Flametoad

Book lovers rejoice! You have the opportunity to influence the world of literature. Who hasn’t found themselves hating a book that the critics rave about? Clearly you have superior taste in literature, right? Now’s your chance to demonstrate it. The Preditors & Editors Readers’ Choice polls are open for voting, and there are two important [...]

Old school book publishers have a love-hate relationship with ebooks. On one hand, it costs less to produce an e-book than it does a paper book (although not THAT much less). On the other hand, even with ebook sales experiencing impressive double-digit growth this year, profits from those sales account for a small percentage of [...]

For the whole time the Flametoad blog was on hiatus, I kept squirreling away links use as blog fodder. The theme for this week’s linkdump is publishing and e-books. Profit & Loss – If you’ve ever wondered why books cost as much as they do, you’ll want to check out this post on Marion Gropen’s [...]

And now, for the opposing viewpoint. What made it all seem worthwhile was the book, the physical item, a kind of sacred and appropriate temple for the text contained within. Had I been told from youth that my literary destination would be some 7 inch plastic gizmo containing my texts shuffling alongside thousands of other [...]

In the Halloween-themed episode of Castle that just aired, the script writers floated the theory that people who showed a deep fascination with death usually had a triggering, traumatizing event in their past. Since the tv show is about a murder mystery writer, the obvious question was what caused him to be drawn to death. We viewers may not know that [...]