See more writing tips posters at My Modern Met.
In TIME magazine (@TIME), Katy Steinmetz (@katysteinmetz) reports, “In recent years, several neologisms have achieved widespread usage thanks to technology and social media.” Consider:
hat tip, n.: in online contexts, used as an acknowledgement that someone has brought a piece of information to the writer’s attention
tweeps, pl. n.: a person’s followers on the social networking site Twitter
lolz, pl. n.: an expression of fun, laughter, or amusement; used especially online.
All three of these are now found in the Oxford Dictionaries Online (@OxfordWords). Other additions highlight trends that have become widespread, such as photobombing–spoiling a photograph by suddenly appearing in the camera’s field of view as the picture is taken….
Our modern taste for word-shortening is also on display, with additions such as ridic, an abbreviation for ridiculous, and UI, an abbreviation for user interface. And the ODO gives those maniacally laughing villains the recognition they’ve sought these many years, with mwahahaha finally getting a nod.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you select the right words in your writing craft and to connect you with readers.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created especially for publishing and marketing professionals.
The Guardian’s (@guardian) Style Guide (@guardianstyle) editor David Marsh (@davidrmarsh) has declared today to be International Apostrophe Day (#apostropheday).
For proper execution, see The Writing Kit’s tutorial, Using the Apostrophe, and the above poster (see it enlarged).
Read why the British bookstore chain Waterstone’s (@Waterstones) dropped its apostrophe earlier this year, then listen to two BBC commentators discuss its implications.
See The Apostrophe Protection Society and the blogs Apostrophe Abuse (@apostropheabuse) and Apostrophe Catastrophes.
For fun, see this apostrophe/comma Speed Bump comic by Dave Coverly. J
And remember that the popular Bible translation Common English Bible (@CommonEngBible) uses the apostrophe in its copious number of contractions (which are used where the text warrants an engaging conversational style, but not used in divine or poetic discourse).
Let Somersault’s (@smrsault) editorial expertise help you properly use apostrophes when communicating your brand’s message.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Because we at Somersault (@smrsault) love words, we thought you’d like to know Nigel Richards, 45, a New Zealand security analyst who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, won the 2012 National SCRABBLE Championship in Orlando, FL, that concluded today, according to the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (@NASPA) tournament website. This is his 3rd consecutive title and 4th overall, both unprecedented achievements. He is also the reigning World Champion.
Both Richards and the runner-up, 1994 champion David Gibson of Spartanburg, SC, won 22 games (out of 31), but Richards had accumulated a better spread (+1579 vs. +1563, a difference of only 16 points) after winning the final game against Gibson by 177 points (475 to 298).
During the tournament, one contestant was disqualified for cheating.
Some of the most creative words played in the tournament were: ZADDICK (a virtuous person by Jewish religious standards), ERYTHEMA (a redness of the skin), ORPHIC (mystical), and WAWL (to cry like a cat).
Also see The New Yorker's poem, Reflections on a Winning Scrabble Board.
Contact Somersault to help you in your writing craft and to connect you with readers.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created especially for publishing and marketing professionals.
Here’s a fun way to display the creative variety of typefaces. This Periodic Table of Typefaces by designer Cam Wilde shows the 100 most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces used throughout time. See it enlarged. A print copy is available.
Below is another version of it, promoting Just My Type, the book about “that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about.”
Also see our previous blogposts:
· “Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve”
· “1912 Typeface Specimen Book Now Online”
· “The Periodic Table of Storytelling”
· “The Periodic Table of the Books of the Bible”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content with excellence.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard to see all things book-related; especially the Editing tab.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet: Consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua
The public radio program about language, A Way with Words (@wayword), asks, “Why are some book titles so incredibly long?”
A caller complains about book-title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words “and What To Do About It.” Cohost Grant Barrett (@grantbarrett) explains that such extra-long book titles have long been a form of search optimization by publishers and marketing departments. The more searchable keywords in the title, the more copies sold.
