Kendra Martin

Feb132012

Lemon

Mar92012

Joan Smith: “The Canadian Georgette Heyer”

I discovered novelist Georgette Heyer when I was twelve, and her excellent regency and mystery novels have a special place in my heart. I invariably compare the humour and adroitness of her writing when I read anything else in a similar genre; Ms. Heyer always seems to maintain her position as Queen by a long shot.

I was delighted to read An Affair of the Heart by Joan Smith the other day, because she achieves a high score from me for excellent characterization, plot, and complete lack of the tendency to over-explain characters’ inner feelings and musings. Action! Dialogue! Characters speak in a semblance of accuracy to the time period! These seeminly simple requirements are not often found in novels other than those by Ms. Heyer.

Well, of course, now I have an obsession with Joan Smith, because I want to read her other novels. But she wrote her books in the ‘seventies, ‘eighties and ‘nineties, and I can’t find a lot of solid information about her works in one place online. That’s why I wanted to share some of my research here for other Georgette Heyer fans looking for something comparable to read.

First, her biography

Joan Smith is a graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the Ontario College of Education. She has taught French and English in high school and English in college. When she began writing, her interest in Jane Austen and Lord Byron led to her first choice of genre, the Regency, which she especially liked for its wit and humor.

She is the author of over a hundred books, including Regencies, many with a background of mystery, for Fawcett and Walker, contemporary mysteries for Berkley, historical mysteries for Fawcett and St. Martin’s, romances for Silhouette, along with a few historicals and gothics. She has had books in the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild, been on Walden’s Bestseller list, had two Regencies selected for the Romantic Times ten best ever Regencies, and had one book condensed in a magazine.

Her favorite travel destination is England, where she researches her books. Her hobbies are gardening, painting, sculpture and reading. She is married and has three children. A prolific writer, she is currently working on Regencies and various mysteries at her home in Georgetown, Ontario.

(Source: Belgrave House eBooks.)

I know from the library cataloguing Joan Smith was born in 1938. Obviously the above bio is a bit dated, as it doesn’t seem she’s published anything since 1998.

Novels by Joan Smith

I found a great listing of Joan Smith’s novels, including title, publication year and publisher, and a brief summary.

As well, RomanceWiki has a listing of Joan Smith’s novels written for Silhouette, 27 novels in total.

OK, so where can I acquire her novels?

Good question! That’s what I wondered. I found her first novel An Affair of the Heart on Kobo’s bookstore, but that’s the only one for sale there. Print books were scarce at my local library and it seems her books have been out of print for a while. (A quick search on Indigo’s website shows availability as ‘Sold Out’ or ‘Unavailable’, which means you’re never getting a copy that way!)

But fear not! I found that Recency Reads has 60 ebooks by Joan Smith for sale at $5 a pop. You can get many electronic formats (including but not limited to: epub, mobi (prc),and pdf).

Have you read any Joan Smith? Where did you find a copy? Let me know in the comments below if you have any more information or links to share. I’d love to hear more!

Mar152012

Going Digital: Encyclopedia Britannica’s New Publishing Model

Kendra Martinpublishing

It was announced this week that Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopedia, will discontinue its print edition and embrace digital publishing. The company’s digital publishing program includes an online encyclopedia for subscribers, an iPad app, e-books, and websites. No strangers to digital publishing, Britannica has espoused the digital shift since the 1980s, publishing its first online encyclopedia in 1981 and the first multimedia encyclopedia in 1994.

But the 32-volume print edition is a staple in many homes. Growing up, there were several encyclopedias in my home, proudly lining full shelves in bookshelves. Books, especially reference materials, have a solid presence, one that beckons us to turn their pages. The book as an object of beauty is the one argument opposing digital publishing that continues to sway me.

In this case, however, I really cannot believe that 32 heavy volumes are better than an online encyclopedia!

Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, gives an excellent summary of the advantages to producing a digital product in a recent blog post. He says “the encyclopedia and electronic publishing make a perfect match.” And I couldn’t argree more with his assessment.

Expanded coverage: no more space limitations allows for greater supplemental material.
Ongoing revision and updating: here’s the major advantage over the print edition. While a family might be able to afford to buy one edition every ten to twenty years, the online encyclopedia will always provide the latest information. Today, the Joseph Kony article is featured as one recently updated, now including reference to the social-media campaign by Invisible Children. Wow, that’s current!
Search function far surpasses the index of print edition. While I am wholly in awe of people who index, a custom search with a computer can provide greater complexity and accuracy for searchers.
Multimedia, such as pictures and videos, are not restricted by print budgets. These materials can greatly enhance words describing a topic and youth today are very familiar with the visual.

As publishing drifts toward digital products, I couldn’t think of a better channel for encyclopedias today. The online reference tool allows the reference material to be up-to-date and accessible, two key goals for any encyclopedic material.

