Tagged “publishing”
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Writing for humans, by humans
In truth, one reason I enjoy writing these newsletter so much is because they land in your email inbox, sorted by date and time, with my name as the sender. This takes enormous pressure off writing a damned title that is SEO friendly and clicky…Sure, writers must hustle relentlessly to promote their newsletter to potential subscribers, but they do not have to play the exhausting game of ‘can I make you click’ for each post…
— Anne Trubeck, Notes from a Small Press - Amazon Is Changing How We Write A ‘captive’ audience of willing—paying, even!—subscribers means there is less pressure to play the SEO game. This doesn’t mean titles, subject lines, and headings don’t have to be well written, just that they don’t have to be keyword-stuffed—written for humans, not The Algorithm.
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Hegemonic technology
…technological advances don’t automatically bode well for the digitization of non-Latin type languages.
— Alizeh Kohari, How to bring a language to the future A fascinating (and at times troubling) read about the intersection of calligraphy, typography, the digital era, hegemonic technology, bias in machine learning algorithms, the importance of open source, and a re-visiting of the tension between form and function.
Also, broaden your own worldview a little and subscribe to RestOfWorld
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Coverless ebooks
Via a link in this instalment of The Convivial Sociert to Home Screens and thence to more of the author, Drew Austin at Kneeling Bus.
Far more than a container or shell for content, the cover is an interface between that content and human society, the intermediate layer that positions information in the world.
— Drew Austin, Incipit as Infrastructure The essay puts its thumb on a sense of disquiet I’ve had for some time but not been able to adequately express, most recently twinged by opening a new book on my Kindle.
It ‘helpfully’ started me off at the beginning of first chapter. As I always do, I paged back to the ‘cover’ and began again: looking for clues in the cover art, reading the front matter (partly for context, partly as a way of creating punctuation between ‘content’), bemoaning the lack of chapter names in the table of contents, pondering the obscurity of the dedications … and discovered that I had been shortchanged by the Kindle’s certainty that I need focus only on the ‘content’: there was a prologue!
Had I relied on the Kindle’s sense of what was important and not begun at the very beginning, I would have missed a large amount of context and place-setting.
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