Short story writer Matt Sumell is BookGlutton’s ‘first featured contemporary author’
Matt Sumell, a short story writer, is the first “Featured Contemporary Author” on the home page of the BookGlutton site. BG is a Web community through which you can annotate others’ works—publicly or privately—or publish your own. You can even do ePub conversions from HTML.
“We’ll be highlighting contemporary authors that have uploaded original work or excerpts of published material in a section on the homepage,” says Travis Alber, BookGlutton co-founder. “Although we continue to bring in public domain and Creative Commons work, we have now begun to expand our catalog to new copyrighted material; we’re excited to provide a space for new and contemporary authors to showcase their writing. We’ll be rotating the featured authors frequently.
Discovering new writers—among goals
“In conjunction with ‘Featured Author’ homepage highlights, BookGlutton now lets registered users create an ‘Author Page’ for their work. The ‘Author Page’ is separate from a regular profile page, since it has room for a jacket photo, long bio, links to an author’s work outside the site, and a list of written work appearing on BookGlutton. We hope to help new writers be discovered and contemporary authors expand their fan base.”
The cigarette in the photo: Yep, we’re tolerant around here. Few things do I hate more than tobacco. Carly has asthma and is allergic to the stuff, and I doubt my own lungs benefited from the second-hand cigar smoke I suffered in a newsroom from the biz reporter at the next desk. Better ways exist to be creatively Retro. No relationship to the tobacco Rothmans, by the way; oh, the irony!
From Sparkles Licks Puddles of Cola, by Matt: “My bother bet me five hundred dollars she wouldn’t make it past December. I accepted and won—Grandma died January 3rd.” Nice start. As a reader, I won’t hold Matt’s cigarette against him. Why not drop by Matt’s area and give him some friendly, constructive feedback? Other readers just might do the same for you. Aaron Miller, site co-founder, writes fiction and can empathize with other writers.
Reminder: Yep, we have a warm spot in our hearts for BookGlutton, because of its experimentation with the IDPF’s ePub standard despite Aaron’s reservations. Among other things, he’s frustrated that it lacks an annotations standard. I agree on that one, Aaron!
August 18th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Hey Matt:
I’ve been a fan since you started at UCI 5 years ago. My all time favorite quote was “I drink when I write and I like to drink.”
Do you still keep in contact with Zach?
-Larry