SF/F/H RSS News Digest via Alltop.com

Here's a website that genre bloggers, readers and fans might want to check out (which I don't think I've seen mentioned elsewhere just yet).

In a mediabistro.com interview posted yesterday, tech-evangelist turned venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki talks about his latest project: an RSS aggregator by the name of Alltop.com that aims to provide a news-gathering service for anyone who doesn't have the time, inclination or know-how to set up their own, bespoke feed-list via a service such as Google Reader.

Alltop.com gathers RSS feeds into themed sections, the aim being to provide as wide an overview of the activity within a particular area of interest as possible, rather than a topic-specific drill-down. Kawasaki explains:

"Think of it as a digital magazine rack. If you went to a newsstand you would see racks of sports magazines, celebrity magazines, car magazines, wine magazines, and food magazines; we have our own virtual rack where we aggregate the Web sites and blogs of the top feeds for each of those topics, and we show the latest five headlines from each source."

I checked out Alltop's genre coverage and sure enough, there's a well-developed and densely-populated section that focuses on science fiction / fantasy / general genre blogs at sff.alltop.com as well as more general books- and writing-related sections (books.alltop.com and writing.alltop.com) that may also be of interest.

Speaking as someone who's spent a fair fair amount of time over the last eight months compiling my RSS-subscription list of genre bloggers, to help me track online coverage of Orbit authors and titles, I really could have done with finding this site round about last May...

January 8, 2009 | Filed Under Online Finds | Leave a Comment

A short pause to reflect and reorganise

With the launch of the long-awaited PS Publishing webstore this week I ought to be able to find a bit more room in my head for other things (although there's still plenty of work to be done for PS and I certainly won't be slacking). As a result, I think the time has come for me to put a long-pondered blog reorganisation into effect.

Here's the plan:

The Genre Files from now on will be all about the books [resists the urge to add 'baby!'] and the graphic novels, and the authors, and anything interesting that that's going on in the world of genre publishing and book marketing that particularly grabs my attention. I might even hold forth on the subject of effective book marketing from time to time and, who knows, maybe even post a link round-up or two... oh, and what do you think of the new decor? Stylish, no?

www.DarrenTurpin.co.uk is my recently set-up (but not yet fully functional) work-related blogfolio (if I can get away with that) and that's where I'll be talking about the work I'm doing with all my clients: authors, publishers, SMEs, the lot. I'll be adding a number of short case studies as I go along as well.

UK SF Book News is just over a year old and is ticking over nicely at the moment, with what seems to be a pretty good mix of shorter news-bite length announcement / press release / what's on items interspersed with longer mini-interview and featurette pieces, and I hope the situation will be able to continue pretty much indefinitely.

And finally... at some point I'll be setting up a new blog at www.darrenturpin.me.uk (unless I can think of a more interesting - and available - domain name in the meantime; one that isn't quite so narcissistic and navel-gazey, perhaps). But anyhow, that's where I'll be talking about all the other stuff I find interesting: music, food & drink, football, photography, art, gardening, nature... ah, hell, whatever I feel like. I'll be thinking of it more as an aide-memoire and extended memo-to-self than any sort of broadcast piece and if nobody else ends up reading it then I really won't mind.

So that's the plan. Still very busy at the moment though, and with a week's holiday coming up fast, so it might be a month or so before all the pieces are in place. But so be it.

October 17, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 2 Comments

I am Jack's complete lack of blog time…

A wise blogger once ~~said~~ blogged words to the effect of:

1) Don't blog if you're too insanely busy to blog (which I most definitely am - head down on my major project, making good progress though...)

2) Don't blog if you're feeling blue (which I'm not, I'm actually really enjoying being this busy, as odd as that might sound... but it's still sage advice)

3) Don't blog if you haven't got anything worthwhile to say (but I have, I've got loads to stuff to talk about - new arrivals, recommended reading, recommended tunes, links to here, there and everywhere - just no time to talk in... no time dammit!)

Back as soon as I can be...

May 2, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 4 Comments

Smart thinking: Hugh MacLeod on Blogging

Hugh MacLeod is another smart cookie, and a bookmark for his gapingvoid blog, which I've been reading for about two years now, is one of only a very few that I keep in a folder marked 'READ EVERY DAY'.

© Hugh MacLeod He started out putting his cartoons online, then started talking about marketing, selling and so forth (he used to be in advertising) and he's been a pro-blogger and marketing-thinker for the past few years now.

In that relatively short space of time he's notched up a number of blog-related successes, such as turning Stormhoek Wines into an internationally-recognised brand (well, certainly among the geek-classes anyhow) and doing astounding things to the turnover of a Saville Row tailor via English Cut.

But perhaps most impressively - unless I've gotten hold of entirely the wrong end of the stick, which I admit is entrely possible - he played a deeply significant part in creating the pre-Xmas Thresher's wine voucher frenzy that enabled them to almost completely sell out of wine and champagne across their chain (thereby massively reducing their over-stock levels) on the back of an offer that was actually only 7% more than their standard '3 for 2' discount, and gaining massive national media coverage into the bargain. And all at practically zero cost, bandwidth charges notwithstanding.

And he still draws his cartoons as well... they're often extremely funny, very dry, very well observed.

So again, when someone like Hugh posts a collection of his distilled random thoughts on blogging then it's worth tuning in and paying attention.

I reckon anyone out there who is more than slightly serious about using their blog to do more than just think out loud online should pay particular attention to points #1, #3, #6, #18, #19 and #33. But read the rest as well, of course. Food for thought.

January 16, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | Leave a Comment

Smart thinking: Cory Doctorow on author websites

Cory Doctorow: One smart cookie Cory Doctorow is one general, all-round smart cookie.

