Read her post, then watch the video.
I’m not adverse to a couple of photoshop smooth-overs, but this is beyond what I’d consider real beauty.
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Jen at Canuck Librarian has an announcement about the Kitchener Public Library’s amateur photography contest.
The KPL has teamed up with the Record to host the contest. Deadline is Jan 31.
Three submissions per photographer.
Two age divisions: youth (18 and under) or adult (19 and over).
Winning entries will be published in an issue of The Record. Winning entries will also be displayed in the Concourse Gallery, lower level of the Main Library throughout April 2007.
The KPL has a number of cool community projects and contests. Do you live in Kitchener? Do you know how cool your library is?
Quote: Toronto-based author Vincent Lam has won the Giller Prize, Canada’s richest and most prestigious literary award, for his book of linked short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures.
Read the CBC story.
I was hoping Rawi Hage would win for De Niro’s Game. I met Rawi in Calgary at Wordfest and heard him read. De Niro’s Game is about two young men during the war in Lebanon.
Want to podcast but don’t want to figure out all the back-end and techie stuff?
Partner up with Mack at Podcastspot.com.
Watch the video: Mack is interviewed on Neo-Fight.tv: a non-geeky, weekly, 10-minute videocast on technology. The hosts are a bit goofy, but I think it works.
Podcastspot.com is from Edmonton.
Julie Wilson has a cool project going on at Seen Reading.
She describes it like this:
Quote:
What Is Seen Reading?
1. I see you reading.
2. I guesstimate where you are in the book.
3. I trip on over to the bookstore and make a note of the text.
4. I let my imagination rip.
5. Readers become celebrities.
6. People get giddy and buy more books.
She’s also getting a lot of attention lately. BookNinja, Quill and Quire, the Anansi newsletter … the list goes on. I am quite happy to promote another book blog. I love them.
Anyone else have a favourite book blog?
Magical Mary’s non-fiction book for children, Prepare To Be Amazed: The Geniuses of Modern Magic, has been shortlisted for the 2007 Silver Birch Award.
Silver Birch is hosted by the Ontario Library Association, and the winners are chosen by readers aged 8 to 12.
I’m a little late on this but it’s still November 1 so if you’re into social change and want to help with a little experiment then read the post on worldchanging.com, then go to Amazon.com and buy their book today.
The plan is to use the internet and word of mouth to get enough people to buy the book today on Amazon to push it up in terms of sales rank. This will get the attention of Amazon, who will likely order more books, and will hit the radar of the indies too.
The plan is a little hit and miss on how the publishing industry actually works, but since I’m a tree-huggy, alternative girl, I want to buy this book, and, therefore, also want to support the enthusiasm of their plan. Since I’m a practical, hard-working bee in the publishing industry, let me explain where the cracks exist.
It is very smart to use word of mouth and generate lots of sales, even for a short period of time. Here’s the but …
1. You want to have lots of sales over a longer period of time, at least a week, not just one day. The perception is wow, they got a whole bunch of people to buy the book on one day. Great. But those sales likely equal the sales they would have gotten over a longer period of time. The pie doesn’t get bigger, the sales just all appear on one day. NOTE: I said this is the perception. Of course, you’ll sell more books because you’ve done an outreach campaign to educate people about your book. But you need to think about how to sustain the sales too.
2. Amazon’s bestseller list is influential to Amazon buyers and the publisher involved. A one-day blitz might get media attention or Amazon’s attention, but you want real long-term impact and, again, a way to sustain sales. Booksellers can return stock so you can do the blitz to get more orders but it doesn’t help you if they return them a month later.
3. Amazon ranks books based on sales over the previous hour. The ranking system is strange. I don’t know why authors keep checking it. It’s an interesting guide but so what if you were #1 for that hour and then #72 for the next hour and then back to #30,000 at the end of the day. That’s not the real data that Amazon looks at, or what a publisher or bookseller considers when making budget decisions.
What does work is the enthusiasm the WorldChanging Team has for the book, for giving readers a purpose and plan, for generating interest and publicity about what they are trying to do and for their book.
You can get attention. My point is simply do it for long-term benefit rather than a short-term media hit.
I recommend reading the comments after the post because there are some clever tips and information from other authors and book people about how to be even more effective than the one-day blitz, and how to be more effective in an indie shop. Read in particular what Maria Headley has to say.
Anyway, I’ve requested this book for my birthday but I’m not going to order from Amazon.com because even though I have a Canadian shipping address, they source US books. I want to support Canadian publishers and distributors so I order from Amazon.ca for hard to find titles and buy from my local shop.
Michael Winter, author of The Big Why and other books I’ve greatly enjoyed reading, has survived falling into an inferno. Speaking of the big why — why? Why was he near an inferno?
According to Quill and Quire, Michael was at the city dump, unloading some roofing from his room, lost his balance and fell into the open air inferno.
Quill reports: ‘Luckily for Winter, the usually deserted dump was not entirely deserted on this particular day. Sitting nearby, according to the author, was a solitary man enjoying some spirits who caught sight of Winter falling into the incinerator. ìHe saw me fall in, got help, opened the back doors [of the incinerator], and I flew out with my arm on fire,î says Winter.’
Quite an X-men story: Winter wrestles Inferno.
Darren pointed me to Kirsten Bole’s website crowstoburnaby.com.
Kirsten has discovered a list of female Vancouver bloggers on a strange site that doesn’t appear to be doing much but looks like there’s some connection to Virsouq.com, which is a website about alternative weddings.
Possibly they are looking for female, 30-something, Vancouver bloggers to blah blah about the upcoming wedding show.
My favourite part of all the strangeness is the one line sentences used to describe our blogs.
Darren is “ok, so he’s a guy, but a high technorati rating”.
SoMisguided is “Another girl, a little tree huggy–prolly thinks of herself as rather alternative”.
What do you think? If you had one sentence to describe this blog, what would you say?
UPDATE: Ok, it’s a little late for you to register. I can’t believe it’s already October 25. Check out the site instead and prepare for the next one.
Want to start a company blog but don’t know how or have received resistance internally? Do your co-workers think blogs are only online diaries kept by basement-dwelling, cat lovers? Tell them it’s not true. Tell them how to run a successful corporate blog. Tell them how to handle negative feedback and criticism as well as how to respond to positive feedback and praise.
If you want to blog for a business but don’t know where to start, attend the 2006 Blog Business Summit in Seattle, October 25-27.
The site offers all sort of great reasons to give your boss about why you should attend.
The full conference is $995, but you can visit SocialSignal.com who are sponsors and they’ll tell you the discount code, then it’s only $895. A true steal of a deal.
I attended the Blog Business Summit several years ago and it really helped me quickly figure out what I needed to do blogwise and why I needed to start right away.