Listen above. Read this in full.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you select the most effective title, and other marketing necessities, for your book.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
(Birth of a book from Lamartis Publishing House on Vimeo.)
Russian publisher Lamartis (@lamartis) says it strives to combine all the elements that make books timeless, majestic, and beautiful. It positions its books for “sophisticated art connoisseurs and book collectors” and creates books for “the adornment of public, corporate, and home libraries.” The above video wonderfully captures the artistic craftsmanship of the Lamartis method.
Also see our blogpost, “EPILOGUE: the future of print.”
If you love books like we (@smrsault) do, we invite you to make our SomersaultNOW online dashboard your personal computer homepage (see instructions).
(Cartoon copyright © Dave Coverly. Used by permission. www.SpeedBump.com)
One of our core values is to have fun. ☺ Contact us (@smrsault) to help you with your publishing and marketing needs.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
The promise we can all go paperless has been around for years, so why is it that despite email, smartphones, e-readers, tablets, and computers, we’re still so dependent on pen and paper?
BBC Click (@BBCClick) reporter LJ Rich explores why paper has such staying power in this hi-tech age. She says
Demand for paper is at an all-time high. Finnish paper provider Foex predicts that the global paper market could reach a new record of 400m tons in 2012.
Also see the BBC Click article, “Is the paperless office possible?”
Since paper is not going away, technology is being developed to enhance it. The above video is from Layar (@Layar), a company specializing in augemented reality that wants to make the print world clickable.
With Layar, publishers and advertisers can quickly and easily activate their static print pages with digital experiences...all without hiring developers or installing software.
Layar makes it possible for consumers to scan with their smartphones a printed magazine cover, articles, photos, and more, to immediately see digital content such as a video or more detailed and localized information.
Back in April, one of our blogposts explained how AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) uses videos to promote itself. One of them answers the question, “Why do old books smell?”
Similarly to how people enjoy the smell of the interior of new cars and look for ways to replicate it, now comes a perfume for people who prefer the smell of books.
As Melville House (@melvillehouse) reports the story:
Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld came up with the name Paper Passion, which launched on July 12 in Wallpaper magazine’s annual Handmade issue. It was actually at Wallpaper‘s Handmade exhibition in Milan last year that the idea for the perfume originated, when German publisher Gerhard Steidl remarked that his favorite scent was a “freshly printed book.”
Since then, Steidl has been working with perfumer Geze Schoen on perfecting the scent, using only four or five ingredients. Synthesizing paper’s unique aroma was apparently not an easy task. Schoen explained, “The smell of printed paper is dry and fatty; they are not notes you often work with.”
If you’ve read this far, you obviously have a keen interest in books. So you’ll want to visit this website (@bookshelfporn) that features photo upon beautiful photo of bookshelves.
Also see our previous blogposts:
· “Home Libraries Despite the Ebook Era”
· “Even E-reader Owners Still Like Printed Books, Survey Finds”
· “Photos: The 20 Coolest Bookstores in the World”
· “EPILOGUE: the future of print.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content as either pbooks or ebooks (or both).
And if you’re a book lover like we are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Forbes (@Forbes) contributor Suw Charman-Anderson (@Suw) asks, “If you’re starting out and you’ve just written your first book, you really do have to ask yourself the hard question: Is this book actually any good?”
If there’s a common flaw in self-publishing, it’s that too many books are published too soon. Experienced voices across the publishing world continually advise self-publishers to get help with editing, and not just copyediting but story editing too. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to properly edit your own work. But the siren call of the Kindle store is often too seductive. The urge to finish your first draft, chuck it through a spellchecker and release it in to the wild is often far too strong for eager writers to resist.
But resist you must. Not resisting results in your name being married, permanently, to sub-standard work which doesn’t show off your talents to their best. Do you really want, in five or ten years time, to look back on your early work and cringe? More to the point, do you really want your first act of publishing to result in the irreversible blotting of your copybook with your potential fans?
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you professionally craft, edit, publish, and market your content.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Editing tab.