Google Book Search News

According to Tara Calishain, who writes the ResearchBuzz newsletter, Google Updates Its Google Book Search:

Google Book Search now presents, as default--single-pages stacked one on top of the other in a scrolling view--you can review content without having to reload the pages. There's also a two-page view. Forward/Back buttons allow you to quickly scroll through content. (You can also zoom in on pages you're reviewing, which isn't that useful when you're reading a play.)

She also presents a summary of other features, although it isn't clear if these are also new. I haven't played with this Google enterprise yet, have you?

Writing Stiffs

TRENDY MAG STIFFS ITS WRITERS - New York Post

FREELANCERS for BlackBook are fuming over the lifestyle magazine's failure to pay writers and editors what they're owed.

If this has happened to you with any publication, be sure to contact Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly. Also send details of spamming incidents (related to writing) for the Whispers and Warnings section of her website. The email address is: angela@writersweekly.com I'm probably going to tell her about a certain novel writing software business that sent me not one, but two malformed emails flogging their product. Both emails were meant to be in HTML format, but what I received was the raw code. If they're so stupid as to be unable to send a simple email ...

Amazon Rank, Sales

According to Liam Collopy at Levine Communications:

If your book is jumping between 2,000 and 9,000, you are probably selling 2-3 books per day. Here are the weekly ranges and sales:

10,000 - up (5 or less)
3,000 - 9,000 (15)
750 - 3,000 (40)
450 - 750 (90)
200 - 300 (175)
100 - 200 (235)
75 - 100 (265)

This looks like the higher a book's ranking, the rate of sales on Amazon diminishes. No wonder people think Amazon's rankings are pretty meaningless and many self-publishers won't even list their books there.

Information Trapping

Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web by Tara Calishain will be published soon. Amazon's description:

How many times have you run a Google search that resulted in thousands of results? With 8 billion pages online and more every day, it's increasingly likely that the Web contains the information you're looking for---if only you could find it. With Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web, Tara Calishain makes researching more efficient for the thousands of academics, journalists, scientists, and professionals for whom the Web is an indispensable tool---as well as bloggers, genealogists, and other hobbyists with a passion to pursue. She does so by teaching the latest techniques in creating ongoing information-gathering systems that are as automated as possible. Instead of the usual static, single instance of finding information, she demonstrates how to use RSS feeds, page monitoring tools, and other software so readers can move from browsing to setting up streams of data that they'll capture and review.

Tara Calishain is the creator of the site, ResearchBuzz. She is an expert on Internet search engines and how they can be used effectively in business situations.[research]

Audio for Writers

Want to find podcasts to listen to or download? Odeo.com has a bunch, 2,357,850 at this writing. And speaking of writing, that's a tag used by some 84 contributors --Odeo: Audio tagged with writing. Scroll down the page and follow the "next" links to see descriptions of all 84 podcasts. Quality varies, but when you find a good one, you can share it with others by putting it on your website at no cost. How about The Best of Column One from the Los Angeles Times?

Dean Koontz Writing

Several novels by Dean Koontz nestle in my overflowing fiction bookcase. I kept trying to like his horror stories, but always ended up feeling he just wasn't horrible enough for me. (My idea of a good horror writer is Clive Barker.) Cognitively, I'm still not up to digesting nonfiction, but felt strong enough to give comedy a break to return to my first love in fiction. Koontz's The Funhouse wandered into my hands, and I thought, "What the heck. I'll give him another chance." At first I was put off by his florid, over-the-top style which I think sounds like romance writing. When a sentence runs on for four lines, laden with adjectives and descriptive phraseology, well, come on! Surprise--I became engrossed in the story, forgot about the style, and it was horrible! Really gruesome. Blood and gore upon the floor. A monster or two. Funny thing, the origin of the book was a movie (Koontz tells all in the back), first published under the pseudonym Owen West, and the earliest copyright is 1980. Now I'll have to try another Richard Patterson effort to see if any of his writing scares the pants off me.

Pantless in San Diego.

Web 3.0 for Writers

Brace yourselves. There's a new web arising, or at least a new designation. Remember the fun we had with Web 2.0? This post, for example and a few others. Faster than we can catch up to the new functions, mash-ups, programming comes Web 3.0. John Markoff of the New York Times News Service 'splained it all in a recent article. He says the "goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide--and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion." Um, I think that's called "AI" for artificial intelligence, right?

Halfway through the article, he leaks the info that this is just the ol' semantic web that ubergeeks have been speaking about for several years. I could never understand what they meant. Turns out that Web 2.0 concerns connecting applications for functionality. I'd already figured that one out. But Web 3.0 is all about the content of web pages, the information carried and, in too many cases, buried in the Internet. The aim of Web 3.0 developers is to leverage bigger, better, faster computers to perform searches that will collate information to provide a complete package to answer questions like how to plan for retirement or select a college; more personalized returns than we can get now with existing search engines.

Now, that's what I'm talkin' about! For writers who use the Internet for research and writers who maintain websites with information about their works, this could be a jackpot. Anything that speeds up, and especially improves the results of web searches has my thumbs up.

Writer's Books

Books are playing a large role in my recuperation from surgeries. One of the first (of many) gifts my friends bestowed is a charming, slim volume from Abingdon Press titled Best Regards: Recovering the Art of Soulful Letter Writing, compiled and edited by Ben Alex. I can't think of a more appropriate gift from one writer to another. Another subtitle is: A Treasury of the World's Great Spiritual Letters. The book design is exciting and attractive, with each page appearing to be a sheet of parchment laid against a dark brown background. It is generous with lovely illustrations, interesting sidebars and callouts. I nibble away at it slowly, as if it were a box of expensive, imported chocolate candies.

Before the cancer tsunami struck, I had received a stack of books to review (some unsolicited). I'd started reading See Jane Write: A girl's Guide to Writing Chick Lit by Sarah Mlynowski and Farrin Jacobs. I'd requested the book on a whim, generally being out of the chick lit age range, because I wanted to see exactly how they define the genre. I have some quibbles with the content and design, but overall the book is entertaining and applicable to other lit forms. I will be reviewing it soon. Another book I haven't yet begun to read is The Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine. It promises to analyze, rank and expose the contracts and services of 48 self-publishing companies. The PR packet that accompanied the book contains an "Authors Bill of Rights". This should prove interesting.