Authors Electric

It's 3 years now since the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) first stormed the closed doors of the London Book Fair and since then the dust has begun to settle.  Although there still seems to be some bewilderment at the change, authors are now firmly a part of one of the biggest book events in Europe.  It seems incredible that it was ever otherwise.  How can you have books without authors? It's as though the mainstream publishing industry has got into the habit of regarding us at best as inconvenient amateurs, at worst just the chicken that lays the egg. Just one of the halls at Olympia. This year, for the first time, I was able to go along and I had the most incredible experience.  Held at Olympia, the Fair is absolutely vast.  So big that I got lost on a regular basis, despite having a map, and on Day One I had three attempts to find the right exit before being escorted out by a burly bloke in a Book Fair T-shirt.  All the major publishers (an...

Last year, Authoright took a big step towards concretising the changing publishing landscape by sponsoring an Author Lounge at the London Book Fair. That was a huge success, in terms of numbers at least, the room consistently sardined to the gunwhales. This year they have gone one further and launched the first ever London Author Fair (I was lucky enough to be asked to give a workshop on how to give killer talks, and collaborating with people from the other branches of the arts - you can download my notes and slides here ). Hosted at Covent Garden’s Hospital Club and mixing seminars and workshops, around 400 writers gathered together to hear industry leaders and innovators deliver a programme dedicated to putting writers, however published, at the heart of the publishing industry. Emblazoned across the venue under the visual of a fist that blended every shade of historic political activism, the Fair came together under the slogan “Writers Unite” (which was, of course, not just a sl...

          It is a huge honour to be speaking later this month at the inaugural London Author Fair , held on February 28th at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.I will be running a workshop on how writers of all persuasions can learn from two of the areas in which poets lead the way - performing their work, and collaborating with people from other branches of the arts. (I will be talking about collaboration with artists and musicians. Expect more of the wonderful photography of my long-term collaborator Veronika von Volkova )           I was a novelist several years before I was a poet. And a headstrong and opinionated self-publishing novelist (at a time when it was very unfashionable to self-publish) to boot. I had also spent years drifting around the music and art worlds, where those strong opinions on what made a successful relationship with an audience fermented and distilled and pe...

I'm incredibly proud of this book (available, incidentally, for Kindle UK here , other areas here , and as a paperback here ). It's still hard saying things like that. I feel like Richard Gere in that scene in Pretty Woman where he says "It's taken me $10,000 of therapy to say 'I am angry with my father'". Only in my case it's taken 5 or 6 years of self-publishing to say, without a whole shockwave of trepidation "I am proud of this book." I have mostly been one of those writers who, when asked about there books, will mumble something non-committal before quickly deflecting back to "and what do you do?" At one poetry night, the wonderful poet, raconteur, and performance artist Tina Sederholm , introducing the night in question, said "poets should stop apologising for their poems before they read them" and eyeballed straight at me as she spoke. In part, this has to do with all sorts of deep-seated inadequacies that are ...

Thsi is an expansion of something I posted on my personal blog this month. I wanted to post itagain in part because not many people saw it there, and in part because it's the best news I've had in a long long time! It's funny how things come at you out of the blue. This month, a surprise but wonderfully welcome announcement has turned my writing plans upside down. A while ago I entered a "first lines" competition on the Harper Collins website Authonomy for a bit of a laugh. I entered the first line from The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, a line I've always loved:  "It's nearly midnight and I've watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke."  Mine was one of 1208 entries. Anyway, this Tuesday I discovered, when someone posted this link on my Facebook wall , that I'd won. (this image, by the wonderful photographer and my long-time collaborator Veronika von Volkova , perfectly captures the atmosphere of The Man Who Painted ...

The short list for the BBC National Short Story Award has just been announced and it's a shocker!  There are no men on it... ( David Gilmour take note)  At £15,000 this is one of the most valuable prizes in literature, and it emphasises the short story's status as a literary art form.  The high value we place on the short story is a big contrast with its lack of appeal as a commercial publishing prospect.  Fewer and fewer publishers are accepting them and then only as a gesture towards their best-selling authors.  Newspaper and magazine outlets have also dwindled. But, readers like short stories and writers like writing them.  The result is a flourishing Indie-publishing scene for short fiction - not just in book form, but also in E-zines and blogs and Facebook groups.  People are reading Flash fiction on their mobile phones and downloading stories onto their I-pads from sites where you can read any kind of fiction from erotic to murderous, ...

A strange thing has been happening recently. The bookish blogosphere has been talking about literary fiction. This is a fire it would be perverse of me not to stoke, so here is a little light mix of oxygen and fuel. It started with an excellent piece by Roz Morris about why literary novels can’t just be churned out. As if to prove her point, this coincided almost to the day with the announcement that after years of writing, arguably our greatest living literary novelist, Vikram Seth, had just missed the deadline for his follow up to A Suitable Boy, A Suitable Girl, and was being pursued for his seven figure advance. Now Roz’s piece was balanced and thought-out, and made no disparaging comments about genre fiction. Nonetheless it caused a considerable flurry of ruffled feathers. This in turn led to a superb piece from Porter Anderson in which he made some excellent points about genre-paranoia and the oppression of the “business-is-business” mentality. Yesterday one of m...