Lauren Beukes Presents The Spark
Posted on September 23, 2013 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
A couple of months ago, Lauren Beukes, author of several fantastic books and recent winner of the Clarke Award, contacted me about wanting to do something similar to The Big Idea for her home country of South Africa. I told her I thought this was a great idea and encouraged her to do it, albeit with a different name so there would be no confusion.
Lauren’s followed through on the idea, and now on her Web site presents The Spark, focused on new books from South African authors, who are talking about those books in their own words. The first book featured is Alex Latimer’s Space Race. Others, hopefully, will follow soon. Congratulations to Lauren for getting this off the ground. I look forward to more Sparks.
For the record, I very happily encourage authors and bloggers to take the “Big Idea” concept and adapt it for their local markets and/or fields and/or languages — I started doing it because I wanted to help promote new books and authors. So the more people doing that, in more places and languages and topics of interest than I could ever cover, the better. I do recommend calling the feature something other than “The Big Idea” if only to differentiate between each of us, but the actual idea itself? Take it. Use it. Promote authors and their works. It’s a good thing to do, for the writers and the readers.
I love that you’re sharing this, especially since Lauren Beukes’ promoting “The Space Race” (and man is that an excellent cover) has me already jonesing to read that based on the Amazon description.
Thus, The Big Idea turned out to be a Big Idea?
Neat, and I’m glad to be easily introduced to new authors.
Oh, I wish this post had gone up a week later! I am *this* close to having a website dedicated to short eBooks all set up and ready for prime time. One of the things I’d love to have on that site is guest posts from short eBook authors, introducing their work. Your Big Idea posts were indeed the inspiration for that!
I’m making the site because I needed a personal tech project to play with, and because I love short eBooks and am a bit unsettled by how beholden I am to Amazon when I go looking for new ones to read. I’m hoping my site can help fix that.
Since I am not doing the project as a big commercial undertaking (although the links, when I get them added, will be affiliate links, my goal is just to cover my expenses), I guess I can go ahead and post the link here, even though I still have more set up work to do. Curious readers and/or authors can check out the almost ready site: http://tungstenhippo.com/
Or you can follow @TungstenHippo on twitter for an announcement when it is ready.
Space Race sounds way cool!
This is a really nice gesture of support. I suspect that most people who read your blog do so not only because we like your books but to stay in contact with a generous spirit. You usually help to begin my day with a smile.
Now I want to do this for indies. :headdesk: Don’t need another project. Don’t need another project…