Do you have a favorite source of royalty-free stock illustrations?

I have a list of go-to sources for fonts and royalty-free stock photography, and I’m happy with them. What I’m fishing around for is a good source of stock illustrations that are inexpensive enough to purchase as needed for this blog.

Royalty-free… It makes me feel a little guilty.

Can anyone suggest a good online vendor? I must be overlooking them.

A scenic tour of literary magazines’ websites

The design of a literary magazine’s website probably shouldn’t be one of the criteria that makes it memorable. But it’s something I notice, which shows just how shallow I am. Like most of us.

Web design signifies a publication’s aesthetic or its editors’ personalities. While an austere homepage can be impressive, it might not be enticing.

I wasn’t sure what made me curious enough to click through and read, so I collected some links to the literary magazines that seemed interesting because of their good looks online:

Blood & Honey Review – Bosnian & English [CLOSED]

California Northern – essays, long-form journalism, literature, and photography

Coilhouse – alternative culture

Dark Sky Magazine – fiction, poetry, essays, and art [CLOSED: Learn more at "Barrelhouse Publishes Final Issue of Dark Sky Magazine."]

Linebreak – poetry read by poets

The Literary Bohemian – travel-inspired writing

The Pedestrian – personal essays

Quick Fiction – 500 words or less

Salamander – poetry, fiction, and memoir

Unsplendid – poetry in received and nonce forms

Does appearance indicate quality? I’m not sure. It affects usability. The noisy magazine-style, or multi-column, websites are not appealing to me. The more a literary magazine’s website resembles a printed literary magazine, the more I like it.

Book publishing and marketing – served à la carte

Between the intrepid self-published authors, who enjoy learning the skills they need to do it all themselves, and the old-school traditionalists, who want a publisher to risk the investment of time and talent to bring their books to market, there is a group of writers willing to pay for publishing expertise. They just need to be able to find it.

To be perfectly clear, this has always been the case. Just about any publisher will agree to bring out a subsidized title that might otherwise not have been considered worth the investment. Labeling various publishers, therefore, might be increasingly pointless as new business models proliferate.

A year ago, I might have referred to a company offering consumers a menu of editorial, design, production, marketing, and publicity services that could be purchased individually as a custom publisher, for lack of a better term. You could also call it self-publishing, or you could refer to the vendor as a subsidy publisher. Rarely is the term vanity publishing heard anymore, but publishing platform is a buzzword. When I decided to write this post, I knew it would be difficult to give a name to the kinds of one-stop publishing project shops I’m describing.

To further complicate matters, a book author might be seeking an ebook publisher, a POD book publisher, or one capable of both.

Following are some of the companies that currently offer à la carte book publishing and marketing services. Not included are those specializing in custom book production alone, without the option of marketing or publicity components. I expect growth in this sector, so the list will soon be outdated. My point is to make writers aware of the existence of these kinds of à la carte publishing service providers, occasionally referred to as concierges. I am not offering any recommendations. The buyer alone is responsible for investigating the quality and reliability of these companies.

BiblioCrunch – New York, NY
[Added on May 13, 2013]

Blackstaff Press – Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
[Added on August 3, 2011]

Concierge Marketing, Inc. – Omaha, NE

FastPencil, Inc. – Campbell, CA
[Added on July 3, 2011]

Flying Pig Media – Arlington, VA
[Added on July 12, 2011]

Greenleaf Book Group – Austin, TX

PubHub – Quincy, MA

Second City Books Premier Author Services – Palatine, IL

The Silloway Press – Columbia, MD

Not included in the list above are the big subsidy or vanity publishing businesses like Author Solutions, the Jenkins Group, PublishAmerica, and their many subsidiaries, which specialize in expensive publishing packages. In fact, I avoided listing any company that advertised publishing packages. All of the bigger companies, however, are likely to atomize their offerings and re-brand to reach a larger market if their profits take a dive. Likewise, the smaller companies could evolve into something more like Author Solutions.

Let me know if you’ve found other companies offering à la carte book production and marketing services. I think they should be much easier to discover online, and it would be convenient if all of them listed their rates up front.

The cost of convenience

The extraneous guillemets in my blogroll and the ads that were being displayed to new visitors finally drove me to distraction. Two WordPress.com upgrades costing $45 annually eliminated both nuisances.

Mike Ho worries about privacy protection in the coming era of cloud computing. Maybe the more obvious problem for many of us will be the rising costs of renting cloud space.

Quandary of the desk-bound

I know a beautifully designed book when I see one.

Something about great poetry, poignant lyrics, and elegant prose soothes my nerves.

 

But can anyone tell me if palazzo pants are still in style?

Is it time to give up on IE8?

I’m not familiar enough with browser development to know whether Microsoft’s IE8 refuses to play with Google Chrome.

Today, when I tried to visit the Feedbooks website using IE8, I got a blank screen and an error message indicating that Google Chrome had crashed. Google Chrome? Hmmm… I hadn’t opened Google Chrome, at least not knowingly. Uninstalling Google Chrome seemed like the easiest solution. Along with Google Chrome, I uninstalled Google Frame, since I didn’t know what it was, which is never a good reason for tampering with the programs installed on your computer. I know. Not only that, it didn’t help me access Feedbooks using IE8.

