Authors Electric

  I have just read two fantastic books about the publishing world of the last thirty or forty years. The first is Book Wars – The Digital Revolution in Publishing by John B. Thompson and the second is Ahead of Her Time , an autobiography from legendary publisher, Judy Piatkus. These two, very different, authors have both managed to capture clearly the world that I have been living in for all of my working life. John Thompson is a Cambridge professor and also author of the brilliant, Merchants of Culture . His new book is an extremely authoritative account of the revolution which at one time looked like it was going to destroy the fusty old world of book publishing, but has actually ended up reinvigorating it in ways that no one predicted. When you are actually toiling at the coal face of writing, it is easy to forget just how much has changed since the arrival of Amazon and ebooks, the explosion of the self-publishing industry and the invention of new ways of publishing such a...

  Apologies for missing my slot last month. I intended to write a review of Book Wars by John B, Thompson, but didn’t have time to read it, let alone write about it. Instead, I moved house for the first time in 35 years. I had underestimated just how much time and effort would be required to condense a large family’s lifetime of possessions into a house half the size. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so physically or mentally exhausted.  It has made me realise that for the last fifty or so years, hardly a day has passed when I have not been consumed by writing, reading, researching, thinking about writing or thinking about the money that I need to earn from writing – hardly a day, literally. There has been little time for reflecting on the bigger picture. So, spending a few weeks immersed both physically and mentally in an entirely different task has been refreshing as well as exhausting. Turning out the old house inevitably caused some forgotten memories to float to ...

  Very excited to receive an advance copy of “Book Wars – The Digital Revolution in Publishing” by John B. Thompson which is due to be published on March 12th. A few years ago, I wrote fulsomely about his brilliant book, “Merchants of Culture”, and this one seems to be even more up my street. The reviewers on the back cover seem as excited as me. “As comprehensive, wide and deeply considered an appraisal of the book publishing world as one can imagine … this masterful work should be the foundation for all future thinking about book publishing …”  “extraordinary in its breadth and depth…” and so on. Hopefully I will have read it by the time I do my next post and will be able to pass on some of the Professor’s objective wisdom on the wars we have all been fighting at close quarters for the last twenty or so years.