8 Jun 2011
About an hour ago I typed: ‘when is a Vanity Press NOT a Vanity Press...?’ at the top of this page.
60 minutes on I still haven’t come up with anything funny. And in fact I’ve rather lost track of what I was asking myself in the first place. I ...
20 May 2011
On a recent trip back from Europe I put down the book I was reading (I was in an Elmore Leonard phase) and allowed my gaze to wander around the cabin of my British Airways 767 in a vain attempt to take my mind away from the turbulence, which always ...
26 Apr 2011
The publication of Tom Masters’s Silence by the Winchester University Press (March 2011) felt like the culmination of a decade-long struggle for those of us within the university who work in the area of creative writing. When we first began to teach...
16 Mar 2011
I was at an overseas conference recently wherein most of the delegates were from overseas universities, from pretty much all continents of the world. As is the way of these things, informal conversations spring up over coffee, lunch, in the hotel lo...
24 Feb 2011
Henry James was perhaps the first writer to provide detailed critical introductions to his major fictional works. He reviewed each work from the point of initial conception, through its writerly development, to the point of conclusion and publicatio...
11 Feb 2011
When surveyed students regularly report enthusiasm for being taught by practising researcher-academics. They like the fact that their tutors are engaged in research in the areas they are teaching, and that they share their experience and knowledge...
22 Dec 2010
There are many dilemmas facing academics in the UK in relation to the tricky question of how to maximise publishing output and esteem within the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The orthodoxy of hard-copy hard-bound publication f...
25 Nov 2010
I was sitting watching the latest Harry Potter movie (how much stalling can they get away with before they actually get on with the story?) and it got me thinking about what I would have done if (as a Commissioning Editor) J.K. Rowling’s original ma...
4 Nov 2010
For Oscar Wilde the publisher was little more than a ‘useful middle-man.’ No publisher, he said, ‘should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes’ because in doing so he tries to usurp the reader in deciding meaning.
It is, perhap...