Posts Tagged Twitter
Deborah Beale on Using Twitter to Preview Tad Williams’ Shadowrise
Posted by admin in Uncategorized on January 24, 2010
Tad Williams' Shadowrise
As damn fine a writer and editor that Deborah Beale is, I consider her equally great as a marketing genius. I’ve written before about some of her and husband/business partner/writer Tad Williams marketing ventures before in this post from last October. I recently joined Twitter (find me here as Talkingwithtim) and have started observing how folks that I respect utilize it to their advantage. This March, Volume 3 in Williams’ Shadowmarch series, Shadowrise, will be released. To whet the appetite of fans anticipating the book’s release, Beale is twittering (as MrsTad) excerpts from the book. The most recent series of tweets started on January 23. I had to ask Beale a few questions about the effort, and she was more than happy to oblige me in this mini email interview. My thanks to Beale for her time and efforts, as always.
Tim O’Shea: How did you come up with the idea to start sharing excerpts from Tad’s new novel, Shadowrise via Twitter?
Deborah Beale: It wasn’t a flash-bang moment; it just occurred to me sometime back that it would be a cool thing to do. I was waiting for a finished manuscript from Tad, and I wanted to fit in with the publishers wishes too, which means streaming something close to publication date. Now, of course, I’m wondering who else might be doing something like this. There was one fiction-experiment last year, I can’t remember the details but it didn’t end well. I’m just throwing stuff out there for our followers and mailing list (who got a free short story for Xmas.) And I’m having fun with it.
Holt & Perren on Media Industries: History, Theory and Method
Posted by admin in commerce, education, media industries, philosophy, pop culture on May 6, 2009
It seems like media industries are being redefined on a fairly frequent basis these days. So when I found out about the new textbook, Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, I was curious to see what ground the textbook covered. Fortunately, the editors of the textbook, Jennifer Holt (Assistant Professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and Alisa Perren (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University) were quite willing to answer my questions. In the spirit of the collaborative way that they edited the textbook, Holt and Perren collaborated on the answers. Once you’ve read the interview, be sure to also visit Professor Perren’s media industries blog. My thanks to both Holt and Perren for the interview. And if that’s not enough for you, be sure to visit Wiley’s (the publisher’s) site to download a PDF excerpt of the textbook.
Tim O’Shea: How did the idea for the textbook first come about?
Jennifer Holt/Alisa Perren: We both teach classes about the media industries and were frustrated with the lack of course materials devoted to this subject – especially materials approaching the topic from a humanistic perspective. We also saw that the study of media industries had been growing and expanding but it had not yet been mapped as a field in an academic text. So we enlisted some of the people who have done formative work in this area as well as those doing new scholarship to help us put what we saw as the emerging field of media industries into context for our readers. (To view the book’s table of contents, click here.)
O’Shea: How did you divvy up the editorial duties on the textbook?
Holt/Perren: This was truly a collaborative effort. We worked together in recruiting contributors, editing all of the essays, and writing the introduction. And amazingly, we remained friends through it all.