Quick Updates for 2009-12-07
Resources, Industry News, and news on members Dave Creek, Stacia Kane, and Terry Bisson
Resources, Industry News, and news on members Dave Creek, Stacia Kane, and Terry Bisson
Kevin Weiss, President and CEO of Author Solutions Inc., has issued a video statement addressing the responses by RWA, SFWA, MWA, and NINC to ASI’s recent partnerships with commercial publishers in launching pay-to-publish divisions.
Resources, Member News, and Industry News
Don Congdon
1918-2009
Resources, Member News, and Industry News for 2009-12-04
The Board of Mystery Writers of America voted unanimously on Wednesday to remove Harlequin and all of its imprints from their list of Approved Publishers, effective immediately. Harlequin remains in violation of their rules regarding the relationship between a traditional publisher and its various for-pay services.
If you want to go beyond the level of just assigning different skin tones and heritages to random characters, you’re going to have to do some research. Because yes, all people are the same, but they’re also quite different. For now, we’ll set aside the argument that race is an artificial construct, and concentrate on how someone outside a minority group can gain enough knowledge of the group’s common traits to realistically represent one of its members.
The Google Books Settlement has released a Supplemental Notice that has a summary of the changes between the original version and the 2.0. It is only six pages long and worth looking over, though it is not comprehensive.
Of the many issues highlighted by the recent launch of pay-to-publish divisions by two major commercial publishers (Harlequin Enterprises’ DellArte Press–nee Harlequin Horizons–and Thomas Nelson’s West Bow Press), one of the most interesting, to me, is how blurred the distinction between self-publishing and vanity publishing has become.
So what is Pragmatics? Basically, it deals with those areas of meaning which aren’t really meaning. What does that mean? It deals with implications (in the lingo, “implicature”), and with presuppositions, and with using language to do things rather than just send messages.