Dreaming About Books
I have a recurring dream about books. It takes three forms. In the first, I am walking up a sidewalk towards a large house on the bank of...
History Grinds to a Halt
The notice above is what greets you on the website of one of the world’s largest repositories of historical documents, the Library of...
It's All Ed's Fault
Most times when I think of Ed McNally, I think of him warmly, although I did curse him last spring when the pandemic hit and all the...
Amazon is the Worst - Part II
In our last article, we discussed the impact Amazon has on the sales of physical books and what it could mean for future bookselling. But...
Amazon is the Worst
There are a hundred directions we could go with that headline, and there are volumes to be written on Amazon’s impact on retail markets,...
Why Writers are Poor (2.0)
We’ve noted before the dismal earnings of Canadian authors: $9,380 in 2017, down from $12,879 in 2014. Things appear to be almost as bad...
Crime Writing in Bars
My career as a crime reporter was over in a flash. In the late 1980s, I wrote a long story for Saturday Night magazine about the...
Why Authors are Poor
It was possible to make a decent living in newspapers and magazines before the internet. Then publishers made the fatal mistake of giving...
Bestsellers: What it Takes
Who doesn’t want to be a bestselling author? Now you can do it, too. It’s easy. Publish a book on Amazon, give a couple of hundred...
What is a Blurb?
This week, blurbs. The scourge of blurbs. The supposed necessity of blurbs. Let’s define our terms: You need spend only half an hour in a...
