Authors Electric

I am reaching the end of the first draft of a new novel. It is a while since I've worked on anything entirely new and I had forgotten how much I love first drafts. It also always surprises me how fast I can write one. Two or three months at the most. My technique when writing a novel is first to plan and then to get the whole thing down on paper from beginning to end. The rule is that I'm not allowed to stop - no matter how bad it gets. The plot may cease to make sense, I may change all the characters names two or three times, a character may be born during the Second World War and then become a teenager during the 1980s - but still I keep going. This is what works for me. I know that other writers work in entirely different ways. But I need to see the whole book from beginning to end before I can progress. And the process is so exciting. You can write whatever you want. No need to think about subtly, nuance, detail, research, credibility. It is fine to write as...

I am in a strange no man's land at the moment. My book came out yesterday but the book launch isn't until next week. And more importantly, a couple of articles in the national press about the book will also not appear until next week. So the book is out but it isn't. And I have no idea what to expect. A couple of friends who have no knowledge of the book world have said, 'You must be feeling pretty confident about all of this.' My response is, 'Unless you are an absolute fool, then you never feel confident about a book.' Having said all that, the omens are quite good. The book has had a lot of good publicity, the cover is great, I think. Although the book was crowd funded, it is being distributed by Penguin Random House. Certainly, it should do better than my novels did. But the truth is that 95% of books sink without trace. And this is true of good books as well as dodgy books. Even publishers are often completely unable to understand why,...

Three weeks ago Unbound, who are my crowd funding publishers, got in touch and asked me if I'd like to come to London for a day. They had organised a meeting room and lunch at The Globe Theatre for a group of authors, some of whom they publish and some of whom they don't, and they hoped I'd come. The reason for the meeting? They wanted to ask authors what they think about the publishing process. Yes, they did. They really did. Honestly. I stress this because, anyone who has been in the writing business for a while will be reading this with their mouth hanging open. When has a publisher ever asked an author what they want? I decided that I better cancel my plans for that day and get there. After ten years of not being asked what I want, I was gasping for the opportunity to say a few things myself - but perhaps even more interested in what other writers might say. The day was led by John Paul Flintoff, who is an Unbound writer, and also by Dan Kieran who is a wri...

Many articles about the book world at the moment seem to suggest that agents are under threat. Since apparently 25% of books are now independently published, in one way or another, then is there much point in having an agent? You would think that the answer might be no but, oddly, my answer at present is yes, yes and yes. Admittedly, my situation is so untypical that there is little that most people can learn from it. I am currently publishing a book which is neither independently published or published by the mainstream. Instead I have crowd funded through publishers Unbound. As Unbound are a very new phenomena, I'm learning on a day by day basis what this means, how it works. To be honest, I think Unbound are only a few steps ahead of me. What I say today might change tomorrow. But so far, unexpectedly, I have needed my agent in this process more than when I was published by Simon & Schuster. S & S are, of course, very much a known quantity. They have huge ...