Authors Electric

Excuse the blatant attack of self-promo, but stick with me for a minute… I’m excited to share my debut novel, In the Shadows, is now available in audiobook format on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. When I self-published in March the thought of audiobooks didn’t even occur to me. I guess there’s two reasons for this: one, I’ve always assumed it’s something only “big” publishing houses offer, and two, I don’t use audiobooks myself so they escaped my thought process. Tut tut to me. In the last six months I’ve discovered audiobooks are hugely popular, and a few readers asked if this was available immediately after publishing. There are a multitude of people who want this format – be it for health reasons, because they have long commutes or because they take their dogs for long walks. A friend pointed me in the direction of ACX – an indie publishing tool via Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a very simple, self-serve website. After I uploaded the necessary details about my book, and a...

The Curiosity Cabinet started out as a trilogy for Radio 4 back in the 1990s. I then rewrote it, with significant changes, as a novel. It took a very long time to find a publisher. It was some time in the late 90s, when I was looking for a new agent, that one of them called it ‘a library novel fit only for housewives.’ I wasn’t a newcomer in any sense. I had a long and occasionally award winning career as a playwright and poet, and two published novels behind me so I could laugh it off. But it still stung a bit. Eventually, I secured representation at one of the bigger London agencies. She told me that she liked the novel, but she thought it was ‘too quiet’ to sell. Nevertheless, she sent it out to the big boys. I forget how many there were back then – certainly a few more than the current Big Five, but all the same, amalgamations had occurred and the so called mid-list was on the slide. Agents and publishers were already talking about the ‘decline of the mid-list’. One even co...

In the past few months I've had some distressing emails from friends - successful writer friends published by big publishing houses here and abroad.  One of them was a Whitbread award-winner with his first novel and the others have also won awards, as well as being very commercial - one has regularly had books serialised by the Reader's Digest. But two in particular have really made me aware of the cruel and destructive power of the contemporary publishing industry, which cares more for its shareholders than the creative egos of the authors it depends on for its income. Recently two friends have told me stories which are very similar. Both are distressed, depressed and have had their lives, their confidence - and their writing careers - damaged by the very people supposed to nurture and support them.  It's difficult not to come to the conclusion that the supposedly 'traditional' model of the publishing industry has begun to cannibalise itself. One symptom...