Authors Electric

January and February are at present providing their annual mix of kaleidoscopic experiences in New Zealand and in this blog, spread over two months because it seemed to be getting out of hand, I'll be bringing some new observations on the topic of a piece I wrote last year: the great Christchurch Earthquake fiasco. But I'm also giving an account of the books I'm reading while we are away. Some of them have chimed in with so many concerns I have at the moment. Perhaps this may make the blog bitty and haphazard.  I hope not: it's meant to hang together. Sorting out a reading programme is important when you go away. You enter a temporary world offering finite, specific, self-contained experience and it seems to me that the reading experience can have boundaries to match it.  Sometimes this works perfectly. We remember some books because of where we read them almost as much as for what's in them. However, sometimes an elephant enters the room and turns it into someth...

I suppose you could say that what I'm going to write about is vanity publishing gone mad. But there is reason behind it. Two issues set this latest crazed ambition going. The first is the ubiquity of artists' limited edition prints. The urge to possess a lovely giclee print not far off original with a number to prove it and so certainly pretty exclusive, especially if it's signed just for you, makes the limited edition print a worthwhile proposition for painters. Giclee prints on sale! The second is something I first heard about when the publishing director of a major but noticeably enterprising (in a good way) publisher spoke to Writers in Oxford about three years ago now and said what they were doing to come to terms with ebooks. First, to test the market, they took some of their genre novels and put them up as ebooks for silly prices. They were amazed at the take up so they put the prices up and were still amazed. Eventually they decided that the traditional...

          If you're not careful, one of the troubles with preparing books for Kindle is being so preoccupied by making sure the formatting is right, worrying about judging the price, hoping the books look like something you intended when they are published, even sorting out which books you'll subsequently allow to rise from the dead, that you forget about the new writing you should be doing.  And when you remember, the awful thought comes that you may have forgotten how to.  I'll be talking later about which of my o/p books are slated for resurrection: now I want to mention something which came directly from my musings about them and suddenly jerked me into a completely d ifferent frame of mind.           I was looking through an old file in which I'd stored reviews dating from the 70s.  And one of them pulled me up sharply.  It was written in 1984 by one of the great names in...