Archive for April, 2011

DailyLit News: Rhyme and Reason

In case you miss it in your inbox, here’s the latest newsletter from DailyLit:

What’s in here:
Note from the Founder
New: Poetry Collections
Earth Day, Every Day
Creative Challenge: Shaking Up Shakespeare
Survey Says…

NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

Is there any rhyme or reason to this month’s newsletter? Absolutely! The rhyme comes in our celebration of Poetry Month with a Shakespearean creative challenge and the launch of two poetry collections. And then there’s reason. Reason to celebrate Earth Day, Every Day, a collection of stories that highlights moments in everyday lives when folks woke up to changing the world in their own unique ways.
So cheers — to both rhyme and reason!
-Susan

Susan Danziger
Founder and CEO, DailyLit
sdanziger@dailylit.com
Twitter:@susandanziger, @dailylit

NEW: POETRY COLLECTIONS

In honor of Poetry Month, I’ve just launched two poetry collections to light up your inbox. Each has been collected and edited by a world-renowned publisher: one by Knopf and the other by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You can find highlights from Knopf poets here and Farrar, Straus and Giroux featured poets here.

EARTH DAY, EVERY DAY

I’ve been lucky enough to work with a woman who has been a pioneer in the eco movement — Sharon Rowe, founder of Ecobags. She’s compiled and edited Earth Day, Every Day, a series of “waking up” stories from people like you and me who woke up one day and changed the world around them. Thanks, Sharon!

CREATIVE CHALLENGE: SHAKING UP SHAKESPEARE

In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, here’s the latest creative challenge: write a line that Shakespeare might have written about life today. You can post the line here in our forum.

And if you need some inspiration, you can find Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets here. I also have a Shakespeare Sampler that gives you a taste of some of his works — now that’s much ado about something!

SURVEY SAYS…

Been wondering who else has been reading via DailyLit? I sure have. So, (drumroll please…) here are the results of our recent survey:
-Age: You come in all ages — there are about as many of you 26 year olds as there there are 65 year olds (love that range!).
-Male or Female? Most of you are women — over 76% (I hope that doesn’t scare off some of you guys!)
-Level of Education: we have an educated lot among us, with a majority of you having at least a Bachelor’s degree (4 year college) or Master’s degree (beyond college).
-You’re also serious readers: almost 75% of you have read between 10 and 50+ books in the last 12 months (puts me to shame!)
-You’re also avid book buyers: over 1/2 of you have bought between 10 and 50+ books in the last 12 months.
-You’ve been reading your installments on either your laptop or desktop (pretty evenly split) — and then about 20% of you are reading on your mobile devices.
-Categories you’re most interested in reading: literary fiction followed by historical fiction, thrillers/mystery, history and biography/memoirs.
-And you prefer to use DailyLit to read long books such as novels or biographies where installments need to be read in the correct order and in their entirety. That’s followed by your interest in short stories and essays. That said, almost half of you like to read stand-alone content such as poems or business tips where you can dip in and out of installments as well as extremely short stand alone content such as a “quote of the day”.
-I’ve also had lots of interest by you experts out there in creating series. Apologies for the delay in getting back to you if I haven’t yet reached out. There’s been more demand than I originally anticipated, but I do plan on responding.
-Finally, the wonderful comments you’ve left about how much you appreciate DailyLit have made my month and keep me going. I really appreciate it. And thanks also for the helpful feedback on how I can improve DailyLit.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit Celebrates National Poetry Month with Knopf

DailyLit is celebrating National Poetry Month with Knopf. For the second year in a row, DailyLit is featuring poetry from the world-renowned library of poets published by Knopf. You can find this second collection here. We’ve also made it easy for those of you who signed up for last year’s collection; since it’s a sequel, you should automatically start receiving this year’s collection as well.

Enjoy!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit Survey Closing this Weekend

Now that it’s getting warmer, it’s time to put DailyLit’s winter survey to bed. Many thanks to all of you who’ve made the time to complete the survey. For those of you who haven’t had a chance (but been meaning to) you have until Easter Sunday (April 24th) to complete it. You can take the survey here.

I’ll be reporting soon on the results. Stay tuned…

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit Celebrates Earth Day with launch of New Series

In honor of national Earth Day, I’m delighted to announce the launch on DailyLit of Earth Day, Every Day, a collection of personal stories from folks who woke up one day and changed the world, each in his or her own way.

