David Gaughran's Blog, page 22

Fill The Shelves – A Great New Initiative To Help Underfunded School Libraries

Chronic under-funding of school libraries has led to the tragic spectacle of empty shelves, leaving children with nothing to read; but a new initiative called Fill The Shelves hopes to change all that.

This story starts in a PennsylvaniaK-8 school called Pittsburgh Manchester, where the librarian – Sheila May-Stein – decided to do something about the empty shelves in her own school (pictured left – that was the entire Fiction section of Manchester’s school library).

Last month, Sheila posted th...

Conference Thoughts: Treating Backlist Like Frontlist

Last weekend, I taught a workshop on self-publishing at the Festival of Writing in York. It was quite a large conference, with a few hundred attendees, primarily focused on unpublished writers.

Most attendees were seeking publication via the traditional route, but there was a lively crowd at the workshop, and I was pigeon-holed by many more curious about self-publishing over the weekend.

I had some free time on Saturday and dropped in on a SF/F genre panel. Much of the advice was excellent, but...

Never Kill A Client: James Bond and the Perils of Product Placement

I’m back from the Czech Republic, but have a show to put on in the gallery tonight, then tomorrow morning I’m off down to York to give a workshop at the Festival of Writingand take part in what is being billed as a fiery debate on e-books and self-publishing.

All of that should be great fun, but I won’t get to return to blogging duties until next week. Given the new Bond film is being released next month, I thought it would be a good time to re-run this piece I wrote for IndieReader in April....

Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the "Purity" of Blood

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath...

Lee Christmas, Soldier of Fortune

For the chronicler, the charm of history lies in the fact that—if only he waits a sufficient time before setting down his tale—he can always trace the fall of an empire to the loss of a horseshoe nail. Hermann B. Deutsch, "The Incredible Yanqui."

It's difficult to subscribe to any grand theories of history when examining the historical record. If you zoom back enough, events can appear to have some kind of order, some kind of logical cause-and-effect.

However, when you zoom in, it's akin to...

Potosí: The Lost City of Silver

If you walk around Potosí today, it's hard to believe that it was once the center of the New World: the largest and richest city in the Americas. There are plenty of signs of faded grandeur; the city is filled with beautiful, but crumbling, colonial buildings.

Most travelers to Bolivia bypass the city. After touring the Salt Plains to the south, most head on to the lights of La Paz, planning to tour Lake Titicaca, cycle the world's most dangerous road, or move on to Cuzco and Machu Picchu.

Othe...

Over The Andes In 2,766 Pieces – Guest Post By Christopher Marcus

The strange story of the gunboats which came to patrol the world's highest lake – without guns.

The Peruvian Navy took a chance in 1861. It ordered two huge iron gunboats—the Yavarí and the Yapura—for patrolling Lake Titicaca, which at 3,838 meters is the world's highest navigable lake.

'Navigable' is often added as there are smaller, higher lakes elsewhere in the Andes, but these are more isolated and lack the requisite depth for larger ships.

But that's not the case for the 100-mile long Lake ...

Capoeira, Runaway Slaves & The Dutch-Portuguese War

Through a curious accident of history, Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in all of South America. The ethnic mix is very different too, largely down to the legacy of slavery.

An estimated 6 million African slaves were "imported" into Brazil between the 1500s and the 1800s. One consequence of this was that the colonists were vastly outnumbered.

Brazil's inhospitable geography (a vast, barren interior surrounded by impenetrable jungle), meant settlements hugged the coastline. When a ...

An Emigrant's Tale: The Ballad Of The Irish Don Juan

Don Juan O'Brien left Baltinglass in 1811 as plain old John O'Brien, earning his new moniker in Buenos Aires, not due to disproportionate amorous exploits, but from the city-dwellers propensity to localise everyone's name, making even an Irishman from Wicklow sound exotic.

Emigration was common in Ireland; some left to find work, some to escape a criminal charge, and some to avoid the terror of deportation to Australia. Many left to escape religious persecution, others to raise an army...

September Report: A Big, Big Slump

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: I had a huge drop in September.

I'm quite sanguine about it. I haven't released something new since July and I have been virtually inactive on the promo front while trying to finish the final pass on A Storm Hits Valparaíso.

I know some people don't like hearing talk about numbers and even less about dollars. For those of that persuasion, you can read my recent post on Indie Reader about the bout of pessimism that had permeated self-publishing...