Authors Electric

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...

This was the month of Zoella the Vlogger, (that’s “video-blogger”, for those who haven’t been following the story.) For reasons too complicated to be bothered with, I was aware of this book’s approach before the full page article in the Sunday Times explained that it was the fastest selling new release from a debut author since the beginning of time. The article was a sort of expose, telling shocked readers that Miss Sugg, (Zoella’s wonderfully Dickensian real name), had had the help of a ghostwriter to pen her debut novel, “Girl Online.” A languidly affronted Will Self was quoted as saying that he did not regard Zoella as a writer “in the sense that I’d regard Marcel Proust or Franz Kafka as one.” The following morning my in-box was filled with requests from eminent journalists asking if I had any thoughts on the whole shocking scandal. Always eager for a bit of free publicity I stared hard, (it has also of course been a triumphant month for that greatest of all starers, Paddin...

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...