We’re excited to announce that BookMachine.me, the new people discovery site we’ve been working on for the past year, has made it to the semi-finals of the Startup Showcase at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.

What does that mean? Well, if we get through this round, the site will be presented to leading lights of the US publishing industry in New York. We hope BookMachine.me will become a great visual tool that helps all you talented publishing-types out there to find each other online and collaborate on new projects, and this is a fantastic opportunity to spread the word.

If you’d like to help us get to the final, please head over to the TOC site and rate us, we’d really appreciate it. Voting closes tomorrow (Friday) so there’s not much time left!

Vote here

The site was backed with seed funding from the British Council, and you can check out the story behind BookMachine.me over on their site.

We’re also happy to see fellow UK startup Valobox reach the semis: they were featured at our Publishing Now event with City University back in 2011, and these guys are definitely worthy of a vote too.

BookMachine.me is currently in private beta, but if you’re signed up to our upcoming Brighton, NYC or Unplugged events, your invite will be on it’s way to you very soon. We’re looking forward to your feedback.

Here’s that voting link again, thanks folks!

Dig out your Ladz On Tour t-shirts: Beloved Glasgow indie Cargo Publishing has announced a jaunt up north for the third year of its Margins book and music festival, expanding its cavalcade of novelists, poets, indie and folk musicians, and other assorted drunks to encompass, for the first time, Margins Aberdeen. The festival’s inaugural northern leg will see it take over Woodend Barn Arts Centre in the rural town of Banchory – around a half hour drive from Aberdeen city centre – from 31 May to 2 June.

Yeah, so the apocalypse didn’t happen after all and we’re back for 2013, and hello again, and [SEASONAL PLEASANTRY NOT FOUND]. In even more Earth-shaking news than the Mayans anticipated, however, the end of 2012 has brought with it word of an occurrence almost as rare as a planet-destroying cataclysm: A new novel from Thomas Pynchon, the iconic, near-mythic American author whose output over the past fifty years has, until now, averaged slightly fewer than one and a half novels per decade, publishing seven in total since 1963. (If you’re keeping track, that means that he’s averaged more guest appearances on The Simpsons over the past decade than he has published novels per decade over his entire career.)

Following last month’s announcement that author and Fellow in English Literature at Cambridge University Robert Macfarlane would chair the judging panel of the 2013 Man Booker Prize – an announcement made with an angry sideways glare and a rueful shake of the head at Stella Rimington no doubt – the Prize has revealed who will be joining Macfarlane in his punishing, fourteen books a month prestige-a-thon over the coming weeks: filling out the panel will be Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney and Stuart Kelly.

Hey, you know who hasn’t taken all the money yet? James Bond. True, the recently released Skyfall – the 23rd of the film series featuring Ian Fleming’s most famous literary creation (sorry, Caractacus Pott, but you know it’s true) – is already the highest grossing release in UK box office history less than two months since its premiere, and increasingly looks like it could be the first Bond to break $1 billion worldwide, but what about the aesthetic purists who disdain the sorcery of the moving image and prefer to picture Bond as not looking like Daniel Craig? What about their wads of cash just waiting to be seduced by some casual misogyny?

Cast your mind back a ways, if you will – no, further back… STOP! too far back – specifically to October of this year, and the announcement of the nominees for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize’s ‘best of the best’ award, a field drawn from previous winners of the prize in celebration of 250 years of the study of literature at the University of Edinburgh and automatically preferable to the similarly styled ‘best of the Booker’ by dint of its not even nominating Salman Rushdie, much less having him win twice. No, instead, the prize has gone to Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, and if 16 was your guess on how many comments it would take before a Guardian contrarian suggested Carter’s continued popularity was down to a combination of her early death and politically correct feminism in universities, well, bully for you.

Big week this week for EL James (when is it not?): after being named ‘publishing person of the year‘ by Publishers Weekly last Friday – insert your own Simpsons reference – the author and anagram of Jams Eel, which could conceivably be a sex act featured in her next novel, saw Fifty Shades of Grey beat off all comers (snigger) to take the title of popular fiction book of the year at the National Book Awards. Since civilisation had already ended by that point, presumably the canapés at the ceremony weren’t up to much.

In a startling break from its usual cycle of Dickens-Austen-Brontë adaptations, BBC One has announced plans to translate J.K. Rowling’s post-Potter bestseller The Casual Vacancy to the small screen. BBC One Controller Danny Cohen commissioned the project following discussions with Rowling’s agent-slash-husband Neil Blair, and the finished product is expected to air some time in 2014. Given the combined global grosses of the Harry Potter films, the only real surprise here should be that it’s going to TV (and non-commercial TV at that) and isn’t the first part of a lucrative cinematic series, perhaps charting small town elections all over England, with official tie-in ballot papers for sale in stationers across the land.

Last week, Simon and Schuster US announced the new publishing ‘service’, Archway, which, for a fee of between $1,599 and $24,999, offers help to authors wanting to self-publish. The prices are tiered to include more advanced ‘services’ at different levels, all of which you can find on the Archway website. The most premium includes a social media publicist, 40 more PB copies of the book than the tier below, 5 more HB copies of the book than the tier below, and costs $5k more than the tier below.

The reactions to this news do say it all, so I’m going to put a few here:

Hey publishers: I think I’ve got this whole ‘how to be a success in the digital age’ thing all figured out. It’s pretty simple, actually: all you need to do is maintain a cultishly adored, critically acclaimed daily webcomic for close to a decade, supporting yourself along the way by selling fans of your comic merchandise that is as smart and funny as the strip that inspired it. Then, once you’ve got all that just about sorted out, you can launch a Kickstarter for the project of your choosing and watch as your loyal fanbase takes it to its goal of $20,000 within three and a half hours, taking it to nearly nine times said goal within a week.