I finally read my first e-book.
OK, call me late to the party, late adopter, troglodyte. Tell me, “Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Ask me if I have indoor plumbing.
So, here’s how it went.
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Author: Andy Le Peau
I've been an editor and writer for over forty years. I am passionate about ideas and how we can express them clearly, beautifully, and persuasively. I love reading good books, talking about them, and recommending them. I thoroughly enjoy my family who help me continue on the path of a lifelong learner.
A Book by Any Other Name
How important is the title of a book when sending a proposal? Very important and not at all.
Sometimes a title can be so bad the editor can’t get past it and rejects the project before ever looking at the proposal seriously. A proposed title can also be so good that it sets expectations sky high. But often the title doesn’t help or hinder, so the editor has to engage the proposal to make a determination.
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Slide Rules and Blank Stares
“We used to do that with a slide rule.”
Blank stare. “What’s a slide rule?”
“It’s a device they used before calculators to do division, multiplication, square roots, squares and trig functions.”
Blank stare.
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Hungry for The Hunger Games?
Massive box office smash. Best selling books. What’s the appeal of The Hunger Games? My take is that boys love the action. The girls love it as a romance. The guys love it as a video game/reality show mashup with not-so-virtual violence. The girls love the idea of being torn between and pursed by two courageous, honorable hunks, especially as that is played out more in the second and third books.
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Not a Straight Story Line
Postmodernism tells us there is no purely objective observer. We all have a bias when we come to a subject, no matter how well trained we might be in science or law or history. This would seem to be a rather difficult problem to overcome. How do we say something is true when it will inevitably be colored by our own perspectives?
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Murder, Apathy and Urban Legends
Kitty Genovese was murdered in Kew Gardens in Queens, New York, forty-eight years ago today. It rocked the nation. The New York Times article about the incident famously began, “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”
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What If You Wanted to Publish?
Would you join me in a thought experiment? What if you had to answer the following questions?
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Pastor Beware (and Writer Too)
I call them preacher stories–those tales that pass from church to church, book to book, blog to blog. Sometimes corny, sometimes profound, they can inspire, accuse, challenge, amuse, surprise or inform.
I recently came across the same story three times, and it made me wonder.
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My Conversation with Jeff Bezos
It was over a dozen years ago that I spoke with Jeff Bezos at a conference in Washington, D.C. In the early years of Amazon, the company was losing money hand over fist (losing $125 million in 1998 alone) in its all-out effort to gain market share. I told him I understood the strategy, but realistically, how long could they keep it up? With his famous Jeff Bezos smile he told me, “I appreciate your concern. But there’s no need to worry about Amazon.”
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What Publishers Can Learn from the Airlines
Book publishers are desperate for new business models. While standing in line at the airport recently, I thought maybe we could look to the airline industry for inspiration. If we did, here are some things you might see from publishers:
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