Google is partnering with The HALO Trust in order to use its Google Earth Pro technology to detect and remove land mines in areas like Cambodia and Angola.
Good Guy Google
Their Thanksgiving(s)
“Behind the collective feast and public ritual lies a personal dimension: the holiday as each of us has lived it, laughed about it, imagined it or reinvented it.” For their “My Thanksgiving” feature, The New York Times asked nine writers — including Parul Sehgal, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Emma Cline — how they celebrate the holiday. Pair with Nguyen’s 2015 Year in Reading.
Dzanc Sessions
With sessions beginning this month, “The Dzanc Sessions are designed for writers who are ready to amplify, polish, and advance their writing. An eclectic platform of craft-based workshops are offered in a series of online sessions throughout the year, with specializations in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenwriting.” Signing up earns you a free print book or access to their eBook club.
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Leigh Stein’s Other People Pod
The Fallback Plan (reviewed on our site) and Dispatch from the Future author Leigh Stein was interviewed for Brad Listi’s Other People Podcast, so that makes us all winners.
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Boycotting Indies?
We are now over a week into Amazon’s boycott of the indie press e-books distributed under the Independent Publishers Group. IPG is taking a stand against Amazon’s hardline negotiations during the retail giant’s annual contract review, and 5000 titles are no longer available through the Kindle store. Last week Jim Hanas, author of the digitally and independently published Why They Cried, spoke out against Amazon to champion other e-readers and e-book retailers. The renegotiations are taking place across the industry, though, as Melville House’s Dennis Johnson puts it, “major industry figures at the big houses in New York — facing similar cutthroat demands from Amazon for their own annual contracts — remain silent… This isn’t over yet.”
The Paper Trail
What writers are actually earning money? Over at Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel takes a look at the new Author Earnings report, which scours Amazon bestseller lists and extrapolates the data to make claims about the state of publishing and self-publishing. Here’s an older Millions piece by Edan Lepucki on self-publishing as supplemental and influential to the traditional route.
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