Author Archives:

Peter James iPhone app

Posted in General

We’re very pleased to announce the release of a landmark iPhone app – the Peter James app, featuring the DS Roy Grace series of crime novels.
Download the press release:
Press release: Peter James iPhone app

Hitchhiker homepage takeover

Posted in General

On 12 October 1979 the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor (and Earth) was made available to humanity – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Macmillan is celebrating thirty years of planet-hopping comic genius with the publication of special editions of Douglas Adams’ iconic books.
In [...]

@rnmorris – a good read

Posted in General

One-time Macmillan New Writing author, Roger Morris, and now hugely successful crime fiction writer, R.N. Morris is twitterizing his novel A Gentle Axe. Reading it in my twitter feed each day is a fantastic experience, and of course one can go back into the archive at twitter.com/rnmorris to read the story from the beginning.
Roger writes [...]

Shatzkin shizzle

Posted in eBooks, mobile

Mike Shatzkin posted a piece yesterday that seemed to me to have the ring of truth about it.
Asking the question, ‘Will Amazon’s current domination of the US ebook market persist?’, Shatzkin answers firmly, ‘No.’
He goes on to explicate the lack of a genuine compatibility between Amazon’s strengths in physical product supply, handling and selling and [...]

lament

Posted in Publishing, eBooks

… the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
There is an interesting piece in the London Review of Books from Colin Robinson about the impact of global economic woes [...]

my tee oh see

Posted in General, TOC 2009

I’ve had a full week now to digest my TOC experience in New York and hopefully I will manage to capture in this post the many points of real value that I gleaned from it.
For those of you I didn’t meet on Twitter, it was actually me behind the @thedigitalist tweets, not Sara. Like [...]

the tweetest thing

Posted in Twitter

Twitter has gone mainstream – we all know this now. Not only did the best thing since Blogger grow by 752% in 2008, and gather geeky celeb users like @stephenfry (60K+ followers) and @wossy but now Gwyneth Paltrow – “new female internet hero” – is reportedly wanting to use Twitter to start a book reading [...]

VB sees the future – agree or disagree?

Posted in Publishing, eBooks

We’ve been reading Victoria Barnsley’s ‘Media’s Last Diehard?’ speech and can’t quite agree on one point. In fact, it’s not that we disagree but just that we see things differently! Here are Michael and James’s views – please feel free to add your own.
MICHAEL says:
Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK and Founder of literary imprint [...]

go anywhere, be everywhere?

Posted in Publishing, read/write culture

BBC Have Your Say is moving out into the wilds of the web and joining the conversation where it happens – link [via Peter Brantley]
This is surely a significant move that publishers should watch with interest. The BBC is testing the waters of not hosting the discussion.
One of the answers to MBQ (My Big Question: [...]

lifting the veil – will you take a peek?

Posted in General

Perhaps you’ve heard of a book called Cliffhanger by T.J. Middleton? No?
Well, you can read more about it on panmacmillan.com – then come right back!
Cliffhanger is published today, and it’s great fun – I did homage to the spirit of the book by reading it on or near the best coastal cliff I could [...]