Five Rivers Editor Short Listed for Award

Five Rivers Intern Editor, Amy Bright, has been short listed (with two others) for the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for best Short Story by an Albertan. Her story, “Look at it this way” was published by Character I Press in 2011.

New Editor at Five Rivers

We’re pleased to announce Barb Geiger has accepted the position of editor at Five Rivers, promoting her from an editorial intern. You can read more about Barb on Five Rivers’ website. Welcome aboard, Barb!

Spinning the Spud

 Available at Indigo and Kobo This morning brings me to the latest McDonald’s commercial I’ve seen, in their attempt to health-up their image. So the commercial features some alleged mommy group visiting the potato farms from which McDonald’s allegedly buys their potatoes, and the women are like, “I like the fact this is all family run.” and “I had no idea raising potatoes was like this” (and I’m thinking you’re a moron!), and then…

Why would Indigo sell Kobo?

News today that Indigo has sold off its rising star and dark horse, Kobo, to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, came as a bit of a surprise to the publishing industry. During the past year-long restructuring at Indigo we’ve seen: the reduction of floor space for books; the decision to carry a title only for 45 days before returning to the publisher (meaning the customer only gets to see best-sellers and new releases); the increase…

Gender Gap in Book Reviewing

Interesting post today at Society Pages (a sociological site) on gender gap in book reviewing — major review outlets feature more book reviews by males, and more reviews of books written by males. Of course, the larger question must be how big a role these print format reviews still play as arbiter’s of taste, in a world shifting to eformat books and online reviews. Anyone up for doing a gender analysis of Amazon’s or Indigo’s…