Saturday, June 04, 2005

One More New Book

Yup. This one really is a whole new book (rather than a compilation of old work). Three rather weird stories about three rather weird little girls -- but actually the thing I'm pleased about it is that I finally got a chance to do something that I really like to do -- as blogged several weeks ago -- which is fill a whole book with pictures, rather than be confined to just one miserable postage-stamp-sized chapter-opener. I don't like the cover-art too much (mainly because I wasn't happy with the title a/w -- I didn't do it, and by the time I saw it, it was too late to change)(also I didn't want the artist who produced it to feel discouraged. This is a very unprofessional reason for deciding to go along with a title design. But then ...)

The name of the book is UNPRINCESS!, published by Penguin. If I can manage to scrape together the energy, I'll post the link in the column on the right too (groan, moan, complain). All this wurk ...

6 comments:

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

Dese are White Eyes. Totally cute. Have all flown off into the blue yonder -- no idea who is and who is not still alive.

Welcome back to the Land of Infinite Everything! Why aren't you in Nude Elly yet??

Anonymous said...

Congratulations :).

I was wondering, did you hear about google's print service, where they plan to digitize *all* the books printed, starting with university libraries and then with publishers who agree ? It's great for out-of-print books, for searching and peeking inside books before you buy them. http://print.google.com. I actually checked for Unprincess! (which I think is a great title). Isn't there yet.

Wonder what you think of google's great idea :), as an author?

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

As a reader, I find I rarely turn to the net looking for books to read. Remember when there was a sudden vogue for gadgets like the "E-Book", which could be used to download whole books? Didn't catch on. Sure, it's possible that digital formats will be the books of the future (BIG SIGH OF RELIEF FROM TREES!), but currently there are too many drawbacks to make them attractive. What I'd much rather have is a quick and easy way to convert any book/article of my choice to audio format -- what I really like is being able to LISTEN to the written word.

As an author, my view is ... whatever wurx is GOOD.

Anonymous said...

ahem ahem. disagrement.firstly as a reader myself i constantly scour the net - practically before i check anything but you know what - even after reading a good book - i like to jump into the net & explore. now granted i know the value of leafing through pages absentmindedly in some strange space and am also doing so all the time. but e books r comming. & whereas sometimes it'd be ok - sometimes not...... newspaper refreshes digitaly every morning kind of vision will just allow more trees to be cut for some other shit - you know environmental politics! but however i too often ponder of the conversion of the writen word to the audible one - pod casting kind of style. and its comming. er, come. came. but note - the inputting of writen words vs audible words are in different brain regions - meaning different processes will or could work on them? the same info fed to you in 2 different formats - elicits different responses from you. ha! reality! gt

Anonymous said...

I guess searching inside a book is probably more interesting for reference kind of books than for fiction. Some of these books cost so much and contain so little :(, that it is great to be able to leaf through them a bit before buying them.

With fiction, I think audio-books might be the way to go, although I do agree with anonymous' posting that the heard word has a different colour differently from the written one.

Personally, I hate the monotone text-to-speech thats available on my machine, and its the product of decades of speech synthesis research. Maybe if the author read the book out ? Maybe not..

Do you 'read' well, Marginalien ?

Manjula Padmanabhan said...

Do I read well? Hmmm ... I like to read out loud. And I believe that in order for a piece of writing to be certified "good", it ought to be easy to read aloud. I often read my own work out loud to myself, as a spot-check system -- it's not a bad way to proof-read as well.

Yes, it's true that the heard-word is different to the spoken-word -- and certainly the terrible monotony of a machine's "voice" would not be worth listening to. But I LOVE hearing novels read out with "expression" -- am currently listening to SONS AND LOVERS (I adore Lawrence) and the person reading the text can do all the accents -- it's fantastic. It's like mainlining a movie direct to the brain -- I listen with headphones on the "stepper", so there are no distractions.