Browsing in quirky little bookstores is a pleasant way to pass the time. If this describes you, be sure to check out 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. And for a insightful look at the history of memoirs, don’t miss The New Yorker article But Enough About Me.
- This column will change your life. “Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too, Hofstadter says. We chronically underestimate the time things take.”
- eBooks Gone in 5 Years? “The future of what we do, once we start to put books into this connected/network world is totally open, and that’s a very exciting thing for people who love books and who love the web.”
- Quick Tips for Better Interview Video. “Moving from audio only to video and audio recording is not a small transition. Frame composition, lighting, and background are only a few of the considerations now affecting oral history recording that previously- when only recording audio- were of less importance. With that in mind, there are five basic principles for capturing better video.”
- 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World. “We all know about the plight of independent and specialty bookstores, so we won’t lament it again here. Suffice it to say, fellow book and bookstore lovers, that all is not lost!…Click through to see some of the coolest niche and specialty bookstores in the world, and since no list like this can ever be really complete, be sure to pitch in with your own favorites in the comments.”
- The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your eBook on Amazon’s Kindle Platform. “The opportunities to grow and expand your business or ideas through publishing an eBook are limitless. With a insightful, compelling eBook, your words can instill valuable wisdom, actions, stories and ideas that can build trust and relationships with your audience. If you follow the seven steps below, you’ll never have to read another article on publishing to Amazon’s Kindle platform ever again.”
- How to Create a Timeline: The Power of Re-working Your Life’s Story, 1 of 2. “A timeline or lifeline exercise is a grid that allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your life, and to see the positive and negative shifts along the way on a single trajectory…Putting your timeline on paper is an opportunity to record vital information about your life and past. There are several benefits to completing this exercise.”
- But Enough About Me. “…memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention…The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.”
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Tagged better, Bookselling, bookstores, E-book, eBook, history, Hofstadter's law, How to, Kindle platform, life story, memoir, New Yorker, niche bookstores, planning, publishing, The New Yorker, timeline, Tips, video interviews
Start your week off with a good chuckle by checking out A Proofreader’s Value Summed Up in this Monday’s Link Roundup. On a more philosophical note be sure to read Orhan Pamuk’s museum celebrates transition, not vanity. It makes an argument for the reverence of ordinary objects. And if you’re in a more practical mood, take a look at The Best Photo Sharing Sites.
- Free VideoPad Video Editor. “Designed to be intuitive to use, VideoPad is fully featured video editing program for creating professional looking videos in minutes. Making movies has never been easier.” [Thanks to Bill Gough for alerting me to this item]
- Orhan Pamuk’s museum celebrates transition, not vanity. “He was born in 1952 to a wealthy but declining Istanbul family. After rising to prominence with his early works and receiving the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red in 2003, Pamuk was pilloried and put on trial in Turkey two years later. In 2006, after decamping for New York, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Now Pamuk is once again living in the city of his birth, and the city has embraced him. A road sign at a crosswalk, installed by the municipal government, points proudly to his newly opened Museum of Innocence. The museum is not so much a homage to his eponymous book of 2008 as an aspect of it…The museum’s aim, Pamuk says, is to suggest that there is no special reason an ordinary life and its ordinary objects ought not be viewed with the curiosity and reverence we bring to museums.”
- The Best Photo Sharing Sites. “There are many ways to share your photos with friends and family today, including social networking sites, photo communities and sites that sell prints and photo crafts. The key is finding a site that suits your photo sharing needs and sticking with it.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
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Tagged best, blogging, DARE, Death Penny, descendants, Dictionary of American Regional English, Ebooks, free, How to, humor, humour, Istanbul, Jim Romenesko, Museum of Innocence, Nobel Prize, orhanpamuk, Pamuk, photo sharing, proofreader, proofreading, publishing, sites, Tips, Turkey, video editing, Video Editor, VideoPad, WWI
Too busy for a vacation this summer? Then you may want to read The Importance of Vacations in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. If you’re not familiar with Cowbird, check out this latest web-based means of collecting stories. And as someone who relies on my copyeditor to save me from embarrassing gaffes, I highly recommend 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better.
- The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood. “Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristo…In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below.”
- Narrative Concepts. “…narrative medicine means an understanding of health and disease for humans, that is grounded in the stories humans live out in their lives and the stories that we understand about our lives which give our lives meaning and purpose…it means that illness is embedded in the stories we are performing and that are performing us. There is a biological story about how we are organisms who are born, live, wear out, and die. Our lives are finite. Within that finitude, however, are multiple social stories which interact with the “how long do I have to live story”.
