Short Pause for a Good Cause

Expect a hiatus for this blog, beginning soon and continuing through most of the month of November. There may be a quick post on the run now and then, and the blog list to the right should keep you current on day-to-day changes in the world of e-publishing and beyond. (And all the other links should continue to work about as well as they have in the past.) But I'll be back on a more regular schedule after Thanksgiving.

Autobiography of Mark Twain

Some of the readers' comments about the new edition (the first complete and unexpurgated edition) of Mark Twain's autobiography  are reminding me of one of the things I love most about Kindle: an easy-on-the-eyes Georgia (I believe) font that I can adjust to my liking. More than one reader has set out to read this first volume (743 pages; hardback list price $34.95, Amazon hardback price $18.87, Kindle price $9.99) in print form and been turned away by the minuscule typeface. (Check out the 'click to look inside' samples at the Amazon product page for the print edition; I'm impressed that anyone can read 743 pages of it.) It's nice to save close to half the price of the book (or more, depending on how you calculate), but it's even nicer to have the right typeface. More another day about this new edition of the autobiography, the first volume (of three) of which I've just downloaded. For now I'll just say that I'm impressed that the book is selling so well at Amazon, where it's #10 in sales rank as of this writing.

The Great Indie Book Contest

Win a free Kindle (complete with a $50.00 gift card) just by buying a book by an independent author (ahem, ahem) and forwarding the receipt in the month of November to Coelacanthpress@yahoo.com. Too good to be true? Check it out, get the official rules, enter and... win big!

Monetization, Schmonetization: From Jascha to Jascha

Most of the links on this page will bring me a small commission, and sometimes a royalty to boot, if you take them and end up making a purchase. The exception to the commission principle is any link to iTunes, including the iBookstore: those referrals are freebies, unless you end up buying A Kiss Before You Leave Me itself there. But, instead of sending you where you'd pay full price for my favorite set of recordings by my favorite performer, I'm recommending iTunes (where the price is so much better, at least until they come to their senses: US$9.99 for the equivalent of a 6-CD set) as a purveyor of the Icon collection of the best of Jascha Heifetz on EMI. Yes, it's all in mono, and yes, the average recording here is almost 75 years old. But, if you haven't sampled them, at least do that much. And this may help: a more readable list of the contents of the set, naming (composers') names and such.

[Added 11 August 2011: Full disclosure: I am now a member of the iTunes/iBooks/... affiliates program. New links to iTunes products will reflect this, and some older links will be updated. Otherwise, advertising policies remain unchanged. There are worse things than a little monetization.]

'Time Value' versus 'Tristram Shandy'

Most of the time the Jascha who writes Jascha Writes is content to remind you less of his alter ego, the more tightly wound (or tightly winding) James Hulbert who wrote A Kiss Before You Leave Me, than of Tristram Shandy, who in Laurence Sterne's masterpiece (1759ff.) sets out to tell the story of his life, gets caught up in anticipation of his own conception and (for hundreds of pages) may or may not get around to being born: the character as (pure) narrator, almost, and surely the poster child for dilatory discourse. Sound familiar? If you started delaying your next coffee break when I promised you a friend's recipe for skinny cappuccino last month, you're well and truly weaned now; and if you started wondering a couple of days later why I cited Marguerite Duras' North China Lover rather than her earlier (and far better-known) book The Lover, well, you're still wondering. But that's all right. All in good time. Most of the time. But if I don't post something today about Nick Spalding's Life… With No Breaks, you risk missing out on big savings on it at Amazon.com, where it usually costs $2.99 but until the end of October is reduced to 89 cents, which is a steal even for a Kindle book. Nick Spalding is a high-profile UK indie humor author and blogger; Life… With No Breaks is currently the number 4 humor bestseller on the Amazon.co.uk Kindle list and deserves more readers internationally. (It even contains a glossary of UK-specific vocabulary. Readers in the UK, by the way, can get a deal, too: for a few more days, Life… is just 69p at Amazon.co.uk.) Now, is it an accident that I'm talking about Sterne and Spalding practically in the same breath? Not necessarily.