Faulkner Influence in Stephen King Stories

At the same time I was marveling at Martha Grimes’ Emma Graham series (Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction, and Belle Ruin) and having a grand time with Jury in the Richard Jury series, I was also having fun identifying and guessing at the literary and cultural influences on Martha Grimes. I finally had a reason [...]

Billy and Stevie, Storytellers Par Excellence

One of my favorite authors, Martha Grimes, gained even more points when one of her characters in Belle Ruin carries around a battered William Faulkner reader in his back pocket. The character is so attached to William Faulkner that he refers to him as “Billy”. If I was stranded on a desert island with only [...]

Influential Women in Publishing

I always face this moment when I’m supposed to be blogging about the great and wonderful world of publishing. There are so many out there that speak so eloquently and engagingly that I have a hard time thinking my writing stands up in comparison. There is, however, one area that no one has yet entered [...]

Future of Publishing

Mark Coker of Smashwords got me thinking about the future of publishing. Many people have written about the end of the year, end of the decade, predictions for the future, but Mark’s prediction kindled a flame of thought. I try to hold on to these moments because my work schedule has become so crazy I [...]

Book Model Variant 2

Collaboration has been around since the first stories were told out over the campfire. Each story teller said over the basic story, history, morality play, and then added his own interpretations to the mix. It amuses me when people talk about book collaboration today as if it is a new idea, new invention. What’s different [...]

An Author Platform Sells the Author

I heard an interesting statistic the other day from another publisher. They were trying to setup an online store with one of the leading online bookstores, but were being frustrated in their attempts because they could get no support from the online store. Every time they called or emailed they got the same response: “I’m [...]

Multitudes of eBook Readers

How many eBook readers are out there? Do you read eBooks with an eBook reader? I don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I tried loading text files on to my iPod. That was shear misery. I don’t wish that on anyone – well, maybe my worst enemy I would. Reading a text file [...]

Early Literary Influences

(by Joseph Kaufman) The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the [...]

DocBook, Publishing Tools of the Trade

DocBook came into being in 1991 through the efforts of HaL Computer Systems and O’Reilly & Associates. They created a model, a schema, based on SGML and XML to define the structure of a document. Originally intended for technical books, DocBook has become one of the prevalent tools in the publishing industry. Why? First, DocBook [...]