Taleist is for tellers of fine tales. Taleist publishes its own content, as well as helping others to write and publish theirs.
It all started when…
On the sixteenth floor of a Hong Kong apartment block, a 12 year old boy is writing an impassioned letter to a magazine. The boy reads a lot of magazines. Pocket money that will later go on Kahlua and milk in a bar called Graffiti now goes on imported copies of Time.
I can still hear the boy’s fingers hammering at his typewriter (it is 1983). The boy would later found Taleist using a MacBook Pro (it is 2010).
That letter to the TV Times in Hong Kong is the first time the boy ever wrote for publication and it gave him a taste for seeing his work in print. Later he wrote articles for the school newspaper as an excuse to meet people he was interested in. One of them was the owner of a gym called Tom Turks who thought everyone should eat at least 10 eggs a day.
Eventually the teenager started his own paper. He and his cohort taught themselves word processing in the school computer room, then called a “lab” because computers were so experimental in those dark ages.
For a while he edited the college newspaper at university, a good way to get known.
Leaving university with a law degree he didn’t want to use, the young man became “commissioning editor” of a couple of legal journals no one read.
Steven Lewis, journalist, writer, publisher and founder of Taleist
And here I am, a far less young man, the best part of 30 years after that first letter to the editor. I’m a journalist whose work has been published in The Financial Times, Esquire, GQ and the International Herald Tribune. Writing for newspapers and companies has taken me around the world; I’ve met some fascinating people; and a couple have asked me to ghostwrite books and articles about them or help them publish their ebooks.
Taleist is the point it’s all come to, the place where I get to tell stories and invite others to do the same.
This is the “About us” page and telling tales is what we’re all about.
taleist, adjective; an expert teller of tales
Our guides are factual and practical. They tell you how to do things, where to go and how to make the most of your experiences. But they’re not dry. We tell stories. Our authors have been there, they’ve had the experiences and they want to share them in an elegant way that’s insightful, informative and respectful of your time. Our authors are chosen because of their first-hand experience of the topic at hand and their willingness to share insights you can use.
Where our guides are about a place, they’re written by someone who has been there, knows the area and is able to give you an insider’s perspective.
