John Baker’s Blog

The Guardian reports on the honourable dealings of the much loved supermarket chain:
Writers criticise Tesco for ‘chilling’ Thai libel actions
· Leading authors sign letter to retailer’s chief executive
· Supermarket chain urged to uphold human rights
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Jacob Russell looks at beginnings:
I wanted to begin with opening paragraphs rather than sentences, precisely to get past the “hook” –the [...]

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has an interesting piece on the book trade:
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. [...]

An interesting article in The Guardian from Stephen Page, publisher and chief executive of Faber and Faber:
Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend. As the mass market has risen so has the reality of a technologically connected society. This doesn’t just mean Facebook. Global communities are gathering around common interests online, [...]

This is heartbreaking stuff from Jane Austen Doe:
By the end of this story I will have broken the most sacred rules of modern authordom. I’ll tell you how much my publishers have paid me for the books I’ve written. I’ll tell you how many copies each of those books has sold. I’ll share with you [...]