Authors Electric

“Kingston Connections” is a three year project about storytelling. It is a joint venture between Kingston University , The Rose Theatre, Creative Youth and the local council. The reason I bring this up is that in amongst their extensive programme of talks, debates, projects and performances, I am appearing on a panel for a discussion entitled “Becoming Your Own Publisher”, which might well be of interest to readers of this site. My role on the panel is to talk about where ghostwriters can fit into the whole process. I was recruited for the project by the redoubtable Dr. Alison Baverstock, who not only runs an extremely well respected MA course on publishing at Kingston University but is also a prolific writer on matters pertaining to publishing and is the author of “The Naked Author”, by far the best book so far on self-publishing, (although ironically published in the traditional manner by Bloomsbury). The talk is happening on Monday 24 th June at 5.30 p.m. in the Cultur...

On the 9th of January it will be the 90th anniversary of the death of Katherine Mansfield - one of the icons of 20th century literature.  She died from tuberculosis, a couple of months after her 34th birthday, leaving behind 4 collections of short stories and a huge mass of unpublished journals, letters and fragments of fiction. Strange things happen after the death of an author.  They either sink gracefully from view, or their work develops a life of its own, marching forward into a future the author could never have imagined, read by people in bizarrely different circumstances, finding meanings they never consciously intended.  In Katherine Mansfield’s case, her husband, the editor and critic John Middleton Murry, was so full of guilt at the way he’d treated her when she was alive, he made it his life’s work to preserve and publish everything she’d ever written. His obsession with her ruined his three subsequent marriages and created a poisonous legacy for his...

     Within the world of blogging, we’re mature about self-publishing. We know to look beyond the term 'self-pub' or 'indie' and to judge a book by its quality.      But elsewhere, all is not so enlightened. When self-publishing is discussed on, say, the books blog of the Guardian newspaper, readers leave comments like this :      ‘Self-publishers are the literary equivalent of those mad people on the auditions episodes of TV talent shows. Every self-publisher I've ever come across has been operating at this delusional standard. These onanists are the enemies of literature, and a centuries-old heritage of the published written word, people who, ultimately, have an utter self-obsessed contempt for the reader, whether they realise as much or not...'      Onanists? Oh no you don’t. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated rant. It’s what happens whenever a national newspaper runs a piece that (pardon me) touc...