The Internet isn’t just transforming the world of professional publishing, it’s opening up a whole new world of self publishing, too. Sites likeWattpadhave become hubs for people wanting to share their homespun fiction. One of the benefits of so much fiction being shared digitally (Wattpad says it sees over 150,000 new works uploaded each month) is that trends can be spotted, telling us about what’s on the minds of creative people out there....

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times before becoming published. Several of Isaac Asimov’s stories were rejected, never sold, or eventually lost. Agatha Christie had to wait four years for her first book to be published. Madeline L’Engle’s masterpiece A Wrinkle in Time faced rejection 26 times before willing the Newberry Medal. Chicken Soup for the Soul received 134 rejections. Marcel Proust was rejected so much he decided to pay for publication himself....

The Next Web are currently exploring the wilds of Finland and today we are inside Rovio’s headquarters in Espoo, taking a look behind the scenes of one of the world’s biggest mobile gaming companies. Earlier we reported that Angry Birds is now being downloadedover one million times a day, recently passing the 250 million download milestone. The company also announced that it is to release an egg-themed cookbook, and we have had the chance to take a look at the culinary masterpiece known as “Angry Birds: Bad Piggies’ Egg Recipes”:...

If you’ve ever been usingPulse, the customizable feed reader for iOS and Android, then found yourself stumbling onto something that you’d rather read later, you’ve been out of luck. Until now. We’ve just spotteda new featurecalled Pulse.me that will allow you to save articles for a later time by sending them to a customized, curated Pulse.me page that you can access from your desktop (via the Pulse.me site) or mobile device (via the app)....

Pummelvisionpulls in your Flickr photos to create fast-paced video montages of your collections that are published to Vimeo and YouTube. And Flickr isn’t the only service. Tumblr, Facebook, Dropbox and DailyBooth can all be imported and turned into mini-movies. This free web app gives users a series of options for photo collections and it allows different folders of images to be selected. As an example, by choosing to make a video of your Facebook photos, Pummelvision enables you to create a video of all Facebook photos or just the pics where you’ve been tagged....