How does one prepare a cup of Darjeeling Tea?
Take 1 level teaspoon of pure Darjeeling Tea in each cup. Nothing for the pot. Pour water, immediately after bringing it to a furious boil. Brew it for 3 - 4 minutes.
A perfect cup of Darjeeling is ready.
If Broken / Fanning Grades of tea is used, ½ teaspoon of tea would suffice. In case milk or sugar is to be added then the brewing time has to extend to about 5 minutes.
The quantity of Tea and the brewing time can be altered according to personal preferences.
If you don't read Joe Konrath's blog, "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing" you must not care about books, ebooks, good writing, humor, insight and any of those kinda things." ... Formats and gadgets come and go. But the world will always need storytellers."
" ... As writers, we would all like to think that our work has inherent value. The blood, sweat and tears that we leaked all over the page should, we tell ourselves, be valued by others as much as it is by us.
But the price that the public is willing to pay has little to do with any sense of inherent value; it is directed by what price the market will support. When it come to deciding what price we put on our ebooks, it is not sufficient to think about our concept of inherent value."
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| Leo Tolstoy, Age 20, 1848 |
Job Description: Leader of Kindle and Print Book Editorial
Amazon.com is looking for a seasoned executive to lead our Kindle and Print Book Editorial Team responsible for developing the vision for furthering Amazon’s position as a world-class book seller, and leading a team of Editors in the execution of that strategy. The Director of Editorial is a newly created role responsible for the end-to-end Editorial vision for Amazon.com Books, he or she must have deep experience interviewing high profile authors and celebrities, and reviewing and creating compelling book content across all genres of Books, from fine literature to science fiction. The Director of Editorial works with customers, publishers, authors and the press to ensure a best-in-class book experience for Amazon.com and its customers.
The key strategic objectives for this role include:
1) Develop a 5 year vision for Amazon.com’s Editorial voice. The strategy will incorporate existing Amazon metrics on book sales and customer segments, shifting patterns in customer shopping and online behavior, industry and competitive trends and will ultimately become the road map for how we talk with customers, authors, illustrators, publishers and the media.
2) This leader will help innovate toward a better book buying experience. He or she will establish a best-in-class content experience, as measured by increased number of customers who purchase, the conversion rates at which existing customers purchase from us, increased customer engagement with us, and increased exposure in the media.
3) This leader will innovate and develop new models for connecting with customers, helping customers connect with content creators, stimulating customer engagement with Amazon, identifying new and emerging sub-genre’s of books to introduce customers to, and constantly seeking new ways to use metrics and data to increase the likelihood of success.
The Amazon.com Books team interacts with over 100 million customers, 40 million books, across 30,000 publishers at any given time. As book format options continue to evolve, and book publishing becomes increasingly easier for writers, customers look to Amazon to navigate the myriad Books available and help them find the exact book they are looking for. The Director of Editorial plays a critical role in connecting customers with books in as seamless manner as possible. The Director of Editorial is responsible for an Editorial vision that touches millions of customers and billions of revenue per year.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree is required.
- 10+ years of relevant book experience.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Existing relationships with the media, top authors, and publishers.
- Tremendous editorial credibility with readers, content providers, and the media.
Preferred Qualifications
The ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience creating high profile book content, and is considered an influencer by readers, writers, and their peers:
- Creative, forward thinking leader with proven ability to innovate.
- Experience using data to drive decisions.
- Has hired and developed teams of at least 5.
"The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.
A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.
All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate."
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.He showed us how the brain wants to believe in the visual, filling in the blanks at times when it decides it knows what's going on, but it can be fooled. I really can't do his performance justice here, so I'll ask you to find a way to see him live. He's so very good.Check out his Ted Talk here.
Equally exciting was the V.axess test facility. It may look like one big climbing gym to you with one wall full of holds any climber would love to spend the day ascending, but there are many more types of testing and training that take place there. In fact, some is so leading edge, it's confidential and I can't write about it.
As Chris spoke with me, I got a better idea of what he and his team work on: innovation of current and classic products, improving something as well known the karabiner or GRIGRI, as well as introducing new solutions driven by their team and current clients' needs. One of the most important "products" they provide, is training to their distributor network, who then in turn train those who sell Petzl equipment. 
Here at LeWeb11, there was a very fun party last night at Renault on the Champs Elysee. I wore my fur hat and Blue Santa wore his too. This is me with Santa next to his new Renault. Wish I had one for Christmas and an apartment in Paris would also be nice too Santa!
