Authors Electric

Amazingly, this year is Authors Electric’s 10th anniversary (the picture is a screenshot of our all-time page views). A huge thank you to everyone who has been with us over the years, past and current bloggers and our lovely readers - we would not exist without you! For our tenth anniversary post, we thought we’d get our three founding members together to bring you this glimpse of a distant past, when ebooks were a rude word as far as our publishers were concerned. Please welcome to the virtual stage Katherine Roberts, Susan Price and Debbie Bennett. *polite clapping and a couple of wolf whistles* KATHERINE: It all started in 2011 at a secret location in deepest Oxfordshire, where two prize-winning authors got chatting about their books going out of print and the general state of the publishing industry. SUE: I think both of us arrived early for the Scattered Authors’ conference at Charney Manor. So we sat in the sunny garden, with swifts screaming in squadrons from the chimney pots to...

When writers get to the stage of writing fiction about the problems of writers, it is generally a sign that the time has come for them to get out more.   Dan Rhodes, however, is so monumentally pissed off with everything to do with publishing, and so good at writing comedy, that his new novel, “Sour Grapes”, published by Eye Books, is fantastic. Every gripe that writers vent to one another about publishers, publishing, literary festivals, money (or lack of it), and the pretentions or inadequacies of other writers, is given the full comic treatment.   Publishing’s greatest renaissance man, Scott Pack, acquired the book for Eye Books, claiming that it is his swan song as a publisher, partly because he is as tired of the whole game as Rhodes himself. What a book to go out on. Some of it is outright farce, like the very best of Wodehouse or Waugh, while beneath the surface the author’s boiling fury has been honed into ice picks of satire, the targets of which anyone who has la...

    Scully Ashes and the Highwayman  A couple of weeks ago, I finally published Scully Ashes and the Highwayman and Other Stories. The book began, before lockdown, with a publisher's brief. They wanted a book, so many words long, for children aged roughly 8-10. But, specifically, they did not want the entire story spelled out in the text. T o test and develope children's comprehension of a piece of writing, some aspects of the story were to be unmentioned, so the readers had to work out for themselves what exactly had happened. Usual in writing for adults, but not so much for 8-10. Not the easiest of briefs, I thought. Aynock and Ayli The Black Country An idea for one story came to me immediately. I come from the Black Country and, growing up there, was often told 'Aynock and Ayli' stories. This is the Black Country pronunciation of 'Enoch and Eli' which were once typical Black Country 'chapel' names. The stories were of a kind which were -- probably sti...

I have been a snoopy fan since my teens. Who could resist the comical and quirky beagle? The creator Charles Schultz gave the little dog and his bird friend Woodstock a friendship  we can all identify with.  If we have friends and family we are fortunate. Over the years I have had many posters on my wall, books in the bathroom, and when my children were old enough they loved him too. There’s nothing like a bit if snoopy wisdom while you are on the toilet! My friends would think it odd  but always came back laughing. This is my favourite image and sentiment and one that is apt for us all today.  We are in dark days in the world but don’t forget that friendship and love mean a lot. So let’s keep looking up because it really is the secret of life!  

  Dragon's Hoard In my blog offering last month, I wrote about my first experience of a real-life book signing, and added my little tongue in cheek list of what to do, and what not to do in preparing for such events.  https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2021/10/book-signings-dos-and-donts-by-joy.html It was well received, for which I am most grateful. But I had made a ‘booboo’ in my first published version of said blog. An inexcusable one. I had fallen into that well-known and tricksy homophone trap. I had used the word HOARD to describe a crowd of people, when of course what I meant to say was HORDE. It was duly pointed out to me by a writer friend and we laughed, because in some ways either word worked in the context in which I was writing. The HORDES might well have appeared at my book signing, in order to stock up on piles of my books, which they could take home to HOARD. (It didn’t happen, sadly!)   It got me to thinking about homophones… Homophone: a word th...

  Please excuse... a wry look at an often-appearing word in writers’ Facebook chats... Here’s something I wrote earlier – actually in 2015, but the theme still recurs today, more than five years on... back then, I began some notes starting with... I was about to write a blog post, when procrastination (often associated with depression) occurred: the carpet was covered in cat hair, and a better use of time would be to hoover the entire downstairs. And the cat tray also needed attention … then, I read this: ‘ Procrastination is the practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones.’ The decision (to fetch the vacuum cleaner, use it throughout the house downstairs, and proceed to renewing the litter in the cat tray) was definitely correct: initially, I’d paused only to read up   procrastinating on Wikipedia. Because these writers’ tales of its seductive powers was becoming irritat...

Interesting article in The Author magazine (Autumn 2021) about the secondhand books market, which I've suspected for a while might be competing in a significant way with the new books market from which authors and their publishers traditionally get paid for their work. According to the article, the estimated size of the secondhand book market in the UK is likely to be worth as much as £500,000,000 (a cool half billion), which is apparently around 20% of the market for new books. Looking at my personal book purchases this year, I'm actually surprised is it isn't more. Granted we have had a remarkable year, with both bookshops and libraries closed to the public during lockdowns... but would this really make much of a difference to the proportion of secondhand book sales compared to new book sales? After all, both types are readily available online from Amazon and other retailers. Any estimate of market share no doubt depends if you count ebooks as books, and - perhaps more i...

  I’m writing this towards the end of October. A few days ago, I was standing on the shore of Derwentwater on the Keswick side, looking across at the mountains and feeling my soul expand. Feeling welcomed. Feeling that I belonged. That’s what mountains do. Very often, people talk about how mountains make them feel insignificant, transient. I’ve never felt like that. I feel a strange sort of kinship, as with friends so close and so trusted that it’s as if their arms are around me, words not needed. We know each other. I don’t want to ‘mount an assault’ on them, put spikes in them so I can climb up and ‘conquer’ them, that would be inappropriate and insulting; I just want to visit, to be with them in silent communion. I’m hopeless on heights, start to wobble if my feet are more than six inches from the ground, so I duck out when it comes to going up lighthouses, steeples and the like, but I have braved cablecars, including one with a rotating floor, in order to roam about on Mount ...