From Paid Content:

In a commencement address to business students at Columbia University, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson hailed the company’s digital subscription strategy and dismissed skeptics who say media outlets can’t reinvent themselves.

“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and  most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing.”

Thompson added that media pundits predicted that the Times’ subscription model, which is based on a so-called “metered paywall,” would be a disaster when it launched in 2011. Since then, he noted, it’s become a standard for the rest of the newspaper industry.

Link to the rest at Paid Content

From MediaShift E-books:

MediaShift and PBS are releasing a new line of e-books (and print-on-demand books) based on content from the MediaShift network of sites. We aim to keep our books simple, helpful and timely. The content is based on insightful stories from MediaShift, updated and expanded for reading on your favorite e-reader or tablet device.

. . . .

Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV

. . . .

How to Self-Publish Your Book

by Carla King

Did you ever consider self-publishing your own book but were daunted by the complex process of actually doing it? Self-published author and expert Carla King gives a simple step-by-step guide to self-publishing your book as an e-book or print book. Plot your success by choosing the reputable tools and services recommended here, along with techniques that will help your book succeed in the market that you choose.

Link to the rest at MediaShift E-books and thanks to Julia for the tip.

From the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day:

mysterium tremendum, n.

A great or profound mystery, esp. the mystery of God or of existence; the overwhelming awe felt by a person contemplating such a mystery.

Link to the rest at Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day

From MediaShift:

The Toronto Star is testing the e-book market with a dedicated subscription model. Launched in November 2012, Star Dispatches is the brainchild of the Toronto Star’s marketing department. The Star already has more than 20 titles of long-form journalism to choose from — ranging from investigations, in-depth health reporting, special reports on events and more. It’s labeled as “a new perspective on a news story.” E-books are produced every week for subscribers at the price of $1 each.

. . . .

Sandy MacLeod, vice president of consumer marketing at the Toronto Star, said their market research showed it took an “incredible amount of marketing” to produce single-copy e-books that generally sold 100 to 300 downloads at $4.99 each. The math just didn’t work out to make a viable business case, he said.

“So we had the thought that, what if we turned this model around a little bit and turned it into a subscription model?”

. . . .

Subscribers are charged $4.33 plus taxes monthly and receive an email each week with a link to download the newest e-book.

. . . .

Any reporter in the Toronto Star’s newsroom can pitch to pen an e-book. While it has been mostly feature writers who have had books produced so far, there are titles coming from all genres soon, said Alison Uncles, editorial director for Star Dispatches. Reporters can work on the e-book while also managing their regular duties, but in some cases, up to three weeks of their schedules have been cleared for working exclusively on the e-book.

Link to the rest at MediaShift

From The Financial Times:

The UK coalition government, desperate to address sluggish growth, is promoting open access publishing, which aims to make peer-refereed journal articles available online at no cost to readers.

The idea is laudable and the principle is supported by academia. But as with all great ideas, the devil is in the detail.

. . . .

Referring to the business and management fields, it is the government’s view that the current arrangements, where libraries pay a subscription fee to journal publishers in return for immediate access to articles by their readers, impede working managers’ access to research findings, thus depriving UK plc from garnering full value from universities’ research.

. . . .

Peer-refereed articles are written for readers with an appropriate degree of technical knowledge, making them inaccessible to the great majority of practising managers. Consequently, peer-refereed journals are unlikely to be found on the bookshelf of executives.

. . . .

Value for money is another consideration – why pay for the funded research a second time through highly priced journal subscriptions? In the case of stem sciences a great deal of research is funded through the public purse. But in the case of business schools, the bulk of research is funded from teaching income and industry donations, hence, the dual payment argument is less relevant. Furthermore, the proposed gold OA simply shifts the burden of payment from the reader to the researcher. Under gold OA, researchers have to find the money from their publicly funded research grants or universities have to find the money to pay for a specific article to be openly available.

Link to the rest at The Financial Times (link may expire)

PG is not an expert on academic business publications, but observes that the widely-known but seldom acknowledged secret of law reviews (the academic publications of American law schools) is that almost no one reads them, particularly practicing lawyers. The reason is that 99% of the articles are terribly written and of possible interest only to a handful of law professors.

He once saw circulation data for a number of well-known law reviews and they were shockingly small.

