Gary Kliewer's Blog – July 2010 Archive (3)

Every book we are working on now has multimedia elements.

Among the textbooks for which we manage production, a large percentage of academic references are website links; that’s where the current, peer-reviewed, accurate sources live now. Most reference works and textbooks have supplemental websites where students go for the in-depth research, study questions, and video. After all, for today’s students, bound books are inefficient and old fashioned.

No longer do the visual…

Whether working with a major house or self publishing, an author today must maintain a website. Having a professional online presence is as standard as having a sales sheet and a business card. But the old (that is, more than two years ago) expectation that a website can be just a glorified billboard is obsolete thinking. What can or should an author-and-book website do for an author now?

First, the site does serve as a sales tool, but only if it is a dynamic tool where reviews and…

Even if you are not personally ready for base jumping, you may enjoy watching extreme sports. Now we have extreme publishing: James Joyce has been quoted inside the DNA of a bacterium!

Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute stitched together the entire genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides. We have been adding and subtracting bits of DNA for decades, but this engineering feat is a milestone. This time, the scientists started from the raw recipe, the…