- 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better. “Linda Jay is a very experienced book editor…I asked [her]…if she would give readers some advice on one of the most important decisions a self-publisher makes: hiring a copyeditor. Here’s her reply.”
- The Importance Of Vacations. “As an entrepreneur who has launched three businesses, I have on several occasions in the past found myself working long hours, seven days a week and forgoing vacations owing to lack of time and reduced income. As I have grown older, I realize that was a mistake.”
- Cowbird. “…is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.”
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Tagged Allianz, archival photos, Baby boomer, Baby Boomers, books, Bruce Hood, Copy editing, copyediting, copyeditors, Cowbird, design, interview, legacy, link roundup, mind, Monday, narrative medicine, publishing, Self Illusion, storytelling, survey, Tips, treasure, trunk, vacations, web
Don’t miss Reflections in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup. It’s a powerful reminder that behind every aged face there was once a younger self with dreams and ambitions. If you’re a serious blogger, you’ll find some practical wisdom in 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging.
- Robert Caro’s Big Dig. “Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great or powerful man deserves not just a slim volume, or even a fat one, but a whole shelf full. He dresses every day in a jacket and tie and reports to a 22nd-floor office in a nondescript building near Columbus Circle, where his neighbors are lawyers or investment firms.”
- Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love. “…when you are facing the unknown, they only way to know anything for sure is to act. When you are dealing with uncertainty — and whether you are going to make any money from your passion at this point is definitely an uncertainty — you act. You don’t think about what might happen, or try to predict the outcome, or plan for every contingency. You take a small step toward making it a reality, and you see what happens.”
- Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is For Everyone Now. “We need a new playbook,” says entrepreneur and author Ben Casnocha. “The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true.” The Start-Up of You, written by Casnocha and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is that playbook. It argues that we can no longer expect to find a job, instead we must make our jobs. As Hoffman says, we have to “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
- Reflections. A poignant reconstructed portrait series where older people gaze into a mirror at a reflection of their younger selves . Created by photographer Tom Husey.
- Social media self-promotion scheme draws authors including Margaret Atwood. “As bookshops teeter and publishers sway in the shifting landscape of the digital age, authors are being urged to go out and find their own readers by a new $20m (£12.5m) fund that will pay them a dollar for every book sold. With early adopters including Margaret Atwood and FlashForward author Robert Sawyer – who claimed the scheme would have added $20,000 to his income from audio over the past two years – the fund is being launched by digital audiobook site Audible at the London Book Fair this weekend.”
- Book Design: Choosing Your Paragraphing Style. “Anyone who wants to do their own book design can spend some very worthwhile time studying books that are old. I mean really old, like going all the way back to the beginning of printed books. Early on, I found these books and the book typography that’s used in them very stimulating when thinking about how I wanted the books I was working on to look.”
- 10 Lessons Seth Godin Can Teach You About Blogging. “Ever since I started in business, I’ve always loved Seth Godin. He’s a brilliant marketer and a great writer. In fact, he runs one of the most popular blogs…And while many people view him as “America’s greatest marketer,” there is a lot to learn from him about blogging.”
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Tagged Tips, How to, wisdom, books, book design, social media, biography, publishing, blogging, entrepreneur, Robert Caro, Seth Godin, Caro, paragraph style, Audible, Reflections, Tom Husey, Ben Casnocha, making money
In this Monday’s Link Roundup, take a look at Your Problem Isn’t Motivation. It’ll kick-start your new year. For something completely different watch the engaging and sobering 5 minute video Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.
- Books That Are Never Done Being Written.“An e-book…is far different from an old-fashioned printed one. The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”
- Your Problem Isn’t Motivation.”Motivation is in the mind; follow-through is in the practice. Motivation is conceptual; follow-through is practical. In fact, the solution to a motivation problem is the exact opposite of the solution to a follow through problem. The mind is essential to motivation. But with follow through, it’s the mind that gets in the way.” [Thanks to Ronda McLean of Insight Life Stories for suggesting this item.]
- New Videos From Archipel Steal the Show. “The digital preservation-related video show, that is. The set of newly released videos from the Belgian project “Archipel” are the latest digital preservation videos to hit the scene. The Archipel project is a recent collaboration by organizations in Belgium, to study digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage materials.”
