Kindle Worlds – a new world of publishing?
Fanfiction is a topic that generally invites disdain from the publishing industry for understandable reasons, although of course there has been attention since the outrageous success of Fifty Shades of Grey, which by now is commonly known to have been based on Twilight fanfiction. I am hopeful that Amazon’s new venture Kindle Worlds, which in its current form anyway, seems to be a limited approach to fanfiction (I will cover this more fully in an upcoming article in Publishing Perspectives; update: now published), will nevertheless open up dialogue about fanfiction. The number of fanfiction stories uploaded and read on Wattpad alone is incredible, as shown in this infographic, and online writing is a trend that publishers ignore at their peril.
With the advent of Kindle Worlds, my professional interest in fanfiction as an online model for interactive, dynamic book publishing has garnered some attention. In the past week, courtesy of an article I wrote last year on fanfiction being republished by Publishing Perspectives, I have been contacted by Business Week in the US, been interviewed by the German publishing magazine buchreport.de and wrote the article for Publishing Perspectives.)
Pearson Education in New Zealand – a thing of the past?
In the same week, it was with great sadness that I read that Pearson Education’s New Zealand office was likely to close down. Martin Taylor, long a proponent of digital publishing in New Zealand, wrote an excellent post on what this might mean to New Zealand publishing.
I worked at Pearson for eight years, and was the Editorial and Production Manager, and Content Management representative, until I left to do further postgraduate study in Business Administration and to concentrate on digital publishing and content management. While I haven’t worked at Pearson for some years now, it will always be meaningful to me as I started my publishing career at Pearson Education (Maskew Miller Longman) in Cape Town, and it was Pearson head office’s promotion of technology and content management that first got me thinking about new forms of publishing and sparked my interest in content management.
I wish my ex-colleagues at Pearson, New Zealand, as well as the excellent authors and freelance editors and designers I worked with regularly, the best. I remember well our weekly Editorial and Production morning teas when we each took turns to bake. Some baking could have been contenders for national baking awards, whereas other cakes, for example made by this Anna, were swigged down with a good gulp of tea. Thanks to you all. And I wish you well.
