Authors Electric

The other day I was re-reading an old online review of a book by Olga Tokarczuk, in which I encouraged new readers to start instead with my favourite book of hers, Primeval and Other Times . When I checked on Amazon, I found it was now out of print - a second-hand copy was available for about £75 - and the Kindle edition had vanished completely. How is it possible for the best book (IMHO) by a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to disappear like this? And how can it be possible for an e-book to go out of print? And why is it that so many of the books I want to recommend to people are now available only at silly prices, or not at all? Is it just me?  My current literary enthusiasm - my wife might say obsession   - is for José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and writes in Portuguese. The first novel of his that I read was A General Theory of Oblivion , which was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2016. Ever since, I have been reading everything by...

 " ... The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."   -- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way    From Stepanie Heuet's 2019 graphic novel adaptation It's been twenty five years since I last dove into Proust. I was living in San Francisco. The Millennium was still a couple of years off. I had my first cell phone, a nifty flip device. Looking back, I see that I was living  in two worlds - at least. I stretched myself between a demanding Silicon Valley start-up job and being an over-age, doting, divorced dad to a precocious, late-in-life eight-year old.  It was no more harried a lifestyle than that of many single parents, mostly moms, but that didn't make it any easier. I had zero time for much of anything reflective, enlight...

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too. I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital. But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.  D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward. You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break. Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for a...

Amazingly, this year is Authors Electric’s 10th anniversary (the picture is a screenshot of our all-time page views). A huge thank you to everyone who has been with us over the years, past and current bloggers and our lovely readers - we would not exist without you! For our tenth anniversary post, we thought we’d get our three founding members together to bring you this glimpse of a distant past, when ebooks were a rude word as far as our publishers were concerned. Please welcome to the virtual stage Katherine Roberts, Susan Price and Debbie Bennett. *polite clapping and a couple of wolf whistles* KATHERINE: It all started in 2011 at a secret location in deepest Oxfordshire, where two prize-winning authors got chatting about their books going out of print and the general state of the publishing industry. SUE: I think both of us arrived early for the Scattered Authors’ conference at Charney Manor. So we sat in the sunny garden, with swifts screaming in squadrons from the chimney pots to...

Image Credit:  Mainly via Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One image from me. I remember years ago being at a Book Fair when someone walked past, looked at my table and said loudly to their friend, “I don’t like books”.  I so wanted to say “what are you doing here then” but judged it best not to! But it did throw up an attitude problem which worried me.  Why is it, in some circles, considered a good thing to boast about not reading? What are they hoping to achieve?    I know reading has never been “cool”. I was the typical girly swot at school. Always had my head in a book but I’ve never seen that as a problem. (I always associated myself with Velma from the cartoon series Scooby Doo rather than Daphne, and with Jo March from Little Women rather than, say, Meg March. I’ve always had a soft spot for the girls with glasses and the ones who love to write. Can’t imagine why that is - possibly the fact I am still a girl, albeit an older one now, with glasses who lo...

I mainly read books but split that between “proper” books and Kindle reading. I have a soft spot for audio books though.  My favourites are the Terry Pratchett Discworld series, which I think work well. (I go for the ones narrated by Sir Tony Robinson). When going on holiday to Scotland, a couple of those audio books will take my family and I from Hampshire to Sutherland, but we will have been entertained and had many a laugh on that trip. Then we have the joy of two more Pratchett audio books on the way home.   No matter how often I hear these, I always pick up on some new nuance I missed on previous hearings plus there is always the joy of re-hearing favourite lines.   Audio books are wonderful shared experiences too. Read a book, laugh out loud, and you’ll get some funny looks (or so I’ve been told, honest, guv).  Share an audio book and have two of you laugh out loud - not such a problem! Stories strong on dialogue work best for audio, I think. It is like e...

My first ebook Around 2007 I began to take interest in ebooks and started reading the reports of booming ebook sales. Seeing sales were increasing month on month I decided to join this revolution. So in 2011 I published my first collection of short stories as an ebook. Based on my sales I followed this ebook with others. Then came the print on demand (POD) revolution, where authors like myself and the Author Electric team could publish a physical book without holding stock. So in 2014 I decided to combine my two Anansi ebooks and release as a POD book. At first sales were slow, then they started to match those of my ebooks. Now they outsell my ebooks. This made me wonder if it was just my ebooks or if ebook sales were down generally. So I did a little research. I discovered sales of ebooks have been falling for the last couple of years. Some of the large publishers have given figures in the region of a 12% fall from 2015 - 2016. I found several reasons being suggested for this...