The YouCaxton Literary Lecture for July 2014 was given by Victoria Denning at the Pengwern Bookshop in Shrewsbury on Tuesday 22 July. Victoria has been a celebrant presiding over weddings, funerals and baby namings for the past eight years and is associated with the British Humanist Association. She described her work and the multitude of different people that require her services to a curious and entertained audience.
Bob Fowke talked on the history of publishing and of self-publishing ‘from the Ten Commandments to Kindle E-Books’ in Shrewsbury Library on Wednesday 9 July. He covered many centuries and several countries and ranged through subjects as diverse as the invention of printers’ ink and the dismemberment of John Milton’s body, all to a rapt audience.
For some time we’ve been advising writers to publish their e-books via Amazon Kindle Select. Our argument has been that Kindle dominate the e-book market both in the UK and the USA, possibly accounting for up to 80% of it. By signing on to Kindle Select, writers give exclusive e-book distribution rights to Kindle for periods of ninety days, renewable. In return writers receive a royalty of 70% of the retail price of their e-books provided the price is set to a minimum of $2.99 or equivalent. This compares very favourably with a more standard level of royalty of 30%.
There are serious dangers in the semi-monopolistic position that Amazon has acquired and we recognise this, but writers, especially self-published writers, have to look after themselves and we feel that is our duty to point out the advantages of a 70% royalty and the advantage of receiving one sales report – which much easier to manage than collating sales reports from multiple e-book platforms. The Independent Author blog has a good balanced piece about the does and don’ts of Kindle Select.
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'Had we lived, I would have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.' For one of the survivors these words would have had particular poignancy. Apsley Cherry-Garrard did live on but he had to take with him the fear that he could have saved Scott and his two closest friends. The novel fast forwards to the late 1950s and to Cherry's friendship with a boy who shares his love of the English countryside and a thirst for adventure. This is a wide-sweeping novel that takes the reader on a journey from an imperial battlefield to the challenges of Antarctica and forward to a new era. |
and Kindle e-books |
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Richard Jopling’s enthusiasm for Captain Scott’s expedition was fired by reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in The World. This led him to undertake over ten year’s research into the heroic age of Antarctic exploration and made him determined to capture the extraordinary spirit and times of those explorers in a novel. |
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An excellent introduction to a much-changed town. Chris Upton’s A History of Wolverhampton makes an invaluable contribution to the story of Wolverhampton’s evolution from the rural Saxon settlement of Wulfruna through to a power house of the industrial Revolution and beyond.
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Available from YouCaxton £6.00 (+ £2 postage) Number of copies: Available from Amazon |
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With all the talk of Trojan Horse plots in Birmingham schools, we thought it might be useful to look back at the original. This edition was published by Penguin Classics in 1998 with Robert Fagles (Translator) and Bernard Knox (Introduction).
Virtual Women: Ladyboys, Changing Sex in Thailand by Anne Beaumont is due for publication shortly and we’re very pleased to add this intelligent and thoughtful book to the YouCaxton list.
Why do some people reject the sexed bodies they were born into and transform themselves into women? Are the brains of men and women different? Is gender identity fixed at birth, is it learned behaviour or is it socially constructed? In this scholarly work, social anthropologist Anne Beaumont shows us that the answers to these prickly questions lie as much in the sphere of cultural difference as in that of science, and she constructs a new framework for gendering the body – one that centres solely on the individual.
Virtual Women takes us from England to Thailand, to the twilight zone of the bars where genders blend into a human hybrid – the Ladyboys (Kathoey) of Thailand who live betwixt and between in sex. Drawing on extensive empirical research and on interviews with Kathoey and with British transsexual women and with the surgeons and psychiatrists involved, Virtual Women brings a new understanding of the transgender phenomenon.