Authors Electric

Every month, to my surprise, I suddenly find I have this blog to write and I haven't got a clue. This month, what we writers laughingly call the pressure is even greater than usual, because I'm flying off to Berlin in a day or two, and I have other vital things to finish. Aw! It's me I feel sorry for… Sometimes, though, the suffering of other people is brought home with a bang. Julia Jones’s gruelling and frighteningly honest piece on the 9 th was a case in point. It was hard to read, and harder to digest. I left a comment because I wanted to show some solidarity, but I had not a clue what to say. Julia is wonderful, one of those people who makes one feel inadequate. I can only thank her for it. Good things can happen though. Northern Lights near Oldham Another terrific writer who has this effect on me is Mark Frankland - and he also runs a charity in Dumfries for victims of the military life. Not people who have been attacked or injured by the fo...

There's been a fair amount of silence on this site recently about the ethics of e-book publication. I haven't heard the word sock-puppet mentioned for ages, although the perennial problem of Amazon reviews and which of them to take any notice of at all clearly hasn't gone away. Why would it? We all believe, possibly with very little evidence indeed, that lots of five-star reviews lead to lots of sales. Look up Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Dan Brown, and I bet you'll find a million reviews, or possibly a squillion, but they won’t have shifted any extra copies. One of the most fascinating byproducts of the social media has been a mass outbreak of critical diarrhoea. Everybody has an opinion – that hasn't changed – but now everyone can not only express it, but get it up in lights. And the critical kind, like most forms of diarrhoea, is almost always shite. Look at the beating poor old Harper Lee's been getting over Go Set a Watchman. I happen to think...