However, to PG’s knowledge, government funding is not involved in the creation of law review articles as it evidently is for academic business research articles in the UK.

This article appears to be primarily concerned with preserving and prolonging the incestuous, highly-profitable business of publishing specialized professional journals.

From a review of “Does Spelling Matter?” in The Guardian:

The title of Simon Horobin’s book poses what, at first blush, seems a banal question. I imagine most readers would answer “Yes, spelling matters”, perhaps adding “though not as much as some believe”. Yet if the question of how words should be written is not uppermost in many people’s minds, its nagging everyday presence is nonetheless evident in the existence of spell-checkers and school spelling tests, as well as in mnemonics designed to help us with spellings, such as the venerable “i before e except after c”.

Phenomena of this kind betray an unease about the irregularities of spelling, and English spelling (Horobin’s focus, though he does say a bit about spelling reform in French, Dutch and German) has long drawn complaint. This has ranged from the smooth-tongued – Jerome K Jerome’s line that English spelling “would seem to have been designed chiefly as a disguise to pronunciation” – to the splenetic, such as the view of the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka that it is “an insult to human intelligence”.

. . . .

[H]e quotes the 18th-century diplomat Lord Chesterfield, who described secure orthography as “absolutely necessary” and recalled “a man of quality, who never recovered [from] the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w”. In the eyes of Chesterfield, who advocated hyper-attentiveness in all social situations, dropping a w was as bad as dropping a baby.

Chesterfield’s attitude was only an embellished version of common prejudice. A good command of spelling is generally regarded as evidence of a tidy mind. Meanwhile people who are poor at spelling are treated as if they are stupid, whatever the evidence to the contrary, and are also suspected of not knowing they can’t spell. Horobin notices that iffy spelling  is “often viewed as a reflection of a person’s …morality”.

. . . .

While Horobin is a sane, sensible guide to such matters, he doesn’t probe the more philosophical aspects of the question he asks in the book’s title. Why do we feel we need an invariant system of orthography? The standard response is that consistency equals clarity; inconsistencies are distracting.

A different answer, of a kind that wouldn’t have been given 50 years ago, is that invariant spelling makes it easier to search through data that has been stored electronically. If I want to look for every instance of the word “change” in the online text of a speech by Barack Obama, it helps if “change” isn’t spelled five different ways.

The defenders of rigidly invariant spelling assert that it is a repository of authority and expressive elegance. The British linguist Mark Sebba has written acutely on this subject and is worth quoting at length: “We spell because orthography is part of the elaboration of our culture; because there is a natural tendency for all human activities which involve choice to take on social meaning; because literacy itself is embedded in and important to our culture and social actions, and orthography is essentially bound up with literacy.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

PG remembers reading that prior to the creation and publication of the first American dictionary by Noah Webster in 1828 and its widespread dissemination, the way a writer spelled words was as much a part of his/her writing style as the selection of words was.

You can search that original 1828 dictionary here. Webster was first and foremost a Christian minister as exemplified in the 22 entries for heaven.

From developmental editor Alan Rinzler:

Writing a memoir is one of the most stimulating but difficult literary challenges an author can undertake. Nevertheless, it’s a hugely popular genre. Five of the top ten hardcover nonfiction books on the NY Times bestseller list this week are memoirs.

Aspiring memoir writers can find help in books and by searching online, but there’s nothing like a live workshop with a master teacher.

. . . .

What is a memoir and how is it different from a personal journal or novel based on your life?

A memoir is the intersection between memory and story. Both sides of that equation—memory and story–are equally vital.  When you decide to write a memoir, you’re asserting that the story is already there. It’s in the facts. Your mission is to discover the story, not create it. The story is not something you add but something you reveal through the facts. Making your story visible becomes a process of discovering what your story really is.

A novel, in contrast, may be based on real-life events, but story trumps all.   As a writer, you are not only free to alter or invent whatever is necessary to make the story better, but you must: that’s your job. If something in a novel doesn’t work, the novelist can never fall back on the plea that “But that really happened.”

A journal is a direct transliteration of experience into words. It’s essentially a conversation with yourself whereas a memoir is—inherently—a conversation with others. When you undertake to write one of these, you’ve already decided to make your private story visible to people who don’t even know you.

