Catmachine

Self publishing has come a long way in a very short time. In the not too distant past it still bore the stigma of Vanity Publishing , a disparaging label casting aspersions on the motives and character of the author. But now? Now it's Print-On-Demand , the unspoken implication being that there is a demand out there for what you've written. These labels make all the difference to how the process is perceived and how seriously it is taken. But the major distinction is the way that the modern process works. You no longer have to shell out for hundreds of hard copies of a book that run the risk of ending up under the bed in ten years' time - in fact you no longer have to shell out for anything . All you need to make a book available is the ability to write one and the willingness to spend some time negotiating the twists and turns of an online administration process. As some of you may know (chiefly because I haven't shut up about it for the past six months) I have r...

I used to read newspapers more often than I do now, and back then I noticed a curious phenomenon. Most newspapers had two distinct identities. There was the main bit then at just over the halfway mark the quality of the content quality started degrading as it became predominantly ads, cartoons and crosswords. Then just impenetrable ads for increasingly bizarre products and services.  But if you persevered you would break free of this cruft and into another section of the paper altogether with stories and articles. It was like discovering a hidden city at the centre of the jungle. The problem was this new section was concerned entirely with sport. I was never interested in sport so as far as I was concerned this part of a newspaper's anatomy was analogous to the appendix. It didn't do anything and could safely be ignored. At times of World Cup or Olympics it did seem to become seriously inflamed but there was nothing really you could do about this. The option of a sp...