Where do I even start with this? I’ve never been particularly worried that the world will be wiped out by the singularity, that Skynet and the Terminators will come for us in an onslaught of self-replicating, intelligent machines or Blade Runner’s more-human-than-humans. I’m more interested in how technology influences our lives in subtle ways now, who has control over…
I was invited to Dublin Zoo for World Book Day, to do a spot on the John Murray Show on RTE Radio 1. Basically, they said ‘we’re going to surround two classes of schoolchildren with snakes, elephants, and other wild animals, oh . . . and there’ll be live music from somebody from ‘The Voice’ too. ‘Then you’ll be…
In Ireland – and, I’m sure, many other places around the world – if you’re in the business of making children’s books, then schools represent an important part of your market. Obviously, this is not just because it’s where the kids are learning to read, but also because it’s where a large proportion of kids will have their first…
It might be going a bit overboard to call it ‘a revolution’, but here’s an interesting idea, as featured on the Mail Online site. Hodder have imported a new publishing format from the Netherlands. Basically, it’s a paperback novel you read with the spine turned horizontally, with the pages in landscape position. The paper is extremely thin – based…
One of the things about being published by a few different publishers in the same market, is that you can end up with a slightly disjointed approach to selling your work. Even within the one publisher, you can find that different types of books are sold in different ways. In some cases, this is necessary; the kind of thing…