I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
I’ll start with thanks for private messages sent suggesting ways of approaching various aspects of self-publishing. I appreciate them all.
One of the key aspects of any kind of publishing is marketing, assuming that you’re looking for some kind of return on investment, and the key to this is often, perhaps usually, said to be social media. That might be true, but in the past two weeks on Twitter I have ‘unfollowed’ one author I like and muted two more because of their incessant tweeting about either their forthcoming book, a forthcoming TV series based on their book, or just retweeting praise for their book in general.
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More snow overnight last night: just a light dusting but it was so cold it was lying as frozen crystals. A grit truck came down the street–a minor miracle in itself, but if it dispensed any grit it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. I’m writing this at 17.40 and it is -6° outside, and likely to stay as cold or colder overnight.
Annoyingly, when I was out clearing our drive earlier, A couple of neat sentences for the work in progress came to me, but I’d forgotten them by the time I came inside. I generally keep a small notebook close for this very reason.
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It’s been quite a musical afternoon. I wrote and posted a couple of 1971 music things, and listened ahead to a fine jazz recording released, I think, March 1971. I also started on a cd boxed set I picked up on eBay just a couple of days ago, a 5-CD, 6 1/2 hour Grateful Dead career retrospective that dealers normally advertise for sale at insane prices but someone put on eBay at a very low ‘Buy-it-Now’ price. I got an alert and bought it probably within five or ten minutes of it being advertised. I listened through disc 1, covering 1965 to 1970, and it’s fab.
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Today, the UK recorded daily totals of 68,053 new cases of Covid-19 and 1325 deaths. London hospitals are mathematically certain to be overrun in two weeks or so. The numbers can sometimes seem just that: abstract numbers, often presented in fancy-shmancy graphics that aren’t easy to understand. BBC’s Newsnight found a way to illustrate it last night:
In the UK, 78,508 people have now died of coronavirus since the pandemic began.
It can be hard to visualise such a large number, what does 78,508 people even look like?
This is what it looks like – it is almost the full capacity of the London 2012 Olympic Stadium.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/TAW4KWF32s
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) January 8, 2021
This article, by the always excellent Helen Pidd, is quietly devastating.
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Finally, to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inaugurations on January 20th.
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Music: I read the news today, oh boy… The Beatles : A Day in the Life.
(There’s a great documentary from 2017 analysing Sgt Pepper by Howard Goodall here: https://dai.ly/x6t7y04).
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