Authors Electric

When you enter any trade fair you're handed all sorts of leaflets, cards and magazines. The London Book Fair has a daily news sheet  The Bookseller Daily . On the first day, this was the front page headline: Self-Publishing, Agency Under Debate "The future of self-publishing, the new agency model and the Penguin Random House merger will be the hottest talking points at the London Book Fair, industry figures predict. Self-published authors will have a greater voice at LBF than ever before, with agents and authors coming together for the LitFactor Pitch curated by AuthorRight, while the Alliance of Independent Authors celebrates its first birthday at the fair. Agent Luigi Bonomi said: "I think we're really moving into a very different world. To date it has been a reticence, a diffidence towards publishers by self-published authors, and vice versa, and maybe this year the Cold War between these two communities will be broken by the two sides meeting face to face, a...

Preparations for The London Book Fair  (April 15 - 17) are in full swing with news of seminars and events gradually going up online. The London Book Fair, Earl's Court I was planning on giving the Author Lounge a wide birth this year. This tiny space furnished with toadstool-like perches and featuring hard-sell salesmen seemed to embody all that was wrong with the author/publishing industry relationship. It looks like it's all change this year. The Author Lounge has its own Seminar Room   with a schedule of talks, discussions and events and authors are even being pitched to on the front page of the Fair website. Alongside digital - another backwater a couple of years ago. Times they have changed. Full details are still coming through but already announced are: E to Eternity  The future of digital  hosted by Kindle Direct Publishing Are bookstores here to stay?  Sam Husein, Chief Executive, Foyles. The challenges facing di...

A first time, young, independently published, UK novelist who makes it to the top of the Amazon best-seller lists has to be pretty special.  One of the E-book phenomenons of the past 12 months has been Sophie Nicholls ’ novel The Dress,   and, as I'm just about to produce my own first novel on Kindle, I was fascinated by her success and wondered what I could learn from her approach. Sophie is a poet with a collection ‘ Refugee ’ recently out from Salt publishing, and she has previously published a novella ‘Ruby Slippers’ , but The Dress is her first novel.  I read and reviewed it for the IEBR site and was very impressed by the quality of the writing and the story.  It seemed to me (and she has 75 reviews on Amazon to prove it) that it was equally as good as many of the big commercial names stacked up in Waterstones and WH Smith;  Kate Morton, Victoria Hislop, Adele Geras, Joanne Harris - Sophie’s novel stands up well against them. Yet Sophie didn’t both...