Authors Electric

Fairlight Moderns Ask anyone to name a famous literary novella and odds on they’ll pick something written before the middle of the twentieth century: Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea? 1952. Animal Farm? 1945.  He art of Darkness? Back… back… way back to 1899….   And yet a quick scan of Amazon (other ebook platforms are available) shows how, in contrast, genre fiction today comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You want your sci-fi hit as a short story? a novella? a six-book box set? No problem. Literary fiction? Nope, novel-length only please.   Discussing this strange situation with some writer friends, it’s easy to see how this has come about.     Send a great manuscript in to a literary agent these days that has less than 80,000 words and you’ll be advised to go home, get your pen out and not come back until you’ve managed a respectable 90,000.   And pitch up with something less than 60,000? You won’t even get out the slush pile. As a wr...

A couple of months ago I got a bee in my bonnet about how outrageously writers are treated by many organisations who solicit for submissions.   Why ask for them and then ignore them, was my question.   Perhaps they get too many to handle?   But then why not just close their submissions process for a time until the backlog of responses has been worked through?     As Katherine Roberts said to our call for advice, ‘yes is brilliant, no is good (because you can cross that publisher/agent off your list and move on), but silence is torture’.   I was determined that we would establish a submissions process which shows respect for writers, and perhaps start a new trend out there – setting the bar higher for all those organisations who seek direct manuscript submissions.     So I asked for views on a submissions code of practice for Fairlight Books and received many helpful suggestions and comments from Authors Electric et al.   I’m plea...

What feels like a lifetime ago (but was actually only last year), I used to work in the energy sector. We specialised in selling gas and electricity to business customers.   There!   I see you turning away already.   It’s dull, isn’t it?   Before, at parties, when people asked what I did and I told them, this is what would happen: First, their eyes would glaze over, then they’d look down at their wine glass and discover they were in urgent need of a top-up, and then they would scurry away.   Nowadays of course, I can tell people I’m a writer and a publisher, and that creates an entirely different reaction.   For everyone either loves reading books, thinks they can write a book, has written a book, or knows someone who has and who needs help getting it published.    (As a little side note for my old friend, Valpy – I still don’t think I have scope for publishing Pylon of the Month, but if there are any other commissioning editors out th...

I heard someone suggest on the radio this morning, that you don’t really choose your favourite song, it chooses you.   And I wondered if the same might be said of the book one chooses to write.   I’ve no idea what makes one friend wake up one morning and decide to write a detective story set in medieval Scotland and yet another be determined to craft a love story based in modern times – I expect a psychologist could tell me.   The one thing I do know is that the choice one makes (or that is made for one!) has an enormous impact on how much of your life will be left by the time the novel is finished. I’m talking here, of course, about RESEARCH.   That dreaded beast that can be a joy, a drudge, an inspiration, a way to make new friends, or all of the above rolled into one. At the moment, I’m groaning about the topic I’ve chosen for a novel. I now have a stack of research reading material that will take me several months to get through, and I can’t seem to s...

The last few weeks since my last posting have passed by in a flash. Not just because we’ve had four seasons of weather over that time, but because we’ve been flat out preparing the Fairlight Shorts website for launch. Fingers crossed, IT Gurus (sorry – Creative Web Design Professional Gurus) and Gods of WordPress permitting, we might even go live today. Or perhaps at the weekend… Or Monday AT THE VERY LATEST… as I’ve said for at least the last ten days. For several weeks now we’ve been sifting through short stories sent to us by writers from writing groups and forums across the UK. It’s been an impossibly hard task because the quality of the writing and the stories we’ve received has been so extraordinarily high. It brings me joy to think of so many of those stories having been read between members of writing groups in all corners of Britain and Northern Ireland, shared, enjoyed and perhaps honed with honest, friendly and constructive feedback over a glass or wine, or a pint o...