Authors Electric

  The world never tires of telling us that we're not Real Writers now and we never will be.  In the beginning, we all were Too Young...when we dreamed of writing books like the GOATs we loved. Then, when we'd written scores of stories or poems and had finally chiseled our own voice and style, the rejections began coming in. We encountered a chorus of form rejections convincing us we weren't Real Writers. And the charge was echoed by everyone we met: if unpublished, we couldn't be Real. In time, against all odds, we actually sold a book to a traditional publisher or to a small press. Either way, the initial rush and sense of validation crashed: the book had a limited press run, appeared on no bookstore shelves, gathered almost no reviews, and sold seven copies. The next book did not better, leading our publisher and agent to conclude they'd been wrong: we weren't Real after all. We were dumped. But even if our books enjoyed limited genre success, strangers lost i...

Love her or loathe her, Ms James certainly pushes buttons, doesn’t she? The recent #AskELJames Twitter Q&A had some interesting questions posed to the author, my favourite being from @skepticosaurus Will you be rewriting the book from Stephenie Meyer's point of view next time? Or this one . One wonders whether her publishers were expecting this kind of reaction or whether they expected her legions of fans to produce a flash-mob of adoration and publicity. I’m sure there were a lot of people praising the woman, but you never hear about all the nice stuff, do you? That doesn’t make news. But #AskELJames does - even on ITV ! Here's the full hashtag thread. So what is it about certain people – certain authors – that polarises opinion? EL James, JK Rowling, even Stephenie Meyer? They don’t write literary fiction, no, but neither do a lot of other authors and it doesn’t matter. We laugh, criticise and castigate. Are we jealous of their success or money? Maybe some ...

Recently there’s been quite a lot of handwringing about the internet’s effect on “deep reading”, and about the so-called “ADHD Generation”, who supposedly can’t concentrate on anything longer than a tweet or Facebook update. If that is indeed so, then it’s obviously bad news for all authors – but is it true? There’s a sense in which it’s hard not to sympathise with this doom-laden scenario. After all, the internet makes a wealth of information available at your fingertips, and in order to process and absorb even a fraction of it you have to be slightly selective. Surfing the web entails an awful lot of grazing and skimming, not to mention a degree of online promiscuity: one leaps onto a webpage, quickly scans a few sentences, and then – if not sufficiently entranced – hotfoots it out of the virtual door and over to the next page. Hyperlinks make that process even more simple; it’s very easy to get distracted when a juicy new page is beckoning enticingly. Why, there’s even a n...

This time last year I sent a tweet that said ‘after so long ghostwriting, this book’s for me’. I was preparing to self-publish my first novel. In the sunny land of tweets, I was keeping up a front of jolly emancipation. Behind the scenes, all was frantic. I’d done a last edit that turned drastic. I was pleased with it but my first advance reader bawled me out for my robust treatment of reincarnation. Although we’re now great friends, this was not reassuring. I had no clue how to market the book, but if I aimed at the wrong readers there’d be hate mail. I was blogging about it here and there, attempting to sketch my multilayered story in a thumbnail. Each time it sounded like a different book. And as for a back cover blurb? I was totally failing to write one that grasped the novel satisfactorily. But flap copy was a detail because I had no front cover. I was designing roughs and hated the way they were going. Even if I was going to use a designer (which in the end I didn’...

Phenomena like the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy are a constant fascination to me. What they seem to show is that no one has any idea at all why some books take off and some don’t. Quality doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Crap novels become best sellers, wonderful novels become remainders. The big publishers throw money at some of their titles, and they still bomb. Word of mouth is meant to be king, yet everyone I know who has read Fifty Shades etc (or claims to have done so) is lukewarm. How many sold? Twenty million? Thus I now crave your indulgence as friends, real and virtual, to name two books by two authors you won’t have heard of, and give you tasters of their work. This is done, naturally, with their full permission, and I have absolutely no commercial interest in either of them. One is a friend called Margaret, the other a friend called John. John’s book is a police procedural called No Place for Dinosaurs, and the other a weird and wonderful shor...