Tag Archives: Blogging
So last week we held our “Digital Shindig”, a party for us to get to know some of our best bloggers as well as a chance for them to meet some of their favourite authors (and us of course!). I am delighted to say that the evening was an incredible success and many of our guests have been kind enough to write about the even. A couple of these comments I thought I would share with you:
So, last night myself and Ashleigh headed into London for what was styled a “digital shindig”, held by the publishing house Quercus Books. Held in the basement of trendy pub-style establishment Mason & Taylor, we spent a couple of hours with a selection of writers, bloggers and publisher staff.
I’ve said it many times before, but I’m convinced that genre (and writing in general) people are the nicest people you could wish to meet. And Quercus seem to have raised this to an art form; being greeted through the door with a free bar and a huge bag of books (see photo) is a truly excellent welcome!
Read the rest of this article over on his excellent: A Mad Man with a Blog.
There was more praise from the superb Notes of Life:
Thursday evening I attended the Quercus Digital Shindig and it turns out they really know how to throw a party! There was plenty of food & drink to be consumed and, most importantly, despite not knowing a soul there, there were plenty of people to chat to. I’m not particularly good in social situations, but I had a wonderful time chatting with the publicists, authors and other bloggers. Everyone was so nice and friendly and I was never short of somebody to talk with.
Some amazing words across Twitter as well:
A huge thank you to everyone who came and looking forward to sharing some amazing books with you.
Stay tuned for some exclusive video footage of the party and any bloggers who missed out, there will be another blogger even t in the autumn and we’d love to see you there!
Over on Book Chick City, Quercus is featured as part of ‘UK Publisher Month’.
Book Chick City is run by Carolyn who says:
“I created Book Chick City in July 2009. I’m a Brit chick totally obsessed with books. I love reading them, buying them and collecting them. Book Chick City is my outlet for my unhealthy book addiction…”
Well, we are thrilled to be featured on her fab blog where I showcase a number of our recent and upcoming titles including The Mayan Prophecy:
The Mayan Prophecy by Steve Alten is a must. Indiana Jones meets the very best kind of cataclysmic thriller: for thirty-two years, archaeologist Julius Gabriel investigated the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old enigma that predicts the Apocalypse. In Mexico, at the autumn equinox, a serpent’s shadow appears over the northern face of the Temple of Kukulcan, as it has done for a thousand years. But this time is different – it is the beginning of the end… Be afraid. Be very afraid!
Read all of the feature on Book Chick City
When we started out on our blogging adventure back in August, we asked “what you would like to see on our blog?”
Well we have – we think – listened, and have – we hope – been doing an okay job: trying different threads, different approaches, different forms. But we are still learning all of the time (this article has certainly been useful / informed our thoughts.)
Indeed, I think all bloggers are learning all the time, both because blogging is really still such a new way of writing and addressing an audience, and because the online medium is always changing so astonishingly quickly…
For instance, am I the only blogger to have noticed how Twitter has affected blogging? It used to be the case on my own blog that between longish articles I’d post lots of links to interesting literary stuff that I found elsewhere online. Often, I felt compelled to add a small, throwaway contextualising sentence, but I have no need to do that now — I just Tweet the link.
This is both good and bad: less filler on the blog, but less regularity too. My Twitter feed blossoms, whilst my blog awaits another weekend when I may or may not have time to attend to it. As Twitter becomes more ubiquitous, bloggers are having to re-establish what blogging means to them. And, of course, as is the way online, it means different things for different folk.
The rise of Tumblr is interesting here. Billed as ‘the easiest way to blog’ it is a platform that really pushes the look and feel of the blog. I’m tempted to write, pejoratively, ‘to the detriment of the content’, but I don’t think that is quite fair. I do however think Tumblr-style blogs work well in a Twitter-dominated space: Twitter for links, Tumblr for visuals.
But for me this still leaves a gap. Blogs are best when they are either like the foremost newspaper diary pieces, or when they attempt to revive the essay. Newspaper diarists have a voice, and you go to that voice because you trust it, or are amused, entertained or annoyed by it. So, too, with the best blogs and the brightest bloggers.
