Authors Electric

There's been a fair amount of silence on this site recently about the ethics of e-book publication. I haven't heard the word sock-puppet mentioned for ages, although the perennial problem of Amazon reviews and which of them to take any notice of at all clearly hasn't gone away. Why would it? We all believe, possibly with very little evidence indeed, that lots of five-star reviews lead to lots of sales. Look up Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Dan Brown, and I bet you'll find a million reviews, or possibly a squillion, but they won’t have shifted any extra copies. One of the most fascinating byproducts of the social media has been a mass outbreak of critical diarrhoea. Everybody has an opinion – that hasn't changed – but now everyone can not only express it, but get it up in lights. And the critical kind, like most forms of diarrhoea, is almost always shite. Look at the beating poor old Harper Lee's been getting over Go Set a Watchman. I happen to think...

As we're all writers on this blog, it can't be breaking protocol for me to do a preliminary review/puff for Julia Jones's new book Black Waters. It's the fifth in her trilogy – or rather, it’s volume 5 in her Strong Winds series – and it takes her into ever-deeper waters. For me, it raises the perennial question: what is a children's book? But first, boringly, I'd better declare a supposed interest. Julia has extremely close connections to Private Eye, and neither of us would relish a knocking piece in that prominent and thrusting organ. Julia is also a publisher, and her imprint Golden Duck publishes one of my own books, Wild Wood. A Firefly on a run - they're faster now! So, down to brass tacks. Black Waters, like the previous volumes, is an adventure story with teeth, sinews and muscles. Nominally about one girl’s (young woman's) struggle against the unrelenting rivalry of top-level sport, it inevitably confronts racism, greed, and what I...

W ith impeccable timing, my ebook publisher Endeavour Press just told me that my sea novella, The Devil's Luck, is going up for free on Amazon at nine o'clock THIS MORNING!      Yeah, TODAY.      They suggested I asked as many people as possible to 'buy' it for nowt, to help it up the freebie ratings. I'm not sure how that helps me , but they say it does. Optimum time for free download algorithm is as close to nine as possible, so if you're feeling bored with toast and Weetabix, please click on the url below . Failing that, do it when you've finished crunching, or any time to suit yersen. And you don't even need a Kindle, I've just learned from this magnificently useful AE site - I've put the link below for people like me who tend not to read instructions. For once, it seems, I haven't missed the boat...     Missing the boat, however, is a trick I've made into something of an art form over the years. Most spectacularly was when I had...