I’m particularly honored that Sharon Rowe, the CEO and founder of Ecobags, has made time to collect and curate these stories. I met Sharon when we both participated in a wonderful workshop of women entrepreneurs put together by Seth Godin (thank you, Seth!) Sharon is that rare combination of being incredibly accomplished and completely down to earth (so to speak!)

This is how Sharon describes DailyLit’s new series, Earth Day, Every Day:

If you’re like me, you’re probably somewhere in between what the media calls “going green” and I call “waking up.” I woke up 21 years ago when I decided to bring my own cloth bags to the store. That started me on a personal journey of a life of less plastic….This is a collection of stories from people who have been inspired to start; to make different choices about how they live, what they buy and what they do for work. If you add it all up you can see that a lot of change is happening and it’s happening all over. My hope is that you will connect and resonate with the stories that I’ve collected and, if inspired, add yours.

In fact, I’ve created a forum on DailyLit where you can add your own stories about the moment you woke up and changed the world.

Happy Earth Day!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Question of the Week: The Most Beautiful Place on Earth?

In honor of National Earth Day, DailyLit asks you this week to describe the most beautiful place on earth you’ve ever seen. You can enter it here.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Susan Danziger of DailyLit Celebrates National Volunteer Week with Catchafire

Here’s the post I wrote as part of Catchafire’s Powerful Woman campaign in support of National Volunteer Week. Catchafire is one way to give your time and skills to a cause you love:

I feel honored to have been selected as one of the “20 powerful woman doing pro-bono work” by Catchafire. I love that Catchafire benefits both not-for-profits and social entrepreneurs as well as the volunteers who can give to a good cause and hone their skills in the process. That’s exactly what happened with DailyLit, the company I founded and run.

DailyLit is based on a simple idea: great literature, inspiring stories, and pieces of knowledge delivered in short installments by email (for free) according to your own personalized schedule. For busy people like you and me who may have little time to sit for hours reading, DailyLit makes books accessible (and unintimidating) by delivering a series of emails to your inbox which adds up to entire books.

DailyLit is enriching the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by fitting great classic works such as War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice into readers’ busy schedules. It’s sparking new ideas with daily lessons from some of today’s leading thinkers such as Seth Godin and Tom Peters. And then there are the unexpected benefits: it is making books available for free to those who can’t afford to buy them; it’s giving access to books to elderly people who can’t leave their homes; and it’s creating access to great literature for the blind who have the technology that enables their email to be read to them.

But what continually surprises me is how DailyLit has enriched my own life. I’ve met the most amazing people from readers to authors to innovative entrepreneurs. I’ve traveled the world, from Charleston to China, speaking about what I’ve learned. And I’ve been able to develop my previously non-existent technological skills.

This has been my story — by giving a little, I’ve gained a lot. You may want to give it a try.

DailyLit’s Question of the Week: Books for the Next Generation

This week’s question of the week is: “If you had only one book to pass on to the next generation, what would it be?” You can post your book here.

Thanks to The Guardian UK for the inspiration behind this week’s question.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Off to the London Book Fair gearing up for “The Great Debate”

I’m off shortly to the London Book Fair.

In case you’re based in London or planning to go to the London Book Fair, I hope you’ll join me this Monday when I’ll be introducing “The Great Debate: Will Publishers Soon Be Irrelevant?”. It should be a lively event with a star-studded list of speakers debating the proposition, “All that matters are authors and readers: publishers will soon be irrelevant.” Speakers include: Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and former CEO of Macmillan; Cory Doctorow, award-winning author, editor of Boing Boing, publisher, blogger, and activist; James Bridle, publisher, editor, writer and technologist; and Andrew Franklin, Publisher and Managing Director of Profile Books, one of the UK’s leading independent publishers. Although the event itself is free, note that you need to register for The London Book Fair to attend the debate. You can find out more about it here.

This debate is part of The Publishing Point (a community of publishing professionals excited by industry transformations and sharing ideas about the future) and was organized in cooperation with Intelligence Squared (the global forum for live debate, dedicated to creating knowledge through contest). Many thanks to Bowker Identifier Services for sponsoring this event.

Hope to see you at the debate — and come say “hi!”