanity is edited out.
It’s Saturday. It’s breakfast. It’s lunch. It’s battle royal near the skillet. Why, you ask? Because we own a stove/oven and a microwave and a toaster oven, but none get...
RL Sutton
Today, I received word my submission towards full membership had been accepted.
At first, I felt an immense sense of relief. My odyssey from writing professional ad copy into writing fiction for my self and my family, writing online blogs and guides was as thorny a journey as any. About six, no seven years ago, I began work on what would become a first novel. When it was finished I considered whether it was fit...
1 comment
CatWake
It’s a common-ish story, mine, though I didn’t realize it at the time: Joe Shmoe (or Jolene Shmolene, in my case) gets bitten by the writing bug, feverishly gives birth to The Best Novel Ever, starts querying, and lands up two months later with a stack of rejections on the desk and a stack of confusion in the chest.
So begin the questions.
What happened? What’s wrong with these agents? Am I writing the letter wrong? Approaching...
4 comments
ireneintheworld
What can you do with just ten minutes? I don’t dare get into a piece of work in case time disappears and I miss the train; my book is sitting in my bag, excited at the thought of being read for a whole 40 mins, though I would like to make myself take a photo of the day rising over the Erskine Bridge as we pass through Bowling but most of the time the windows are too dirty. Maybe today.
...
skipperjeru
No I haven't got an agent/contract/three book deal. Much more fun than that. 9.15 every Sunday I turn into a lifeboatman (in my mind a superhero). A very unlikely one, stuffed into an oversize...
1 comment
Crowe
In no particular order:
1. Opening about 12 different windows in my browser and leaving them open all day, including when I go out
2. Getting obsessed with a new story idea while I'm...
3 comments
Donna
It doesn’t take much to give me a thrill when I’m watching a legal drama. Even the tiniest bit of law done right can make me happy. Yes, I’m probably easily amused. But when a screenwriter gets...
1 comment
Quacker
Trying to get a small indie publishing house off the ground in today's publishing climate often feels like hurtling headlong in a burning car with no brakes towards the edge of the Abyss. And I...
2 comments
Donna
Find out about the Amazon/Macmillan dust-up; who's with the Google settlement and who's against; what happens when you sue John Grisham for libel; and something Rupert Murdoch said that I agree...
cathmurphy
So let’s start with the question everyone asked when we first announced our plans.
Why Norway?
Or at least that's what they wanted to ask. In fact, almost no one did. They nodded...
3 comments
Crowe
So just before Christmas, the senior editor of a prestigious literary magazine rejected one of my stories but said he'd love to see more of my work. Hooray! Except it's a bit terrifying and...
3 comments
skipperjeru
Q: Will my Western Digital 250 gb firewire/USB external hard drive survive falling from an average desk?
A: No.
geographer
OK, so Hemingway (if it was Hemingway?) said that we can't call ourselves writers until we have a million words under our belts. For most budding authors, we know, the first or second...
5 comments
CatWake
Here I am. At a turning point again. Trying to decide whether to be happy or sad, and certain that I will land, as ever, somewhere betwixt the twain.
I look over my...
worldper
In the course of human events, at various times, we all arrive at certain hypothetical forks in the...
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