Authors Electric

When writers get to the stage of writing fiction about the problems of writers, it is generally a sign that the time has come for them to get out more.   Dan Rhodes, however, is so monumentally pissed off with everything to do with publishing, and so good at writing comedy, that his new novel, “Sour Grapes”, published by Eye Books, is fantastic. Every gripe that writers vent to one another about publishers, publishing, literary festivals, money (or lack of it), and the pretentions or inadequacies of other writers, is given the full comic treatment.   Publishing’s greatest renaissance man, Scott Pack, acquired the book for Eye Books, claiming that it is his swan song as a publisher, partly because he is as tired of the whole game as Rhodes himself. What a book to go out on. Some of it is outright farce, like the very best of Wodehouse or Waugh, while beneath the surface the author’s boiling fury has been honed into ice picks of satire, the targets of which anyone who has la...

Another book recommendation for anyone who likes to read about writing and writers. “Self & I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition” by Matthew De Abaitua. Almost anyone who came of age realising that the only thing they wanted to do with their lives was write will find something moving, funny or frightening in this memoir of a young writer from an entirely non-literary family wading out into the swamps of intellectual snobbery and potential poverty in search of the elusive uplands of literary success. The USP for this particular story is that young Matthew was employed by Will Self, a novelist famous for being a terrifying mixture of drug and drink fuelled intellectual rigour, Hunter S. Thompsonesque japery and, some might say, literary pretension. The book is marketed as being a real-life "Withnail and I" – and it certainly fulfils that brief, but it is also a serious look at why on earth so many of us are willing to risk starving to death in order to be free to...

Thsi is an expansion of something I posted on my personal blog this month. I wanted to post itagain in part because not many people saw it there, and in part because it's the best news I've had in a long long time! It's funny how things come at you out of the blue. This month, a surprise but wonderfully welcome announcement has turned my writing plans upside down. A while ago I entered a "first lines" competition on the Harper Collins website Authonomy for a bit of a laugh. I entered the first line from The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes, a line I've always loved:  "It's nearly midnight and I've watched Agnieszka die 103 times since I woke."  Mine was one of 1208 entries. Anyway, this Tuesday I discovered, when someone posted this link on my Facebook wall , that I'd won. (this image, by the wonderful photographer and my long-time collaborator Veronika von Volkova , perfectly captures the atmosphere of The Man Who Painted ...

Once upon a time you wrote something, passed it round your friends/family, edited it, looked up a few agents and/or publishers in the Writers and Artists’ Year Book, sent it off and hoped for some interest.   It was all very simple.  But things aren’t like that any more.  Most new writers workshop their stuff on the internet and many of them will opt to become an ‘indie’ author, publishing their work as an E-book and possibly opting for a paperback with Create Space or Lulu.  They network like mad on the internet and hope for some interest.  That’s also relatively simple.  But ..... The world of independent publishing is becoming ever more complicated as traditional publishing houses realise the potential of this new ocean of talent. Some of them are trying to hoover up would-be authors, offering expensive publishing packages that have attracted a lot of criticism, others are using the E-book world as a slushpile, to cream off the top.  Harper Colli...