Authors Electric

 I am the husband of Elizabeth Kay, of this parish. Her blog post the other day was about an attempt to scam her with promises of a film adaptation of one of her books. That book was, incidentally, a fairly unlikely choice from among her oeuvre, though admittedly it had the distinction that it was the only one to have been translated into Irish!   Elizabeth promised a follow-up post from me, focusing on the AI aspects, so here we are.   Before we get on to the AI, a couple of other related matters. First, the email address used by the supposed bigshot film producer, who we are calling Sheldon, didn’t look right. It was an ordinary AOL address, and we would have expected a major film producer like him to have been using something more corporate-looking. And the name of the account began with “official_” – which was perhaps protesting a little too much? He also gave us the URL for the website of his production company, which was superficially impressive – convincingly sw...

Copy-editing is the thing I hate most about being an Independent Author. It’s a grinding, methodical task that takes a lot of time and concentration and it has to be absolutely perfect, because one of the main criticisms of Indie published books is the standard of proof-reading and copy-editing.  I’m still being sent books for review that are littered with typos, punctuation and formatting errors. I don’t want mine to be one of them, but my books simply don’t earn enough to pay a professional - for a full-length book it can be as much as £750.  I can’t afford that as well as the advice of a good structural editor - and the latter, for me, is of the utmost importance. I’ve been doing the copy-editing myself, reading and re-reading, but something always slips through and I hate it!  Your eyes see what they think should be there rather than what is actually there.  And then you die of shame as soon as it’s up there on Kindle and someone points out what you’ve misse...