“You have no talent and we suggest you give up writing”

A memorial library for Kurt Vonnegut opens in Indianapolis this November. Exhibits will include “boxes of rejection letters”.

I’d really like to see it.

This is the electronic book’s iPod moment

Amazon’s Kindle for £109.

Get a free crime e-book this weekend (10/11 July)

Fancy a free book? Publishing firm Simon & Schuster is giving away a free ebook version of Loser’s Town, a Hollywood-set thriller by Daniel Depp. I’ve no idea what it’s like but it’s free, it’s a PDF so it should work on anything, and all you need to do is provide an email address, so you might as well get it while you can.

Here’s the link.

In other news, the new Tim Dorsey novel is much cheaper as an ebook than it is in print: the latter is £11 to £14 plus postage, while the Kindle edition is eleven dollars flat. That’s around seven quid.

Breastfeeding and making new mums feel like crap

I’ve written before about the way new mums are talked down to by health “professionals” – last week on Radio Scotland the NHS Breastfeeding Co-Ordinator spent an entire programme patronising women who dared suggest that breastfeeding isn’t always possible – and other parents, but Zoe Williams expresses it wonderfully in today’s Guardian:

the case for breastfeeding is not that strong, and it has passed so seamlessly into the book of What’s Best for Baby that it’s often very lazily put. To give an example, there’s a charity called Best Beginnings, which aims to foster breastfeeding confidence, and is endorsed by the Department of Health, the Health Protection Agency, the NHS . . . the full force of nationalised health provision. Its opening statement is, “Did you know babies who aren’t breastfed are five times more likely to end up in hospital with serious tummy bugs? Or that in countries like Australia or Norway, people think breastfeeding is as normal as putting the kettle on?”

Here’s the thing: that figure in the first statement is from the World Health Organisation, which presents it as a global collation of statistics. In other words, this is not comparing two babies from Surbiton. It’s comparing breastfed babies to formula-fed babies from countries where they might not even have an assured water supply or sterilising equipment or electricity, where they might not even have enough formula. It’s an absurd way to propagandise for breastfeeding. If they were flogging a Pot Noodle, they wouldn’t get away with it.

…the statistics showing less asthma, less eczema, less obesity, fewer ear infections: these haven’t been adjusted for social class and environment. It boils down to: “Middle-class babies do better; middle-class babies tend to be breastfed.”

Mums and mums-to-be have a tough enough time without this bullshit.

The worst book covers of all time

This site, Good Show Sir, is fantastic. Here’s one of the horrors it has found.

There’s a difference between printing something and publishing it

Novelist and former tech writer David Hewson on the coming eBook avalanche/apocalypse/delete as applicable and its implications for writers:

Technically it’s never been easier to get a book into digital print. But here you hit a perennial problem. Successful books aren’t just printed. They’re published. Anyone can print something. Few can publish successfully. Publishing involves a chain of skills — editing, revision, marketing, design, positioning and building an author’s career slowly and carefully.

…Does anyone seriously think you can replace all that simply by uploading a file to Apple and announcing your new work on Facebook?

How to design a book cover

This is great: six hours of work in a two-minute clip.

More here:

Over 6 hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through Alexia photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established for Soulless and Changeless, there weren’t the usual batches and rounds of versions of different designs that happen with standalone or first-in-a-new-series covers. That would be a weeklong video!

How iPad books might look [video]

Penguin’s been showing off some iPad-related ideas, and I think it’s fair to say they’re amazing – particularly the kids’ books.

Could Spotify work for ebooks?

As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago.

Could the same kind of thing work for ebooks? Is there enough ad money to go round? Do book readers want to social network?

we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades.

Could similar ideas work online?

Will piracy rip the spine out of ebooks?

Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes?

One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had it in X format, but the only legal versions were in Y format.

Publishers are keen to avoid the same thing in books.