Authors Electric

  Firstly apologies for being absent last month. I don't know where the time went to. One minute I'd got days to go before I had to write my blog, next minute I'd missed it by two days. I'm hoping it's not an age thing, more a really busy 'up to my eyes' kind of thing. And one of those things was to try and bring my children's book Rampage back to life. It was published by Usborne back in 2007 as the third book in my Beast Trilogy – T he Beast, The Reawakening and Rampage .  As publishers tend to do, they decide they are going to let your book go out of print when you least expect it. In my case it wasn't long after The Beast took top place in the 2013 Coventry Literary Book awards in the raring2read category; and Usborne were offering me as a prize in a schools' prize draw – win an author visit to your school, at The Education Show. So it came as a bit of an unwelcome surprise to get the dreaded letter giving...

A couple of months ago I blogged here about my experience of signing up with 'aggregator' Ingram Spark, recommended by the Alliance of Independent Authors. Then, a few weeks ago I received an invitation to a presentation at Ingram headquarters in Milton Keynes and a tour of their printing works at Lightning Source.  Always curious to know the path from my uploaded manuscript to the printed page I happily accepted, even though it meant a 5am start from the Lake District.  Neil, as the Book Mill editor, came with me to investigate the techie side of things. We weren’t disappointed.  Andy Bromley, their ‘front man’ for indie authors, gave a fascinating presentation into Ingram’s history and its plans for the future. Ingram was established in 1964 by John Ingram as a private company.  They started out in logistics, moved into digital content and publishing and are now going into Robotic technology.   In 1997 they acquired Lightning Source as a Print On Dema...

In the past few months I've had some distressing emails from friends - successful writer friends published by big publishing houses here and abroad.  One of them was a Whitbread award-winner with his first novel and the others have also won awards, as well as being very commercial - one has regularly had books serialised by the Reader's Digest. But two in particular have really made me aware of the cruel and destructive power of the contemporary publishing industry, which cares more for its shareholders than the creative egos of the authors it depends on for its income. Recently two friends have told me stories which are very similar. Both are distressed, depressed and have had their lives, their confidence - and their writing careers - damaged by the very people supposed to nurture and support them.  It's difficult not to come to the conclusion that the supposedly 'traditional' model of the publishing industry has begun to cannibalise itself. One symptom...