. . . .

How can you create drama, suspense and humor in a memoir?

As you produce the data dump of memories, you’ll want at some point to start on the “actual” memoir. Now your quest is to organize the shape buried in the detritus of events and details you’ve recorded. What is the heart of it? Where does it begin? What is the dramatic rise?  How does it resolve? What is it all about? There are countless ways to go about all this. You can make an outline and start writing from it. You can start writing without an outline, just let your instincts guide you. You can take that shapeless draft you’ve produced, all those pages of babble, and find the nuggets in there (there’ll be some; never fear), extract them, set them in order, and see what you’ve got.

Whatever your method, your quest now is to make the buried pattern visible, get the story-like elements to emerge. At which you’re in a zone much like the one inhabited by novelists:  you’re using all those tools to build drama, suspense, humor—it’s all about what you juxtapose, how you build, and what you build toward.

Link to the rest at The Book Deal

If you’re sold, here’s where to get it –  The Drunken Botanist

From Publishers Weekly:

Book-length nonfiction is what I do, and my advice is necessarily tailored to writers who want to do pretty much the same thing.

1. Write about things that really interest you. Notwithstanding what my pal Mike claims was his spooky prescience, I never dreamed I’d be a literary biographer. I’m not an academic; I’m just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they’ve ever written and find out why they wrote it. Which brings me to how this miracle came to pass. “Blake, fiction isn’t working out for you,” my would-be literary agent told me several years ago. “All your success”–such as it was–”has been with nonfiction. Look: write me a nonfiction book proposal about something that really interests you right now, and I’ll try to sell it.”

. . . .

3. Action is character. This is what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes while working on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, and he wrote it in caps: ACTION IS CHARACTER. If one of our greatest narrative writers had to remind himself of that right up to the end, it must be pretty important. It is. Human beings are far too complex to explain away in so many words: imperious; timid; pompous; vain; bombastic–and so on. “Imperious”? “Bombastic”? What do those words mean exactly? In Lillian Ross’s note-perfect profile of Hemingway, she shows us the great man in a narrow elevator at Abercrombie & Fitch. Aware that a woman is giving him the stink eye, he suddenly erupts: “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!” Just that: no elaboration on Ross’s part; only what happened. (The woman looked at the elevator floor after that.) So was Hemingway a “bombastic” man? Well, yes, sometimes, but consider all the other implicit nuances of his behavior: sick of his own fame; moderately aware, too, maybe, that the woman isn’t staring at him because he’s Hemingway but rather because he’s a big sweaty guy with a three-day beard who stinks of booze and just stinks period (fun fact: he rarely bathed); and finally a man who was getting rather tired of living in general. Let us see and hear how your characters behave, and let us (for the most part) draw our own conclusions. It’s more fun that way, and it does more justice to the paradox of human nature.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Eric for the tip.

Additional fact for younger visitors: When Hemingway was riding that elevator, Abercrombie & Fitch was a high-end outfitter for outdoor activities of the rich and famous. You could buy everything you needed for a three-month African safari, from custom-tailored hunting clothes to custom-fitted big-game rifles at Abercrombie & Fitch.

If Hemingway could see what Abercrombie & Fitch has become, he would erupt with much more colorful language than he did on that elevator.

From Kickstarter:

Have you ever dreamed of what Bilbo’s pork pies actually taste like?  Does Sam’s coney stew sound wonderful?  Do you share Gollum’s affection for sushi-grade fish?  If Balrogs had wings, what would they taste like?

If you, like me, have ever spent long afternoons wondering about these important questions, this is the project for you.  With the help of my friend, Corey Olsen (also known as the Tolkien Professor, and author of the recently-released book “Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”“), I aim to write a 30-recipe book, which I will release in both print and free online versions, with recipes, pictures, cooking tips and tricks, and witty commentary from both Corey and myself on where these recipes originate from in Tolkien’s works.  The online version will be available for anyone, anywhere – not just my backers but free for anyone to use!

. . . .

These recipes will cover different parts of Tolkien’s world – light and delicate Elvish recipes like lembas bread, stout roasted Dwarven fare, hearty Hobbit pies and stews, as well as a few oddball recipes like Balrog Wings.

Link to the rest at Kickstarter