Authors Electric

Last year, Authoright took a big step towards concretising the changing publishing landscape by sponsoring an Author Lounge at the London Book Fair. That was a huge success, in terms of numbers at least, the room consistently sardined to the gunwhales. This year they have gone one further and launched the first ever London Author Fair (I was lucky enough to be asked to give a workshop on how to give killer talks, and collaborating with people from the other branches of the arts - you can download my notes and slides here ). Hosted at Covent Garden’s Hospital Club and mixing seminars and workshops, around 400 writers gathered together to hear industry leaders and innovators deliver a programme dedicated to putting writers, however published, at the heart of the publishing industry. Emblazoned across the venue under the visual of a fist that blended every shade of historic political activism, the Fair came together under the slogan “Writers Unite” (which was, of course, not just a sl...

          It is a huge honour to be speaking later this month at the inaugural London Author Fair , held on February 28th at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.I will be running a workshop on how writers of all persuasions can learn from two of the areas in which poets lead the way - performing their work, and collaborating with people from other branches of the arts. (I will be talking about collaboration with artists and musicians. Expect more of the wonderful photography of my long-term collaborator Veronika von Volkova )           I was a novelist several years before I was a poet. And a headstrong and opinionated self-publishing novelist (at a time when it was very unfashionable to self-publish) to boot. I had also spent years drifting around the music and art worlds, where those strong opinions on what made a successful relationship with an audience fermented and distilled and pe...

When you enter any trade fair you're handed all sorts of leaflets, cards and magazines. The London Book Fair has a daily news sheet  The Bookseller Daily . On the first day, this was the front page headline: Self-Publishing, Agency Under Debate "The future of self-publishing, the new agency model and the Penguin Random House merger will be the hottest talking points at the London Book Fair, industry figures predict. Self-published authors will have a greater voice at LBF than ever before, with agents and authors coming together for the LitFactor Pitch curated by AuthorRight, while the Alliance of Independent Authors celebrates its first birthday at the fair. Agent Luigi Bonomi said: "I think we're really moving into a very different world. To date it has been a reticence, a diffidence towards publishers by self-published authors, and vice versa, and maybe this year the Cold War between these two communities will be broken by the two sides meeting face to face, a...