Booktopia is the largest online bookseller in Australia. My research shows that it pre-dates Amazon selling in Australia and its sales focus on one thing, books. Amazon sells anything and everything but Booktopia only sells books. If you’re selling only one type of item online you only have to worry ...

Read More

It’s been a quiet four weeks on the blog. There’s a really good reason for that and I’ve been taking my time to rectify things and get back to it. One of the joys of having a website of any kind is keeping everything updated and backed up. After I ...

Read More

You’ve probably clicked in hoping for some fabulous list, you might be disappointed. I’m conducting an audit of my blog. It’s going to take some time as I’ve been writing for thirteen years. In the beginning I wrote every two or three days, then I increased it to every day ...

Read More

One thing that has been on my mind a lot of late is plagiarism. If I look I can find a number of examples of plagiarism but I’ll only give you one example because it’s fairly recent. John Hughes was nominated for the Miles Franklin award. At some stage it ...

Read More

Well, the date was with my blog but I’m certainly late. I like to publish on a Monday and today is Tuesday. So I’m sitting here while the Prague Cello Quartet sits in a library somewhere and plays Roxanne by The Police and pretending to write something useful. I could ...

Read More

I had a teacher at uni who talked about many things including grammar but also how to read your own writing out loud. I’ve not forgotten the gist of her words and they came back to me tonight while watching a Port Fairy Literary Weekend Event. Port Fairy is a ...

Read More

Audiobooks are a challenge to create. They are an added expense and can take lots of time. I don’t have dollar figures for audiobooks but who you choose will make a difference as to the bottom line. Some people will read the book themselves, this is very time consuming but ...

Read More

There are some basics that make every book easier to read. Text free from typos and good grammar are two of these basics. This is what Laura Goodin has to say about grammar: Good grammar and punctuation are both the CAUSE and the EFFECT of clear understanding. When they’re right, ...

Read More

Here is yet another reason I dislike Amazon. They own Audible. You may have heard of Audible, you might even use it. And if you’ve returned an audio book through Audible I hope you’re going to think twice about doing it again in the future. When we return purchases to ...

Read More

This is an article I wrote some weeks ago. I’ve no idea why it didn’t publish. It was set to publish on the 20th May 2019 and didn’t publish. I feel it’s important enough to publish now. To answer my thought in the last paragraph, yes it has reduced…a lot. ...

Read More

I’ve picked up a book that at over 900 pages might possibly keep me going for a few weeks. It is dense reading with many short stories and some critical articles about those short stories. The first few pages are about Writing About Fiction. As I was reading those pages ...

Read More

when I really wish I lived in the northern hemisphere. Things happen over there in the book world that either don’t happen here or they’re just bigger. I’m only jealous. If you’re wondering what I’m annoyed about now then you can wander over to your Twitter account and put #TheBookCon ...

Read More

I was struggling with reading new books. I tried several books in a row but either didn’t like them or couldn’t read them. I put it down to being all newed out.  This is a term I coined a few weeks ago to explain why I couldn’t read anything new. ...

Read More

I have this creeping suspicion that I’m over-committed. More over-committed than I should be. It’s leading to me dropping the ball some days. The most recent time was my blog for Wednesday. This week has been rather interesting. We launched the website for Nullus Anxietas 7: The Australian Discworld Convention. ...

Read More

As at the time of writing I am that close to finalising the last couple of assignments to complete second year uni it’s not funny.  One assignment I just need to make it look pretty and then submit. I should just bite the bullet and do it so I can ...

Read More