Another bit of news from the world of Dagda Publishing: Not con­tent with pub­lish­ing excel­lent poetry from up-and-coming writers online and in ebook form, they have grand plans to become a full-blown indie pub­lish­ing house. An Indiegogo cam­paign to raise fund­ing has just begun and I urge you to donate whatever you can.

Yes, I have a ves­ted interest in their suc­cess as they’ve pub­lished my work and I do design for them, but ignore that. Independent pub­lish­ers are sorely needed these days. The big guns are con­tent to churn out whatever books fit on the cur­rent pop­u­lar band­wagon, and are busy mess­ing around with restrict­ive DRM and the like. Whereas inde­pend­ent pub­lish­ers like Dagda and the excel­lent Angry Robot are focused on their mis­sion to find awe­some new tal­ent and intro­duce it to readers.

Speaking of people who don’t get it, here’s an art­icle about some atro­cious com­ments made recently by Terry Deary (author of the Horrible Histories series) about how lib­rar­ies have “had their day”. It reeks of selfish­ness and greed and detach­ment from the real needs of society.

Deary is call­ing for a pub­lic debate around lib­rar­ies, and for an end to the “sen­ti­ment­al­ity” he believes has framed the issue so far. “Why are all the authors com­ing out in sup­port of lib­rar­ies when lib­rar­ies are cut­ting their throats and slash­ing their purses?”

Obviously many (super­ior) authors have con­demned his com­ments and still stand staunchly in sup­port of lib­rar­ies. If you fancy a quick anti­dote to his views, I recom­mend read­ing Marc Morris’ sub­lime response.

And if you fancy fur­ther infuri­at­ing him by read­ing some­thing for free, you could do worse than check­ing out Little Nemo in Slumberland. Now in the pub­lic domain, and there­fore freely dis­trib­ut­able by any­one to whomever they like, you can find the entire ori­ginal run online here.

Moving on to some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent: This is pos­sibly one of the best art­icles I’ve read recently. Taking the ques­tion of “what if the Doctor regen­er­ated into a woman?” fur­ther than ever — an altern­at­ive world where the Doctor has always been a woman. The choices are excel­lent (bar­ring the ter­rible mis­take with the elev­enth) and the sum­mar­ies of each Doctor’s career are the icing on the cake.

The best part is that the idea of Sue Perkins as the Doctor is so pop­u­lar, a cam­paign has star­ted to have Big Finish do another Doctor Unbound series with her in the title role. I am fully behind this.

To fin­ish things off, I give you a round-up of book cover cri­ti­cism blogs. The first two, Caustic Cover Critic and Lousy Book Covers, cover the full spec­trum of lit­er­at­ure. Thanks to self-publishing and the fact that any­one can knock together some­thing hor­rendous in a cracked ver­sion of Photoshop and set it as the cover of their 20-page Kindle “novel”, there are lots to choose from.

Then there’s Good Show Sir, which focuses on SF/F books. It’s a real eye-opener to see what works of ter­rible art oth­er­wise excel­lent books by some very fam­ous authors have been saddled with.