M A N T E X N E W S L E T T E R Number 39 - December 2000 Best-sellers of the Year ----- ISSN 1470-1863 ---- ** Seasonal Greetings to Everyone! ** 0----- 26 Golden Rules for Writing Well Here's one for your Xmas stocking! It's a list of guaranteed hints for better writing. FREE to you, and a smile thrown in as a bonus. http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/rules.htm 0----- 'XML for Web Designers' Extensible Markup Language [XML] allows web designers to define their own tags for the content of pages. So, you can haveor or tags in addition to the usual HTML tags. It will be particularly useful for people working on big documents or multiple pages which need a common structure. Once the tags are applied, you can display the documents in any way you wish. This is being tipped as the Next Big Thing in web design. Details at - http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/martin.htm 0----- Xmas Books - The Best of 2000 Stuck for gift ideas? Why not try some of the books which have become best-sellers at our site during the last twelve months. ** Best in the USA - Writing Guide Kate Turabian's 'Manual for Writers of Term Papers' is now the de facto standard guide to academic writing in the USA. It covers everything you will need - from undergraduate to postgraduate studies. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/turban.htm ** Best in the UK - 'Writers & Artists' A clear best-seller this year has been the 'Writers & Artists Yearbook' - which offers details of publishers, agents, editors, literary services, prizes, and lots more for those writers who want to promote their work or just get published. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/black.htm 0----- Windows Tip - 50 Fonts Maximum Ideally, you shouldn't have any more than 50 fonts in the main FONTS folder. Any more than that seriously hurts performance. Even 50 fonts means slower operation and fewer resources for other programs than, say, 30 or 20 fonts. If you want more fonts, you should keep the others in separate folders. You can use the Control Panel to choose which fonts are in your system. 0----- Academic Writing: best-sellers in 2000 'Writing your Doctoral Dissertation' is a practical guide to the preparation, research, and writing which goes into a postgraduate project. It also contains useful tips from former candidates who have survived the experience. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/brause.htm 'Doing your Research Project' is now in its third edition - a sure sign of its success in delivering clear advice on the gathering, organisation, and writing-up of information. Written for social sciences, but the approach is universally applicable. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/bell.htm 0----- Mobile phones create best-seller! Text messages via mobile phones are now circulating at the rate of 700 million a month. This explosive new technology is spawning a new language - fuelled by the fact that messages have a maximum length of 160 characters. That's an average of twenty-eight words. This in turn has pushed 'WAN2TLK: The Little Book of Text Messages' into a best-seller. It's a text-messaging dictionary for every make and model of mobile phone. Over 1000 abbreviations, 'emoticons' and their meanings guarantee the reader pick up lines, witty replies, and scorching romantic exchanges. Another stocking filler! It's ridiculously cheap - only 99 pence with Amazon's discount. [Keep the URL all on one line.] http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/185479678X/mantexinformatio 0----- Authors: Don't Give Up Trying This story should give hope to unpublished thriller writers everywhere. 'Postmortem', Patricia Cornwell's first novel (1990), was rejected by seven publishers before Scribners bought the manuscript for $6000. For 'Point of Origin' (1998), the ninth in the series featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, Cornwell reportedly received an $8.5 million advance. Scarpetta's has become one of the most distinctive voices in recent crime fiction. Source: BookEnds http://www.bookends.co.uk 0----- 'Futurize your Enterprise' David Siegel is a web design guru whose 'Creating Killer Web Sites' became an international best-seller. This is his big follow-up on e-Commerce. He argues that anybody who wants to succeed in the digital economy needs to ditch old business methods and embrace new ideas. What are they? Well, mainly give your customers what they want - not what you want to sell them. And if you want to be *really* successful, be prepared to gives things away. His ideas can occasionally be Utopian, but this is already another best-seller. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/siegel-2.htm 0----- FREE downloadable guidance notes The most popular FREE guidance notes this year at the Mantex site have been ** Writing Skills - a Bibliography http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/bib1.htm ** Essay Planning - How to Do It http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/plan.htm ** Common file types - explanatory notes http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/t171/t171-05.htm ** Information Technology - a Glossary of Terms http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/glo.htm 0----- 'Email Marketing' This is one for experienced email users - not beginners. Marketing guru Jim Sterne shows you how to plan sales campaigns and advertise using only email. The secret is to avoid spamming. You also need a product or service which people actually want. http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/sterne-2.htm (c) Copyright 2000, MANTEX All Rights Reserved PO Box 100 Tel +44 0161 432 5811 Manchester Fax +44 0161 443 2766 M20 6GZ UK www.mantex.co.uk If you like this newsletter, PLEASE FORWARD IT to friends and colleagues. New subscribers should register at the following address -- http://www.mantex.co.uk/newslet.htm Please retain the copyright and subscription information. It may be posted, in its entirety or partially, to newsgroups or mailing lists, so long as the copyright and subscription information remains. If you have any requests, observations, or items you would like to be included in our next issues, just mail us at -- news@mantex.co.uk You receive the MANTEX newsletter because you subscribed to it. If you wish to unsubscribe, go to -- http://www.mantex.co.uk/newslet.htm News-39-December-2000 ISSN 1470-1863 The British Library