Later today the Iceberg partners will have what I regard as the company’s annual meeting. It has become our New Year’s Eve tradition to review the past year and lay out the key priorities for the next over sushi at our favorite Japanese restaurant (Yummyaki’s in Waterloo). The meeting runs for around two hours, after […]
One of my more closely-guarded possessions is a little green notebook. Alas, this is not an archive of the phone numbers I’ve collected from ladies over the years. Indeed, considering how much of my time this book has taken up, it’s probably one of the reasons I’m single (along with being terribly aloof). Inside the […]
The first book I read in ebook format was Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers. If you’re familiar with that book, you’ll understand why it seemed fitting (and maybe just a little ironic) to purchase it for my iPad and begin reading it while sitting and having some lunch in a food court in the middle […]
When Jacqui Tam was teaching me to write (my failings as a writer are my fault, not hers), one thing I learned was the value of music to the drafting process. I’ll elaborate more on that in future, but suffice to say I’ve had some sort of soundtrack for every book I’ve worked on. Lately […]
One of my favorite writing-related books is called Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg. As the title suggests, it’s not a book that provides step-by-step guidance on how to create works of fiction or non-fiction. It doesn’t include fill-in-the-blank outlines for your projects. And it does, as some Amazon reviewers […]
This year, the Iceberg team gave me a wonderful present: a coffee table book loaded with photos from our Tenth Anniversary Gala. It’s been a fantastic Christmas, but this may be the present I cherish the most. Writing –– storytelling –– is not some ‘gift’ that an author shares with the masses. In past, when […]
In A Daughter’s Gift, I shared a terribly sad memory of the Christmas my father no longer remembered how to sign ‘Love Dick’ on the card we had picked out for him to give my mother. With a few noted exceptions during his later years, though, Christmas was a magical time in my childhood home, […]
It was December 2003. The Human Equation had been released that October, and we’d done our first round of media and book tours. Everything was new and exciting, but the pressure was high to release the rest of the Equations series on schedule. By that time, the first four books were already drafted, but the […]
A couple of days ago I wrote about a Young Writer’s Workshop I attended when I was in high school… Grade 10 to be precise. It was held in what had formerly been Belvedere Central High School which, coincidentally, had in years previous been the orphanage where my father’s mother (Nan Barron) had resided after […]
Defense Command readers will recognize DCNS Sackville. Skippered by Commander Katya Romanov through the Martian War, the corvette made a real difference –– despite being older and less advanced than the rest of the ships of the Belt Squadron. As Ken Barron wrote in The Mercury Assault: “And, somehow appropriately, our daring corvette Sackville lost […]
I came across my decades-old copy of Death on the Ice by Newfoundland writer Cassie Brown a few weekends ago while organizing some of our bookshelves. The pages are yellowed, the cover is slightly faded, and the spine is lined and cracked. The book tells the tragic story of the death of 78 Newfoundland sealers […]
The opening scene from Whitecoat sees soon-to-be Lady Alex Smith swimming around the island of Newfoundland. She ends up floating under a cliff, contemplating her future… and possibly misinterpreting a seagull’s intentions (she is, by her own estimation, somewhat awkward). Though the book doesn’t specify where around Newfoundland this takes place, the inspiration was a […]
It’s official: the first installment of the Champions of 1941, Firebox, will be released exclusively as an ebook on Tuesday, January 29, 2013. An excerpt from the novella will go online early in January; here’s the teaser from the back of the book: When confronting a rogue Champion, an ordinary soldier’s best hope of survival […]
One of the greatest creative collaborations I’ve enjoyed over the past ten years has been with fellow Iceberg writer Wesley Prewer. If you’ve seen the Defense Command or Equations books, you’ll recognize his work… if you’ve read Seas of Sand, you’ll know it too. But Wes’s contributions don’t stop with cover images, or even written […]
A new adventure series debuts October 23, 2012, featuring international intrigue, other-worldly influence, and intense action –– all converging in Newfoundland. Whitecoat, the first novel in author Kenneth Tam’s new series, The Champions, is now available in print and ebook, and it brings the story of His Majesty’s New World home to Earth. “Champions is […]
On September 7, 2012, Iceberg Publishing hosted a very special Tenth Anniversary Gala reception at the Tannery Event Centre, in Kitchener, Ontario. Joined by approximately 80 of the company’s closest friends, Iceberg’s partners took the opportunity to reflect on the journey that had taken them to the start of their second decade of storytelling. When […]
Since 2006, readers have been following the heroes of Defense Command as they struggled against the Martian Imperium and other forces whose presence was far less obvious. This July marks the end of that adventure with the release of the last four novels in Kenneth Tam’s Martian War series –– at last, the question of […]
This summer will mark the end of the six-book His Majesty’s New World series, but readers curious about the fate of Earth and its colonized planet won’t have long to wait to find out what comes next. Iceberg Publishing will be launching the next series set in that universe this fall, and preparations are already […]
Two of Iceberg Publishing’s most popular books are now featured as New and Notable titles on the Apple US iBookstore. Jacqui Tam’s Standing Tall: A Daughter’s Gift and Kenneth Tam’s The Rogue Commodore, debuted in this position on Tuesday, January 17, 2012. “We’re very excited to start Iceberg’s ebook operations on this high note,” said […]