Book unites professor, hoops legend

Article in the Daily Pilot about the new book by Raymond Obstfeld and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They will be at Orange Coast College on Feb 28 at 2:00. Kareem will speak, then do book signings.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld

Raymond Obstfeld, author of our debut novel, published his latest non-fiction, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance . It is available now. Raymond and Kareem are doing regional book signings in February. We'll list them here when we get the dates.

Getting a writing contest launched

The mechanics of launching a writing contest seemed to be pretty straightforward...at first. Due to circumstances beyond our control, the contest announcement was pushed up two weeks. That crash project pretty much drained our spare cycles, but we got the press release out on January 21 for release on January 24th. The time consuming part was working out the rules of the contest, finding judges who are willing and available, and getting the website updated to accept both the fee and the electronic submissions. Given the paper flow in the office, we will soon be going to electronic submission for all subs. Our current challenge is figuring out how to get the contest announced at the various writing conferences.

Meanwhile, we're wrapped up in cover design and copyediting for the first two books. We hope those will go to press in March.

Greetings to the blog world

Here's where we'll post information about the development of Iota Publishing, a start-up commercial publishing company. We expect to provide a glimpse inside the publishing world, and perhaps even entertain a little. We also expect to hear from you and learn a thing or two ourselves.