We were in Portlaoise last weekend, and I took my daughter to a playground in a small town park, while her mum and brother were off watching a football match. She was too young to watch the game and too old – and too mad – to sit still on our laps. The playground was a decent one; the…
It’s taken me a few days to get round to posting this, but I was at the Children’s Books Ireland Conference in the National Gallery last weekend, where I got to hear some excellent talks. The conference was kicked off with a thoughtful and inspiring inaugural speech by our new Children’s Laureate, Siobhan Parkinson, who hailed the great success…
I was tempted to start this post with ‘And so it begins . . .’, but that would be wrong. Because Google’s leviathan-like surfacing in the book market has been a long time coming. Google Editions, the company’s new online bookstore, is due to start selling this summer. I have mixed feelings about Google’s strategy. On one hand, I’ve…
This afternoon, I was at a function in the headquarters of the Arts Council to celebrate the announcement of Ireland’s first ever Children’s Laureate. A host of us crowded into the room to hear President Mary McAleese declare Siobhan Parkinson our first Laureate. So for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t spend half their life immersed in the children’s…
Charles Stross, one of the UK’s most successful sci-fi writers, and a compulsive and prolific blogger, has written a series of posts about writing for a living, but there’s one post I think everyone should see, about the lifestyle of a writer. There are a lot of blunt truths here – though there are some key differences in the…
I’m borrowing the theme/title from Trinity Week for this piece, partly because of the great event I got to do with Philip Reeve and Conor Kostick last Tuesday, and partly ‘cos it fits nicely with the other stuff I want to talk about . . . An article I read recently on Publishers Weekly about new apps for the…
‘The Vile Desire to Scream’, my first free ebook novella.
Why is it so hard to make money from something that so many people love so much? What is it about books that they put those who love them most through the mill? It can be hard to love books sometimes. I learned the other day that the Hughes & Hughes bookshop chain is closing down – in fact…
To recap from Part 1 (of my ambitious and epic blog trilogy) what a publisher traditionally does for a writer is: first, they take that story on. That approval is, in itself, a recognition that the story is of a reasonable quality. Then they hone it into something they can sell, produce the printed matter and distribute it to…
The Stand and Deliver seminar and bad news from Mercier Press.