Jan62011

eReading to the Maxx

Kendra Martinpublishing

I’ve been working with eBooks for a while now, but in the past month I had the pleasure of producing an enhanced eBook of The Mistress of Nothing, using the text, an audio recording commissioned and produced by the CBC, exclusive videos of the author, and a slideshow featuring 1860s Egypt illustrations. The book is now available for sale on the iBookstore, and they featured it on their frontpage during Christmas. What an exciting promotion time frame! I will be interested to see how ‘enhanced’ or multimedia eBooks fare in the marketplace. Currently, many of the dedicated eReaders don’t support the HTML-5 features of the epub that are necessary to render the audio and video.

Will other eReaders catch up? Will reader demand (or lack thereof) speed or slow the process? And will it be non-fiction books that take this trend mainstream? In particular, I’m thinking of cookbooks by famous chefs that would feature embedded ‘how-to’ videos in-line with the recipe text. Many times I’ve googled a recipe, and then also looked up a video on how to perform a certain task. And I’m sure other how-to books, on home improvement, decorating, crafting, etc. can embrace this technology, once readers are ready and able to consume this content.

It’s all speculation from me at this point. I’m just happy to have produced a book with added features that I think book clubs and general readers will love to have!

Jan302012

Developing a WordPress Multisite Network of Sites Using Thesis Theme

Kendra MartinWeb Design

I was asked to re-design two websites and we decided that using WordPress’s multisite function would be a perfect way to make administration and upkeep much easier for the two sites, considering another site or two might get connected in the future. You can read about how to Create a Network on the WordPress Codex.

The second consideration was which theme to use, and we decided to use Thesis by DIYthemes, which is used by many developer types and has great flexibility.

I am a basic–intermediate level when it comes to making WordPress sites. I’m no coder, although I’m trying to learn more. Thus, I rely on the generosity of other bloggers who kindly post tutorials and guides on their blogs. I want to share which bloggers and posts I relied on for this project, so that anyone else developing a WordPress multisite network of sites using the Thesis theme will have the resource.

Here is my step-by-step process:

1. Using MAMP to locally host websites during development

The software MAMP (acronym stands for: Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) allows you to install WordPress on your computer, for development purposes. The website will be shown in your browser as if it were live online, but only you can see it.

I suggest first reading the WordPress tutorial on installing MAMP and WordPress on your machine. However, after you’ve read this, use the adaptation on the blog Musings of an Esposito, which modifies the process to work for multisite.

The only problem I ran into was in Step 4.1 “Editing Your httpd.conf “. The code given did not work for me. This is the code I ended up putting in my httpd.conf file:

NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/Users/[Username]/Sites/wordpress"
ServerName [mysitename].dev
<Directory "/Users/[Username]/Sites/wordpress">
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

That worked for me, but I found several variants. It depends where you install your WordPress. I installed mine under Sites directory.

You should be able to type localhost into your web browser and complete the WordPress install and set up your sites through the dashboard.

2. Installing Thesis for Multisite

It’s best to follow the instructions on fourblogger.com on how to install Thesis theme to enable it to be used for all sites on the network. This means that each site can be customized using one Thesis install. I followed these steps and it worked perfectly.

3. Modifying Thesis

With Thesis, one has the opportunity to made a number of changes to design using just the editor in your Dashboard. The Site Options and Design Options tabs are full of changes you can make.

Here is a great post on artofblog.com about the difference between Page Framework and Full-Width Framework in Thesis. I used and modified the code given to make changes to my Nav and Footer and Header colours.

Thesis uses hooks to define parts of your theme. These hooks are used in the PHP code and DIYthemes has provided a Thesis Hook Reference Lists. If you don’t know much about hooks, read the Sugarrae.com post Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies.

Using full-width headers and footers is a common style for websites these days. I really liked kristarella.com for its simple and effective tutorials on both these subjects (full-width headers and full-width footers). I suggest further exploring kristarella.com for more tutorials on the Thesis theme.

Conclusion

I’m still working on the design of my websites, and plan to share in a future post my results and more resources to build great websites using Thesis. Best of luck to all Thesis developers!

Jan152012

Co-operative Bookstore Ownership

Kendra MartinUncategorized

Could a co-operative community model of bookstore ownership be the way of the future for indie bookselling, asks Christina Palassio in “Take My Bookstore—Please”. I read this article with hope after reading many articles on the demise of the indie bookstore and hearing anecdotes about why book buyers are abandoning their local bookshop in favour of [insert reason: e-reading, online purchasing, other media, etc.].

Palassio offers examples of bookstores that have embraced a new ownership model, such as Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY. The bookstore raised money, and hopefully strong a customer base, by selling over 600 shares in the store.

I’m very enamoured with this model, because as messy as co-operatives can be, it produces the pride of ownership that makes the community care and take action to keep their bookstore alive.

“Take My Bookstore—Please” by Christina Palassio | THIS Magazine, Jan–Feb 2012 | this.org

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