Authors Electric

Dorothy L Sayers Fabulous and dead "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.   When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.)   LINDA GILLARD Fabulous and 50-something So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinki...

Author Linda Gillard What do you like to read? Do you like to know exactly what to expect when you open a book? Or do you like to be surprised? Do you stick to favourite authors? Do you read only certain genres or do you like to try something new? The publishing industry is based on guessing what readers like to read. (I say “guessing” because I’m yet to come across any adult fiction publisher who does reader market research, apart from Harlequin, Mills & Boon.) Sales figures show what readers bought, but not what they enjoyed and there’s a difference between the two, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been disappointed by the gap between what a much-hyped book promised to deliver and what actually lay within its pages. I write fiction for a living, so I have more than a passing interest in what readers like to read. Over the years, I’ve found myself at odds with editors over this - which brings me to the thorny question of “genre issues”, a problem that has dogged many an autho...