But the essay, that form invented by Montaigne, to try out a notion, to work it through, to take an idea for a walk, seems, to me, to be the form that the best blogs take. And now that blogs don’t need to be littered with linkbait, I do hope the blog-essay will rise again to occupy a third way between Twitter’s immediacies and Tumblr’s visual delights.
We’re always working hard to make quercusbooks.co.uk as interesting as possible, adding new content and features all of the time. So, at the end of another busy week here at Quercus HQ, I thought I’d take the opportunity to round-up a few of the new items on the site!
First of all we have put our latest catalogue up online. Catalogues tend to be rather a trade tool, previously thought only to be interesting to booksellers and fellow publishers, but increasingly bloggers and other committed readers are asking to see what we have coming up in next season, and the catalogue is still probably the best way to showcase our books in one place.
When I Tweeted out — via twitter.com/quercusbooks — the link to our catalogue last week, I had a really fantastic response to it, so I thought it was certainly worth flagging-up again here. Hopefully, it will whet your appetite for what we all think is our most exciting season yet…
You’ll also notice that we have a new Featured Book banner, which I think makes the site look really smart. It’s a great book we’re featuring too: Philip Kerr is a really special writer, and Field Grey, his latest Bernie Gunther mystery, sees him on stellar form.
Buried a little bit deeper in the site is lots of new rights information about our books. We’ve posted that up there mainly to help other book industry bods, but also as a drive towards more transparency about our business in general. The buying and selling of rights is a fascinating part of the publishing world, and will soon receive a post of its own.
A new thing I’m testing out on the site is Flip Books. If you head over to the detail page for John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead (ace book by the way!) and click on ‘Sample Chapter’ you’ll see the first 24 pages of John’s book in what I think is a really lovely format. Do you like it?
And finally, before I go, I also wanted to mention the nice surge in Friends that we’ve had on our Facebook page of late. Thanks to everyone who has “Liked” us! Doubtless our little flurry has been due to our fab Facebook competition, but I also hope its due to the fact that we regularly post lots of interesting links and stories and images on our Facebook page.
Have a great weekend!
Previously on this blog, I’ve written about the vibrant and ever-expanding book blogosphere and about what readers might be looking for on publishers’ blogs.
I’m on record as saying that most publishers still haven’t fully got to grips with blogs, blogging and the wider blogosphere (although, like us here at Quercus, many of them do seem to have embraced Twitter). For me, for any blog, regularly updated content is the bottom line, and I still think most publishers fail on this basic, entry-level requirement; beyond that, some publisher blogs can sometimes feel like nothing more than glorified catalogues. Notwithstanding these problems, there are some really excellent publisher blogs out there. Here are just a few of my favourites…
I’ve always been a fan of the Snowbooks blog which manages both to showcase some of Snow‘s excellent titles and give you an insight as to how and why a particular title came to be published. This is coupled with a nice personal tone set by Emma and Rob, Snowbooks‘ founders. Their blog has been a little quiet of late, so I’m hoping that that is because they are taking a well-earned summer break!
I find Faber’s blog, The Thought Fox, a little difficult to navigate - their graphic links are beautifully presented, but it isn’t always clear, next to text synopses, that they are links! Regardless, once inside, The Thought Fox has some fantastic content and is certainly one of the best publisher blogs on the web. It has some great articles from their authors (I very much enjoyed reading Alex Preston on poet David Jones) and other contributors (as in a fine piece by Lynne Hatwell on reading Ulysses), as well as podcasts, information about events, and other interesting bookish links.
The Penguin Blog is excellent. Appealing to look at (good use of video and photos), engaging to read (a nice host of contributors helps here) and pretty regularly updated too (although not during August it would seem!) I think any publisher thinking about engaging in the blogosphere could do a lot worse than look at what Penguin are doing…
The International Writing Blog, mostly written by Harvill Secker editor Rebecca Carter, is a newish addition to the publishers’ bit of the blogosphere. Not quite a blog (it’s a weekly essay), it is clever and engaging. OUPblog is the blog of Oxford University Press USA, with regular contributions from the UK’s Kirsty McHugh. A fantastic resource, daily updated, which regular reminds one just what a hugely diverse and exciting publisher OUP is.
And there are many others, of course… But what are your favourite publisher blogs — and why!?
