Writing in the Digital Age

Art has long been claimed as a final frontier for automation-a field seen as so ineluctably human that AI may never master it. But as robots paint self-portraits, machines overtake industries, and natural language processors write New York Times columns, this long-held belief could be on the way out.

Celebrated American author Mark Twain was very dismissive of people who think it is possible for someone to learn how to write a novel.

"A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel," he said. "He has no clear idea of his story. In fact, he has no story."  Read more

For Allen Lau, it turns out that sometimes the biggest decision in a business can be to stick to your original idea and build on it.

That's his story, anyway. It's the story of Wattpad Corp., a Canadian company that started in 2006 as an online reading room and now attracts 70 million users a month to its site and app in more than 50 languages.  Read more

Ebook sales are dying. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. http://www.ebooks.com/ are insanely popular.

If the short definition of cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas to be true, ebooks are about as dissonant as digital content gets.  Read more

Last weekend I spent a lot of time around aspiring authors. On Friday, I ran a 'trade secrets' workshop for writers at Chipping Norton Literary Festival. The day after I headed to Leicester University to deliver a plenary talk to the audience at the sixth national Self-Publishing Conference.  Read more