Authors Electric

It's midsummer, although you wouldn't know it from the weather as I write this (Spain is apparently sending us storms). So rather than yet another summer solstice blog post, I've been thinking about where we might be if you view the publishing industry as a single year. It goes something like this: JANUARY: Stone Age ~ 40,000 - 10,000 BC We live in caves. People tell stories around the campfire at night. Nobody writes them down but somebody might illustrate the most exciting ones on the cave walls. (January is a long, dark month.) telling stories around the campfire (Emeldil, CC*) FEBRUARY: Pyramid Age ~ 4,000 - 2,500 BC Europeans are still living in caves, but in Egypt they are building pyramids. Priests decorate the walls of their temples with religious texts in hieroglyphs, while further east in Mesopotamia people are writing similar texts on clay tablets using a clever pen-press language called cuneiform. Bestseller: The Book of Coming Forth by Day (Ancient...

It's taken me a long time to realise this, but now that I've been 'writing with the expectation of earning money' for over 15 years, it's increasingly obvious that a creative career is not the kind of career you can plan in a linear fashion from your first stumbling steps until some time in the hazy distance when you get your pension... that is, starting on the lower rung of an imaginary ladder and climbing to the top, where you hit the dizzy heights of your chosen career path, buy yourself a big house and a yacht, and lord it over all the minions eagerly scrambling up after you on the same worn old rungs. Ladder of Divine Ascent About the only time the ladder image might apply to a fiction-writing career is in the beginning, before you publish your first book, when there is (or at least used to be) an accepted path to publication. Many industry professionals will still tell you that it's the only ladder available, and you'd better start climbing it i...

  A guest post today, from author Katherine Roberts.           “May you live in interesting times” is a curse in some circles but, like it or not, authors today are living in very interesting times. There has been some wild speculation about the death of publishing as we know it, the death of printed books, the death of literature, the death of agents, and the death of professional authors (of which mine has been greatly exaggerated). But the only thing that’s really changed is the way a story gets out of the author’s head and into the reader’s head... the writing, publishing and distribution process, in other words. Because stories are same now as they were thousands of years ago, when cavemen told tales around their campfires at night.           So let’s take a look at how an authoress might fare in the different eras of publishing so far (this is a His...