Authors Electric

Uncomfortable Statistics for traditional publishers - Good news for Indies -            The Big 6 are not so big any more.  According to the latest figures for 2013, Penguin Random House came top of the table with a 24% share of the market, but its sales were down £342m (15%).  All the others - Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan, Bloomsbury, and Simon & Schuster were also down.  Their total share of the market was only 59% - down from 70% in 2001.  Is this a sign that their dominance of the book trade is fading?  I think it is.  But they won't go down without a fight, so - more turbulent times ahead. The end of Constable and Quercus           The hope of many 'mid list' and 'literary' authors dumped by the Big 6 for commercial reasons has been a group of valiant and well-respected independently owned publishers still willing to take on authors for...

Thsi is an expansion of something I posted on my personal blog this month. I wanted to post itagain in part because not many people saw it there, and in part because it's the best news I've had in a long long time! It's funny how things come at you out of the blue. This month, a surprise but wonderfully welcome announcement has turned my writing plans upside down. A while ago I entered a "first lines" competition on the Harper Collins website Authonomy for a bit of a laugh. I entered the first line from The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, a line I've always loved:  "It's nearly midnight and I've watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke."  Mine was one of 1208 entries. Anyway, this Tuesday I discovered, when someone posted this link on my Facebook wall , that I'd won. (this image, by the wonderful photographer and my long-time collaborator Veronika von Volkova , perfectly captures the atmosphere of The Man Who Painted ...