Authors Electric

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,...

In my last post I provided some information about new independent publisher Unbound. That raised questions which I am now going to attempt to answer. I should stress that, although I am currently going through the process of publishing a book with Unbound, I am not an expert on this subject. My decision to publish with Unbound was largely based on a gut feeling. In reality, I should probably have looked into other options in more detail. I am working things out as I go along so please continue to ask questions and correct me. We are all in a learning process here. Here are some answers to questions which were asked. How does Unbound different from Kickstarter? I don't really know that much about Kickstarter but what I do know is that you can use it for many different kinds of project. Unbound only publish books and e-books. Also, I'm not sure to what extent Kickstarter screen projects which go up on their site. What I do know is that Unbound are like a traditional...