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I’ve got two cameras, a wee Sony Cyber-Shot and a big Sony DSLR. The former’s a great wee camera but a bit rubbish in low light, especially as I have RSI-induced shaky hands, while the latter’s far too big and bulky for casual use. Could a single camera ever offer the best of both worlds?… [more]
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New Scots man-blog A Man’s A Man has written a very nice – and very nuts – thing about Coffin Dodgers. I get the impression Owen the editor liked it. [more]
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Just a wee update: my month of cut-price ebook selling has been and gone, and I thought I’d share the figures (if you’re new here, I’ve been selling my debut novel online for £1.99 and decided to halve the price to see what would happen). In June, I sold 90 books: 85 in the UK… [more]
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We’ll miss him. They reckon that we’ll never have another Beatles or another Rolling Stones: the world is too different, too fragmented, and the perfect storm that created them will not happen again. Jobs and Bill Gates are tech’s Beatles and Stones. I’ll let you decide which one’s which. [more]
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I sold my 251st copy of Coffin Dodgers this morning, and I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve discovered so far. The first and most obvious thing is how important price appears to be: after the initial momentum wears off, sales plummet if you’re pricing at £1.99 (there are other factors – Amazon… [more]
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This is interesting: a cloud-based version of the Kindle app. I’ve had a quick play with it and it works really well – it’s very fast and good-looking. The help pages say “Kindle Cloud Reader is compatible with PC Windows, or Mac, or Linux computers using the Google Chrome or Safari web browsers, on Linux computers… [more]
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There’s an interesting post on The Guardian books blog today: The true price of publishing. Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the… [more]
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A while back, I wrote that iCab mobile was one of the best browsers on iOS – and it was. It isn’t any more. I don’t know if it’s iCab or iOS, both of which have been updated since I first started using it, but it’s become borderline unusable: desperately slow, refusing to let me… [more]
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I feel a little bit bad about the slagging I gave John Locke’s how-to manual, so I thought I’d redress the balance a little bit by mentioning Let’s Get Digital. If you’re looking for a manual on e-publishing, spend your money on Gaughran’s book, not Locke’s: Gaughran makes it abundantly clear that the work starts when… [more]
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This year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest winners have been announced. This one is my favourite: As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
