As part of my PhD thesis on smartphone storytelling, I’m creating a locative audio narrative designed to be experienced while listeners walk through London’s Brompton Cemetery. The work engages with the many stories that lie buried in the cemetery alongside their owners, weaving them into a fiction that gives the listener a role to play…
100 Novels by British Women
At the weekend, prompted by having started to reread Wuthering Heights (a mere 29 years after I’d first read it as a callow sixth-former), I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter – men and women – to recommend their favourite ten novels by British women that I ought to read. The response was overwhelming,…
Impact and the research-and-practice PhD (i): some definitions of impact
Last week, I gave a paper at the Bath Spa University Early Stage Researchers Conference. The theme of the conference was impact, and my paper attempted to explore what impact might look like for a PhD like mine, combining research and practice in the humanities. This post comprises a reworked version of the first part…
Working in publishing: fifteen things you need to know
This is a talk I gave at the University of Lincoln on Wednesday 8th February. 1. It’s not all about editing… Though almost every would-be publisher wants to work in editorial, there are plenty of other roles available that might be more suited to your skills (or which might offer you another way into the…
Writing in Place: An ‘Ambient Literature’ Project in the UK
What happens if the story you’re reading knows where you are, and can respond to your input? A new project based in the West Country of England explores the possibilities of writing that’s informed not only by a sense of location, but also by the affordances of smartphones, and what they can bring to storytelling….
Paris and the Machine: scholarly print-on-demand
The new Les PUF store, La Librairie des PUF, certainly makes a stylish addition to an already highly literary quarter. It’s not far from the Place de la Sorbonne, the city’s historic seat of academia. And it’s just round the corner from some of the city’s most prestigious bookshops: the Librairie Philosphique J. Vrin, Editions…
Open access: a personal take
I have a few reservations about Open Access. In some respects, that’s hardly surprising. After all, I work for a big publisher – not, admittedly, an Elsevier, but still one of the world’s largest university presses, one of those not-for-profit organisations whose deep differences from the likes of Elsevier are too commonly elided in the…
Ten ways to get ahead in publishing
(FOR THE SOCIETY OF YOUNG PUBLISHERS AT THE LONDON BOOK FAIR, TUESDAY APRIL 14TH, 2015) INTRODUCTION I’m Alastair Horne, and I work for Cambridge University Press. I started out at Cambridge ten years ago as a project developer, testing educational software for primary schools; then spent three years as a project manager, working with internal…
The Future of the Scholarly Book – ten take-aways
The recent ALPSP conference on the Future of the Scholarly Book offered many lessons for publishers, reassuring some that they’re heading in the right direction, while challenging others. Here are ten things I took away from the conference. take-aways below. Make sure you know what you (and your colleagues) are talking about… One problem with…
Two and a half thoughts on Amazon’s Matchbook
Amazon’s announcement on Tuesday of its new Matchbook offer, allowing customers to buy discounted digital versions of print books they’d previously bought from the retailer, is far from the first attempt to bring bundling to publishing. As Peter Hudson, CEO of BitLit was quick to point out, his start-up has been offering something rather similar…
How to get ahead in publishing
I was asked to give a short talk at the 2013 London Book Fair on a panel session organised by the Society of Young Publishers. Here are my notes from the talk; you can also download them in PDF format at the end. #1 YOUR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IS FAR TOO IMPORTANT TO BE ENTRUSTED TO…
Reaching readers: my talk from the 2013 Independent Publishers Guild conference
Academic and professional publishers’ routes to market are changing fast. In this talk, I showcased some of the best ways to build close relationships in niche communities and across social media. If you prefer, you can download a PDF of this talk at the end of the post. INTRODUCTION I’ve ten years’ experience in digital…
The pressfuturist manifesto 