Authors Electric

  The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel Well, The Fall of a Sparrow  is out at last, hip hip hooray! Officially, that is. Publication Day was three days ago.      But given that copies have been available (online at least) for a couple of weeks already, the actual date feels less significant than it used to; and since the pandemic, even insignificanter. (Yes that is now a word. I have used it.)      Because there's something missing.  Ahhh those were the days. Traditional launch of  The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst at Blackwell's bookshop, Oxford That great JOY of bringing out a book, the fizz of excitement of a launch, the wonderful opportunity for a party with friends and book lovers queuing up to your table piled high with fresh, gleaming copies which you sign away merrily, glass in your other – third? – hand … gone. All gone. It’s hard for even the most well-known authors not to feel a sense of deflation; but they at lea...

So I was talking to some of the lovely people here about bookstores, and saying how I was lucky to have a great relationship with not one but two of my local stores, The Albion Beatnik and *the* Blackwell’s , both in Oxford. And I was saying how both relationships had been forged not despite what I do online with ebooks and all kinds of things digital, but because of it. They said that’d be a really good thing to blog about, the way embracing digital can work for the author and the store. (l-r me, slam poet Lucy Ayrton, Sophia Satchell-Baeza of Dissocia , and Oxford International Women's Festival and Oxford Pride poetry MC Anna Hobson pose outside The Albion Beatnik for the poster for This is Oxford , wherein we take over Blackwell's for the night on October 18th) And I thought yeah, fantastic, and I can talk about some great shows I’ve got coming up at those stores at the same time. Only. How could I possibly talk anything else when we’re two days away from one of the...