Authors Electric

Enginesoptional, Redbubble, 'We Fall Only To Rise.' Long-sleeved t-shirt   Earlier this month, my AE colleague Debbie Bennett posted an amusing (but saddening) blog about the threat posed to writers by the many people, in Debbie's words, 'upload[ing] thousands of low content bits of tat a day' . Much of the tat clumsily ripped off from others. Ripped off from us . As Amazon's bots and human staff check everything uploaded for copyright infringement and other crimes, the rise in low-content tat means that it takes longer for all books published through them to be approved: so the shameless intellectual theft of a few makes indie publishing harder for us all, even when our material is legit. I was reminded of another threat to all us hard-working, and mostly under-paid, writers and artists: the much vaunted AI or Artificial Intelligence. One of my brothers told me about a Polish fantasy artist named Greg Rutkowski who, it seems, is being persecuted and ripped ...

  Being a sucker for children’s books, I’m often drawn to those shelves in a bookshop – only to wonder how many well-established authors of a bygone era would have a chance of being published today. Take Enid Blyton; her stereotypical characters, mediocre writing style and gloriously un-pc assumptions about class and nationality would surely send her straight to the bottom of any slush pile. Yet 50 years after her death, her books still sell in their millions worldwide. Why? Because despite all these shortcomings (which earned her plenty of criticism even in her own lifetime), she knew how to craft a cracking good story, whether it be about a mysterious tree that played host to different magical lands, or about groups of children solving mysteries and going on adventures. She was, in short, a genius.   Blyton’s books will never achieve ‘classic’ status though because they aren’t ones you’d pick up as an adult to enjoy. Children’s books still in print half a century and more af...

I want to talk about magic. I’m not personally particularly magical: my wishes rarely come true, I have yet to discover the secret of eternal youth and I can’t fly though I have always really, really wanted to and I lack even the most elementary skills of turning raw ingredients into delicious and nutritious feast for the senses.   Even with all these inadequacies, however   I am proud to stand up and boast my credentials as a somewhat inept   practitioner   of fundamental magics, the simple fireside spell casting of the story teller.     There is something arcane, mystical and almost supernatural about the telepathic power of text.   The way in which through story we can live a million lives in a million different places: the ideas we have in our heads, the worlds we dream of and the invisible people we talk to as we go about our daily business are conveyed through the magical medium of words from our brains to those of our readers. Its not tel...

Today I was thinking of all the things I love about being a writer. One of them is that even the very best writers recycle themes, ideas, phrases, even plots. I am not going to claim greatness, but to prove my ecological credentials, here is a blog post I wrote some years ago. Nothing has changed in the interim, or at least nothing that changes my views on these: ten reasons I like being a writer. 1. As an author you can lie in bed with your eyes shut claiming (sometimes legitimately) that you are not dozing but plotting... 2. Cafe Coffee and croissants post JK Rowling are a morally justifiable, if not a legally acceptable, expense. 3. You can still work in your dressing gown/birthday suit/wellies without anyone lecturing you on ‘inappropriate workplace attire’ or indeed horrific taste/cellulite. 4. You can still feign shock at parties when nobody has heard of you: ‘Oh but I always thought you were very well read...’ or ‘well I suppose my books are rather demanding....

The problem with writing a best seller is that then the pressure really is on to follow it up. Some authors do succeed: the seventh Harry Potter book reportedly had sales of 11 million during the first 24 hours, beating book six by 2 million sales. The series has come to an end, but eyes are once again on J K Rowling this month, with her first adult book due out on the 27 th.   Can’t say I’d like to be in her shoes as there are doubtless going to be a lot of people out there hoping to see her fail, and I suspect there will be a lot who run it down, regardless of its quality. Yes, trying to follow up a best seller must be a tough task. While Rowling has kept on writing and each of her books so far has outsold the previous one, some authors become literary one hit wonders - Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty spring to mind, although to be fair their authors had little chance for a second crack of the whip:   Anna Sewell died five months after publication of her masterp...