Authors Electric

Slippery stuff, Time.  Aarrgghh it’s my time of the month again! No not that one, shame really as I rather like waterskiiing, being towed on skates by dogs, parachuting and all the other pastimes enabled by the purchase of a box of Tampax. I mean my monthly Authors Electric blog post day, viz and to whit, today. It’s frankly terrifying how quickly that day comes around, and it’s speeding up all the time. Tampax are wonderful - you can do stuff like this! Time is funny stuff, infinitely flexible – unlike most things, it speeds up as we age. On Christmas night, as a child, it seems like a lifetime until Christmas day will come again, but now, it hardly seems worth putting the decos back in the attic before they’ll have to be lugged down again. Weeks fly by. It always seems to be Thursday. Time sprints when we have a lot to do and a tight deadline, or something fabulous happening, but then it drags, such as when you are waiting in Accident and Emergency. Note to sel...

A very 'traditional' book. Among the many writing jobs I've undertaken in the course of a long career, I've sometimes reviewed books in a ‘professional’ capacity. I was writing for reputable magazines and newspapers and they paid me. Not a lot. But it was one more way of staving off penury.  Mind you, even there the times are a-changing. A well published (but by no means wealthy) writer friend told me how he was asked to review an autobiography of a Very Famous Person for a popular newspaper, on the understanding that no money would change hands. ‘We thought you’d be honoured!’ they said. He told them that the day Asda or Tesco were honoured to supply him with free food would be the day he’d work for a big commercial organisation for nothing. Most of the time, book editors would – and still occasionally do - ask me to review a particular book because they've seen something in my professional experience which lead them to think I might be interested in i...

Image via http://9gag.com/ Post by Kathleen Jones Getting your book reviewed is one of the most difficult aspects of publishing a book - whether you’re doing it yourself or through a publishing house.  We’re all eager to have our books noticed and recommended to the lovely readers we hope to entertain, inform or intrigue.  Magazine and newspaper review sections have contracted over the past few years, so sources of hard-copy review are hard to find and usually closed to independently published books.  But, at the same time, Cyber-reviewing has expanded into outer space and beyond. Amazon and LoveReading encourage us all to rate and review the books we’ve bought, and there are other dedicated readers’ review sites - the vast Book Blogs and GoodReads   are the biggest, with Kindle Users Forum   not far behind.   And then there are all the thousands of private book blogs all chattering away like mad about books - and not just the ones that appea...