- Four Steps to (Quickly) Share Your Business Story. [Video]“Communications coach Carmine Gallo shares tips on how to craft your business story — covering all the essential elements — so you can tell it it in 60 seconds. He shares the four critical questions you must answer to get your message across to prospects.”
- A Secret, A Kiss: ‘The Moment’ Your Life Changed. “The six-word memoir conceit grew into a popular series of books, but the editors knew it was tough to share a meaningful story in so few words. So Smith Magazine prompted its community to write about the moments that changed their lives — the moments of clarity, the things that happened to them, the things they made happen.”
- Life in 4,748 Self-Portraits.[Video] “It started simply enough in 1999. Jeff Harris, a photographer based in Toronto, took his first self-portrait, something he has since repeated every day. His visual diary now amounts to 4,748 photos and they tell a very personal story.”
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Tagged book design, business story, digital preservation, E-book, elevator pitch, How to, Jeff Harris, memoir, motivation, pagination, publishing, self-portraits, Smith Magazine, Tips, Writing
This Monday’s Link Roundup includes three thoughtful articles on the digital age and the future of writing and books: Books After Amazon, Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age? and Six e-Book Trends to Watch in 2011. Whether we like it or not, e-books are here to stay – with significant implications for personal historians who work in print.
- Books After Amazon. “Even before the Kindle, Amazon wielded enormous influence in the industry. Now it is positioned to control the e-book market and thereby the future of the publishing industry.”
- The Enigma of Capturing Light. “It is light that colors our vision, our understanding, and allows us to feel the essence of our surroundings. We are able to capture all this through the lens, with the aid of light, into the medium of photography.”
- Endings. “The ending is something special. The ending is the last word. It’s the writer’s final chance to nail his or her point home to the memory of the reader. It’s the moment when you give the reader something to take away from the story and think about or when you fail to achieve that.”
- Are Writers Powerless to Make a Living in the Digital Age? “As paper and ink give way to electronic gadgetry, questions arise. What will reading be like in the future? Will long-form prose survive? Will the quality of literature get better or worse? To Jaron Lanier, those are the wrong questions.”
- Six e-Book Trends to Watch in 2011. “Because I am the CEO of a book publishing company, I am regularly asked how I see the future of digital publishing. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
- Good Marketing vs. Bad Marketing. “Marketing, per se, is neither good nor bad. It is simply the way a company speaks to us. People use their mouths, companies use marketing. It is objective. However, how companies choose to speak to us is another story. And in that case how they market to us is mostly bad.”
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Tagged black history, digital age, e-book trends, e-books, How to, Marketing, photography, publishing, Tips, W.E.B DuBois, Writing
Hello. And welcome to Monday’s Link Roundup. For book designers don’t miss Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmakeable” Interactive Book. It’s remarkable. For all of us who struggle with PowerPoint there’s useful advice in Five Ways to Not Suck at PowerPoint. For a thoughtful look at the future of publishing check out Apple-Esquire dust-up bodes ill for the publishing utopia we pictured.
- Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings. “The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That’s the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals’ opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.”
- Inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Unmakeable” Interactive Book. “The book is actually a kind of interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.”
- 45 Great Cultural Icons Revisited. “Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here.”
- Taking Care of Your Personal Archives. “…as a part of the Smithsonian’s October Archives Month celebrations, Smithsonian Institution Archives experts answered your questions about your own personal archives. The Facebook Q&A session we held over at the main Smithsonian Facebook page was a great success, and so we wanted to highlight some of the interesting questions that came out of the session.”
- Five Ways to Not Suck at PowerPoint. “It’s easy to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations, but designer Jesse Desjardins suggests that more often than not, the speaker’s to blame, not the tool. In Desjardins’ presentation he outlines five common presentation design mistakes that can be easily avoided, along with suggestions on how you might do so.”
- Grieving in the Facebook Age. “Chances are you’ve thought about what happens to you after you die, but have you ever wondered what happens to your social media?”
- Apple-Esquire dust-up bodes ill for the publishing utopia we pictured. “…the news that Esquire had to tone down the racy bits to be published at the App Store realizes fears that have been murmured since Apple posited itself as the distributor of the future: Can a company that’s proved infamously fickle about deciding which apps will be sold in its store and which won’t really be hands-off about editorial content? Could a corporation with a messianic leader whose success derives from, among other things, obsessive design control really stand back? The answer is, apparently not.”
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