No big deal. I didn’t want to download anything from Feedbooks anyway; I was only looking for information. I could go on to other things, such as reading my RSS feed.

Google Reader is my RSS feed reader. For a while, I’ve noticed a strange, nearly undetectable redirect whenever I access Google Reader using IE8. Now, without Google Chrome installed, I can’t view the Google Reader site at all using IE8. Both Google Reader and Feedbooks have disappeared, as far as IE8 is concerned. Grrr… I am not amused by browser wars.

Any tech nerd will tell you that I shouldn’t be using IE8 in the first place, because Microsoft has refused to bring its browser into conformance with accepted Web standards, creating endless hours of extra work for Web designers and developers around the world who must attempt to create applications and websites that display properly across multiple, incompatible browsers. It’s a nightmarish waste of resources and time. The problem is that, at least the last time I did the research, some version of IE was the browser of choice for most users. My site statistics bear that out. I kept IE in mind when I designed my website, and I continued, until now, to use IE as my default browser. It made sense to view the Web through the same lens as most other users.

Today, if I want to see my RSS feed or Feedbooks or whatever else has, for whatever reason, disappeared from IE8′s view, I’ll be using Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or AOL’s Netscape. Strike that. I refuse to use a browser portal that automatically plays AOL background music. It’s been so long since I used Netscape that I wasn’t aware it was no longer supported. Its homepage has become the AOL portal. The Netscape Archive refers users to Mozilla’s Firefox and Flock.

Mood: mildly irritated

Future hardware purchase: Apple iPad

Default browser: open to suggestions

[Updated on February 21, 2010] Opera is another decent browser that I forgot last week.

It doesn’t call attention to itself

This week, I accompanied Mr. Misdiagnosed & Admitted to his favorite writers’ conference, a congenial gathering of eminent, established, emerging, and aspiring formalist poets. The Poetry Conference at West Chester University of Pennsylvania is currently in its fifteenth year and seems appropriately vigorous for its age. At Books, Inq., Frank Wilson, Melissa Balmain, and Carrie Keesey are blogging about selected sessions, for those who can’t be present.

The conference schedule includes evening events that are free and open to the public. Books by conference faculty are available in the campus bookstore. At the registration desk, browsers are lured by a display of fine limited editions printed and bound on the university campus. Tempted by Moira Egan’s The Silk of the Tie (in its irreverent pink cover), David Yezzi’s Sad Is Eros, and Dick Davis’s translation of medieval Persian poet Fakhraddin Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin, my money and I were soon parted.

The opening of the conference on Wednesday was celebrated with a reading by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. It was a pleasure to be part of an audience attuned to the collective shudder at the poet’s quiet observation: “Your peonies lean their vast heads westward / as if they might topple. Some topple.” (See the full text.)

Michael Peich, conference cofounder and director of the four-day event, surprised me with an invitation to his early morning demonstration of letterpress printing. A group of us trailed across the campus in the muggy calm, and Peich ushered us into the Aralia Press, housed in the new library at West Chester. We were joined by Donald Hall, who seemed delighted to sign for each of us Peich’s elegant, hand-colored broadside of the poem “Nymph and Shepherd.”

Peich, an admitted fanatic with a passion for rare types and the gorgeous imprecision of the typesetter’s art, explained the intuitive process of designing the broadside. Listening, we were as happy as a group of schoolchildren at story time. My photographs of Peich’s demonstration at Aralia Press can be found on Flickr.

Later in the morning, Mr. Misdiagnosed & Admitted conducted a workshop on preparing poetry manuscripts for submission. When asked to discuss the effect of typesetting on a poet’s work, he replied:

If a woman wearing a new dress walks into the room, do you say, “That’s a beautiful dress”?

If so, you miss the point. The proper response is “You look gorgeous.”

You could call it poetry immersion learning.

What makes an icon?

The Obama poster that outclassed them all, Shepard Fairey’s portrait of the President-elect, which was also used as a Time magazine cover, is a fine example of getting to the point. Simplicity is elegant. We’re instinctively drawn to it.

[Updated on February 10, 2009: Randy Kennedy reports in the New York Times on the copyright infringement lawsuit stemming from the use of an Associated Press photographer's image as the basis for Shepard Fairey's Obama poster.]

Tom Christensen, whose blog.rightreading.com on the subject of book publishing is one of my favorite blogs, notes that Paste magazine has given us Obamicon.Me, a Web-based photo editor that can transform your uploaded image file into an Obama-poster-style Obamicon.

I wish someone would send Jo sent me a good one to illustrate this post.

If only there were book and blog editing software designed to filter out distracting narration, grammatical errors, mixed metaphors, clichés, implausible dialogue, strange punctuation, and inadvertently repeated words. Would iconic language make us all look good in print? I’m not sure. Does simplicity make some people’s writing attractive?