On Nov. 16, literary types will put on their evening wear, gather in a Manhattan ballroom and clap politely for the presentation of this year’s National Book Awards. It’s the publishing industry’s biggest awards ceremony — and its best excuse to party — but it remains a subdued affair. Last year’s jolt of celebrity came from a jeans-wearing Patti Smith, whose “Just Kids” won the nonfiction award. Far more typical was the fiction prize, which went to the little-known “Lord of Misrule,” by Jaimy Gordon. It would have been a shocking choice if the National Book Awards weren’t known for this sort of thing. They’re awards for insiders.
A radical "perfumier" or perfume maker named Christopher Brosius has made a fascinating palette of perfumes of everyday, non-floral smells. He runs the shop CB: I Hate Perfume, with the link here. 
Check out these amazing volumes from Juniper Books. They do very custom designed books, just about the most hardcore hardcovers you will ever see.
There was a session for Entrepreneurs which featured a number of great brand new and some more seasoned entrepreneurs. In particular, I really appreciated the advice of some of the women who suggested getting a co-founder. It's perfectly "duh" advice on one level, but you have to hear it to go ... "Of course!" 
I think it was a discussion between the brilliant Katie Rae of Tech Stars and fabulous Pam Reeve of The Commonwealth Institute. They gave the best simple advice about how to pitch, how to hire and how having a co-founder makes it easier for VC's to get a sense of who you are and who they are investing in. Ladies, a little redundancy please, both in your servers AND in having a partner to help run your business. 
Dear Customers,
Today we're announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers — as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebook store offers such a service.
The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library features a wide array of popular titles, including Water for Elephants, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and Fast Food Nation – plus award-winning novels such as The Finkler Question, motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, biographies and memoirs including Kitchen Confidential, and Pulitzer Prize-winning books like Guns, Germs, and Steel.
We’re adding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Prime membership at no extra cost — Amazon Prime remains just $79 a year, which gives you free two-day shipping on millions of products, plus unlimited instant streaming of almost 13,000 movies and TV shows.
With e-books now making up about 20 percent of sales for many big publishers, it’s essential for bestseller lists to include them in order to give an accurate picture of what is selling. The Wall Street Journal will start running e-book bestseller lists starting this weekend, following a move by the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) earlier this year and USA Today in 2009. But there is something unique about the WSJ‘s e-book lists: They are powered by Nielsen BookScan, which has not publicly tracked e-book sales until now.In July she addressed the ebook / bestseller list issue here in a piece called Hitting Online Bestseller Lists is Key for Ebooks' Success.
For Barbara Frankie Ryan, 19, a graphic design student in London who recently curated an exhibition of zines at a boutique there called Tatty Devine, the Internet and handcrafted publications exist in tandem. She runs a popular fashion blog and also makes a series of zines — although she said she wasn’t even aware of the rich history of zine culture when she started creating them in her bedroom at the age of 15.
Instead, she was looking for an outlet for her drawings and innermost musings on popular culture and romantic crushes. And she wanted to be able to experiment. While Web sites come and go, in another sense the Web is eternal: tidbits can be searched and found when you least want them to be. That can be inhibiting.
“I’m becoming more aware how permanent and accessible things are online,” she said.
Ms. Ryan also said zines have an air of exclusivity: they are like other artifacts that were never intended for mass consumption or distribution, like a scarf knitted by a friend, a sketch or a cassette tape filled with handpicked songs.
“I like the idea that I’ve only made 40 copies, and only 40 people will see it,” she said. “It’s really easy to reveal a lot about yourself, and so this is a way of getting control back, and I find that quite comforting.”
These days, travel is all about packing light. If you can’t fit it into a carry-on bag, then chances are you don’t really need it, right?
Not so if you’re Kyle Durrie, proprietor of Power and Light Press and driver of a refurbished 1982 Chevy step van, dubbed the Type Truck. Since June of this year, when Kyle set off from her Portland, Oregon home, she’s traversed the country, visiting cities and towns large and small, sharing her love of letterpress printing.
The idea to take her art on the road emerged during the summer of 2010, when she toured with her boyfriend and his band.
Leonard recalled that one of the major reasons for beginning the Hogarth Press was to publish small books that would otherwise have little chance of being printed by established publishing companies—small volumes that “the commercial publisher would not look at” (Woolf, Leonard 234). The majority of Hogarth authors were a part of the Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle—Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West—and they were allowed to escape from the unpleasant pressures of editors and publishers.Of course the notion now that “the commercial publisher would not look at” writers like T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, or Virginia Woolf sounds completely crazy. But escaping the pressures of the editors and publishers in 1917 sounds more than reasonable, even to the present day.
