Authors Electric

  From the Penny Dreadful to the Halfpenny Dreadfuller by Robert J. Kirkpatrick – it's my current reading and what a handsome volume! Published by the British Library, 576 pages, copiously  illustrated   indexed, appendicised, footnoted, bibliographed; rrp £50 and weighs in at a thunderous 1.6kg. It almost certainly costs more (£6.50, second class, £7.95 first) to post a single copy than the hapless author or even the publisher will expect to earn. I mention this fact not only as a thank you to Robert for his generosity in sending me this copy (and because I'm incensed by the current Royal Mail hike in parcel costs) but also as a passing reminder that every development in publishing is inextricably linked to the current state of the distribution network. As a print publisher I howl with anguish every time I do my sums and remind myself that to post a single copy of even my paperback books costs almost as much as I paid to have them printed. As an e-publisher I tr...

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there were no publishers. This may come as a terrible shock, but until only a little while ago, everyone published their own books.  When the book was first invented, there wasn't any alternative; you copied them out by hand on papyrus or animal skins, or inscribed them onto clay tablets, or carved them into rock. The modern printed paper book, as we know it,  started back in 1456 when Gutenberg turned out the first bible.  For several hundred years after that, there were only printers - no publishers, no agents. No middle-man at all.  You just wrote your book and took it down the road to your friendly printing press.   Which was sometimes operated by women! You had to have money, of course, to pay the printer, but if you knew lots of people you could do a bit of crowd sourcing and get all your friends and family to stump up the money for the book in advance and it was called Subscription Publishing. It was ...

I sporadically keep a log of what I read.  I always start off with good intentions, write them all down for a few weeks and then get caught up in other things, leaving the pages blank.  Only a few out of the thousands of books I’ve read since I left school have been recorded. But, when my mother died a few years ago I discovered among her things a series of little notebooks that were a record of her reading from 1948 until the week before she died, with very few gaps.  She was a voracious reader and had a book in her hand when she slipped into her last coma. In her notebooks she wrote the month, title and author and gave each book a star rating that reflected how much she had enjoyed it.  I’ve found it fascinating to go back and discover who were the most fashionable authors of each decade.  She also read the classics widely - particularly Dickens and Doestoevsky, but not much Hardy or Jane Austen.  Trollope and Walpole were among her favourite...

The seventeenth century Margaret Cavendish - one of the very first women writers to publish her own work -  was known as the Mad Duchess.  King Charles II is alleged to have described her as ‘an entire Raree-Show in her own person - a universal masquerade - indeed a sort of private Bedlam-hospital, her whole ideas being like so many patients crazed upon the subjects of love and literature’.  Although she lived like a nun, scribbling away in her study, so that even her ladies in waiting hardly saw her, she was still nicknamed ‘the Whore of Welbeck’.  Margaret was born in Colchester in 1623, the daughter of a wealthy gentleman. She had a very eventful life - living through the English civil war.  Her family home was razed to the ground by Cromwell's troops, her mother imprisoned,  two of her brothers killed, and she escaped to France to join the court of Queen Henrietta in Paris, where she met her husband.  She was only a gentleman's daughter, Newca...