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Must-have publishing fundamentals

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When I help people publish on tight budgets, the big question is ‘What’s truly indispensable?’

That depends on the project, but I’ve long wondered whether there are some things every project needs. What are your must-have publishing fundamentals?

Over on the Electric Book Works website, I’ve written up my list, which almost entirely by accident fall into categories that start with P:

  • Purpose
  • People
  • Production
  • Promotion
  • Persistence

Once you’ve given that a read, let me know on LinkedIn if you think I’ve missed something, or over-emphasised something you think is not so important.

Ten things to know about making ebooks

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These days I’ve got my head down at Paperight, putting ebooks back on paper. But I still get asked a lot about how ebooks are made in the first place. Where does a person even start to learn? So at the suggestion of friend and mentor Kate McCallum,* I wrote up, in a few brief slides, ten things you need to know more about if you’re going to make ebooks.

 

* Kate McCallum is probably the best publishing trainer in South Africa (perhaps the world) – certainly anything sensible I know about the financials of publishing I owe to her mentorship when she was MD at Oxford University Press Southern Africa ten years ago.

The TED Talent Search: five days left to vote

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Over the last several months, TED has been running its global TED Talent Search (#TEDTalentSearch), an effort to draw on a wider pool of speakers than ever before for TED2013 in Long Beach, California. In fourteen cities around the world, 290 speakers did their best to explain their idea worth spreading. I got to talk in Joburg.

 

A key element of the Talent Search is public opinion, so on each video, viewers can Recommend, Vote, and Comment. A kind of intellectual Pop Idols. The TED team will be guided by that when selecting about 25 speakers for TED2013. The public voting ends in five days, so if you have a favourite speaker, get your vote in now by going to the Talent Search site (the quickest way is to hit the Facebook Recommend button below a video). Naturally, I’d love to see votes for me and my fellow southern Africans! Continue reading →