This began as a post in praise of the Kindle as a reading device. For writers the Kindle is much more than that. KDP transforms the e-reader into a publishing platform, and the most powerful device a writer has at his or her disposal. But don’t be fooled into thinking you necessarily need professional help to format your e-book. While an editor is invariably beneficial, designers and other opportunists are trying to mystify e-book formatting and cover design for profit. The paybacks of the Kindle will be self-explanatory to anyone who’s held one for longer than a minute. Writers who own a Kindle that doesn’t contain their entire body of work are either slow or have never had cause to refer to their own writing. Being able to instantly search text strings while away from your desk, look up words in the dictionary, research online via a wireless connection, highlight sections earmarked for revision and tweet quotes are just some of the more obvious benefits.

Georg Salter was born in 1897. His family emigrated to the US where he worked as a designer at a time when books mattered in a way they no longer do. About his design for Kay Boyle’s novel, Generation Without Farewell, Thomas S. Hansen writes in his book Classic Book Jackets: The Design Legacy of George Salter:

“Salter’s abstract design prevailed over the author’s own wish to present images of amputee soldiers against a background of mutilation … Salter instead chose a symbolic approach showing battered Venetian blinds to symbolize a state of despair about cultural dissolution in postwar Germany.”

Some of his designs prefigure the work of modern day design houses such as Tomato.

‘“Hey, Nigel!” Kev shouted. “We’re going on a boat-trip.” He was already at the gangplank.’

What happens when three drinkers take an impromptu boat trip? And why are the other day-trippers so relieved to get back to port? The title of this e-book comes from a reference in the introduction to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and a quotation from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. JP Donleavy’s A Fairy Tale of New York also gets a mention.

Get Port After Stormy Seas on your Kindle, PC or iPad for US$0.99 – less than you pay for the coffee you drink while you’re reading it. A link and short extract follow the jump.

Steven Pressfield says inspiration comes from the Muse. I no longer believe in angels or muses, but I do believe writers tap into the collective consciousness, and having now read Pressfield’s motivational books I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. I’m not the first writer to confirm his methods succeed – what we have in common is that we’ve sat down and are writing. It’s that simple, so far. As revered screenplay instructor Robert McKee says: “When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.”

I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.

Consider this the wordsSHIFTminds manifesto. Over a century ago author Arnold Bennett wrote How To Live on 24 Hours A Day and it’s still being read today. In it he urges readers to use their time more effectively. “The chief beauty about the constant supply of time,” Bennett writes, “is that you cannot waste it in advance.” Time is a more precious commodity than ever.

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment minus Raskolnikov; Dickens’s Little Dorrit with no William Dorrit; Sebold’s The Lovely Bones without Susie. To read Trevor Butterworth’s recent article on FT.com, in which the co-founders of new publishing collective Mischief + Mayhem (Dale Peck, Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, DW Gibson and Choire Sicha) talk about publishing in the second decade of the 21st Century, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this would be the world of books if commerce-driven publishers had their way. It’s no longer acceptable, it seems, for writers to include prison inmates, murdered children or less-than-beautiful protagonists in their novels, for fear readers won’t be able to identify with them.

Liz Calder’s reputation as a publisher is without equal. Not only did she launch the Harry Potter series in 1997 (after becoming co-founder of Bloomsbury in 1986), she also launched the careers of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Julian Barnes and Anita Brookner.