Authors Electric

I came across this book in my local charity shop last week, with a title I could not resist - Publish or Die. The bargain price of 20p is well within my current book-buying budget, so I picked it up, took it home and read it over second breakfast. It turned out to be a teen title written by Alan Durant and published on Scholastic's Point Crime list in the 1990's, a few years before my first book was published. Scholastic did several of these lists as I remember... Point Horror, Point Fantasy, etc... bringing together well-respected YA authors to create what seems to have been a successful publisher-led brand. Publish or Die  is set in the offices of a small publishing house, where the heroine Calico has just started as an editorial assistant - for which read coffee-maker, slush pile reader, photocopier of manuscripts, and general gofer. Still starry-eyed with her love of books, she walks straight into a cut-throat office dispute between two of the senior editors, who di...

On Thursday, UK voters will be making a decision to REMAIN or LEAVE ("BREXIT") the European Union. I'm writing this post a little ahead of time, but already I have been bombarded by so many different 'facts' from both camps (mostly speculation and educated guesses, it seems) that I am becoming quite confused. So without trying to change your mind in any way at this late stage, I'm writing this post to try to decide what the referendum means for authors like me. 'Fact' 1: Authors are self-employed. This means we do not benefit from any kind of minimum wage, holiday or sick pay, workplace pension, or other employee sweeteners. So far I've heard that Brexit might cut wages by £38 per week , but also that Brexit could mean a rise in the wages of low-paid workers . Both of these headlines seem to be based on educated guesses working from Britain's  GDP (Gross Domestic Product) forecasts, and as far as I can work out neither outcome will direct...

This month, I bought a car for the first time in ages, trading my faithful 13 year old Renault Clio in part exchange for an eco-friendly zero road tax three year old Peugeot 107. The whole process has in the meantime moved online, so there is no signing and posting off various coloured parts of the V5 logbook, no queuing at the Post Office clutching your MOT and insurance documents to buy a pretty paper tax disc to display on your windscreen, no real MOT certificate even, although you do still get a printed confirmation from the test station. You don't need any of the paper documents any more. It's all there on a computer somewhere in the vaults of the DVLA, and changes are done instantly online. You can even check the tax and MOT status of any car you fancy on the DVLA website by entering the registration and make... which could become quite a hobby if you live on the kind of road I do, with all sorts of vehicles passing up and down at every hour of the day and night. It...

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...