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I could not let the 50 th anniversary of Doctor Who go by without writing a blog post about the greatest science fiction show of all time. I grew up watching the original series and I remember watching Partrick Troughton, who was the second doctor. I had nightmares about an episode where that Doctor was investigating a dark room full of giant toadstools. My mother must have forced me to eat mushrooms that day. I watched the original series right to its end. When I was staying in a residential college (Menzies College) at Latrobe University a group of us used to gather together to watch it. My favourite episodes usually involved the Daleks. Two of the more memorable stories were Death to the Daleks , where Jon Pertwee had to navigate a deadly maze to destroy an energy sapping beacon, and Genesis of the Daleks, where Tom Baker battled Davros, the evil creator of the Daleks. My enthusiasm for the show survived the wishy-washy Peter Davison years. I even watched the C...

Two new subscription services for ebooks have recently started: Oyster and Scribd .   What is an ebook Subscription Service?   A subscriber to Oyster or Scribd is allowed to read, for free, as many ebooks as they like from the selection of ebooks on each site. Oyster claims to have over 100,000 ebooks, and Smashwords is giving them access to 200,000 more. Scribd claims to have 40 million books and documents on its site, but how many are ebook novels of any quality? Harper Collins is the only major publisher to have signed up to the services. Mark Coker from Smashwords has written two blog posts ( one and two ) on why he thinks subscription services are going to change publishing for the better. As a distributor, signing up to the subscription services means he should distribute more ebooks, so he would think they are great. But are the subscription services good for the reader and especially the author?   Will Subscription Services Pay Aut...

Like many writers, I keep track of the number of words I write each day. I have a chart blue-tacked to the wall, with columns for each day and weekly totals. Today I finished filling in the details on yet another page of that chart. When I looked back over the chart, the last four pages had numbers in every box: I had written on every day since August 22, 2011, that’s 812 days in a row. During those 116 weeks I wrote 257,070 words, an average of 316 per day. Most of those words were for the novel I am currently writing. I have added words to that manuscript on every day since the beginning of last November. So I am keeping at least one writing goal of writing every day. But I would be a lot happier if it was 1,000 words a day. The only day during the past two and a bit years when I was close to not writing happened just two Monday’s ago, when a kidney stone made sitting at the computer very painful. As Norman Mailer says: a real writer produces work even on bad days. ...

It's time for another survey of the prices of the top 100 ebooks and ibooks. Kindle Top 100 prices.   Twenty-three ebooks in the top 100 were priced at 99 cents, which is very similar to my last survey in June when 22 ebooks were 99 cents. In January only 14 were priced at 99 cents, a big increase from the six in September (2012), seven in August, and three in June. This was down from a massive 34 at 99 cents in February (2012) when I first did the survey. So it seems more 99 cents ebooks are now making the top one hundred. I’m not the one buying them. The number of ebooks at $1.99 was down to four, compared to six in June, 11 in January and eight in September. Before that the numbers at $1.99 were too insignificant to mention.   This time there were fourteen books at the guru nominated price of $2.99. In January there were ten, 11 in June, 16 in September (2012), 15 in August, 22 in June (2012), and 32 in February (2012) at that price. So the decline o...