Authors Electric

The new novel I am writing is all about voice. The main character tells her story in the first person and the novel will either succeed or fail depending on whether her voice engages the reader or not. For that reason, I have been thinking about voice in novels often recently. It is something that I think about anyway because my teaching at Oxford is all about voice. But practice is always different to theory. The particular question I have been considering recently is - just how far can you go with voice? Where does the line fall between a voice which makes a novel which is original, interesting, engaging. A voice which really adds to the story and becomes an integral part of what the novel is. And at what point do we move away from all those positive things to the moment when a voice becomes off putting, hard to read, distracting, annoying. Of course, there is no answer. All we can do is look at the books which work (for us) and the books which don't. When I'm te...

Alice is one of our newest members, and will be posting regularly on the 4th of each month - but a bit of a malfunction on October 4th resulted in her first post being up only for a couple of hours. So - as it's an interesting post, full of useful information, we're re-posting it here today. What makes a book or e-book sell? That’s a question that every publisher, agent and writer would Alice Jolly like to be able to answer. Of course, at present, due to the rise of e-books, the answer is changing daily. But still you would assume that the big publishing houses must have an extensive knowledge of who buys books and why. But they don’t. How can they? They might notice that the sales of a book or e-book rise after an article in the paper, a radio interview, or a flurry of tweets, but still they have no means of knowing anything much about the people who bought the book, or why exactly they bought it. Amazon, of course, claim to know which books we all lik...