Years ago, long before the whole blogging-thing had achieved anything like the reach or mainstream acceptance it has today, he set up boingboing, which for a long, long time was reckoned to be the most popular blog on the planet (according to Technorati's Top 100) and is still going strong at number #3.

In 2003, he released the entire text of his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [Amazon] as a free pdf download, under a Creative Commons license. Many thousands of copies were downloaded (and presumably read) completely for free, and yet the dead-tree edition of the book still sold (in Cory's own words) "fantastically well", as Charlie Stross also found when he repeated the experiment with one of his own titles a year or so later.

These days, as well as writing for boingboing and blogging at his own Craphound.com site, Doctorow writes novels, short fiction, columns, articles, you name it. So when he pens something on D.I.Y. author websites, then it rather behoves a freelance author-website-builder like me to sit up and pay attention.

At first glance, it doesn't appear to bode too well for yours truly. The gist of the article rather seems to be that authors should take their online presence into their own hands, dispense with the services of their webmaster / webmistress / webAriel - particularly in terms of updating the site by means of laborious HTML and CSS editing with manual FTP upload - and go it alone by means of one of many freely available, open source CMS systems out there, such as Wordpress, Drupal et. al.

But even though that rather sounds like it might be doing me out of a hard-earned crust, I (almost) completely agree with him. In fact it's methodology that I'm actively encouraging as many of my own author clients as possible to adopt. I've already helped set up blog-based 'news and views' pages for Tim Lebbon, Brian Ruckley, Mark Morris, Michael Marshall Smith and James Barclay, as well as full-blown, theme-blogs for Mark Chadbourn and James Barclay (again) at Jack of Ravens and Barclay Talks Sport, respectively.

Why? Because it's a damn good idea. Because if my clients have something to say to their fans and readers then of course they should be able to say it immediately. The shouldn't have to wait around for a few hours, or a day or two (hopefully not much longer these days) for a window to appear in my update-schedule.

And quite frankly, from my point of view, the less time I have spend on those laborious HTML / FTP uploads then the more time I can spend working with my clients on far more interesting online activity: blogging for a start, but also podcasting, social-networking, search engine keyword-advertising, word-of-mouth campaigns, general marketing stuff... everything I'm familiar with, or have read about, and am just itching to put into practice. So yeah, more power to the author-bloggers, says I!

Although I do have one small caveat: there is a flip-side to the D.I.Y. approach. What if the author in question isn't particularly keen, or confident enough, or simply hasn't enough time to learn the necessary basics of HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, RSS, SEO, content tagging and so forth? Not to mention graphic design and the rudiments of professional-standard layout. And then there's the accessibility issue, and the European directive on e-communication... I mean, there's a fair bit more to it than updating your news page, if you want to do it properly.

After all, the principle activity of a writer is surely to write, no? So any time spent away from that activity really ought to be justifiable. You ought to be able to prove (to yourself at least) that it's of greater added value to your career than if you'd actually got on with writing something new instead.

In which case, it seems to me that the smart / busy / technologically shy author will still want to employ their friendly, neighbourhood webguy / webgal to sort out all the aforementioned fiddly stuff - as well as things like domain name registration, website hosting, email accounts, Amazon affiliate links, mailing lists etc. - while they get on with the actual business of creating new content, whether it's for their forthcoming blog entries, their novels, their magazine columns... whatever it might be.

So yes, I wholeheartedly agree that there are definite advantages to taking control of key elements of your own online presence. But there are also advantages in getting a professional to help you through the tricky bits and get everything running smoothly before you dive on in.

Now, Cory does drop heavy hints in that sort of direction in his article. At one point he says: "It's the kind of thing you can pay someone a couple hundred dollars to do, and it's a near-sure thing that your current webmaster is already maintaining one or more blogs and is familiar with the basics," so fair's fair. And I think that what he also means by that is that you certainly shouldn't have to pay top-whack multimedia agency rates for the job. Not when a competent freelancer will be able to sort everything out for you for a fraction of the price.

And I'd like to point out one more distinct advantage to the employ-a-freelancer route that Cory doesn't really touch on: namely the ongoing benefits that you should be able to derive from being client-affiliated with a professional; particularly in terms of the propagation and implementation of new ideas.

So for instance, let's say a member of my (currently 16-strong but hopefully soon-to-be-expanding) client group comes up with an idea for a new website feature that they'd like to implement. If it's a good idea, a generic technique or tool that my other clients would also benefit from, then it's very easy for me to pass that idea on to the rest of the group. I can then perform the necessary installation on everyone's site, or set up the relevant third-party software across the board, and everyone wins.

And I do try to make a point of keeping my ear as close to the technology news ground as I reasonably can. So again, if I hear that there's a new Google tool about to become available, or a new social networking phenomena about to break, or just a new way of doing things online that I think my clients can benefit from, then I'm in a good position to let them all know what's what. Everyone wins again.

Whereas if the individual author in question doesn't have the time to read the same marketing and tech blogs, or isn't subscribed to the same mailing lists that I am (or doesn't happen to write for one of the world's most popular technology / tech-lifestyle blogs and so get to hear about everything anyhow) then they might never get to hear of a particularly useful concept or technique.

So, this afternoon I've sent an email to all my author clients to point them in the direction of Cory's article and tell them that, yes, he's quite right: they can - and should - update their own websites as frequently as they like using a blog-based platform, and that -furthermore, I'd be delighted to help them set that up, as I've already done for the aforementioned author-bloggers on my books.

And hey [utterly blatant self-plug warning: look away now if this sort of thing offends you, if it's not too late already...], if there are any authors, writers, artists or independent publishers reading this post who think they might be interested in doing something similar, then please do feel free to drop me a line. Tell me what sort of thing you have in mind, and I'll be happy to let you know if I can help out, and how much I usually charge...

January 12, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | Leave a Comment