Authors Electric

It's not looking good for your latest submission... OW. It hurts. Someone, some stupid, bigoted, illiterate, stuck-up barsteward, has rejected your writing. HOW VERY DARE THEY! Quick, get onto facebook, get some lurve from fellow-writers who will understand your agony. ‘Just had a rejection from ‘Crappy Ezine’, so upset! Doubting my entire life’s work. About to set fire to my pile of typescripts. ☹’ Friends zoom in with verbal chicken soup for your infected soul. ‘Ignore them, they are jealous of your genius!’ ‘Never heard of it!’ ‘Editor probs only publishes their mates! Sod them!’ ‘I think you’re brilliant, strong, talented, you don’t need them!’ All hoping you'll not have to say the same to them. Yeah, right.  Yes it does hurt to have the outpourings of your inner being, carefully crafted into art by hours of self-scarification, sent back, regardless of how many famous authors we are told were also rejected numerous times . In fact it’s harder to be rejected now ...

Meet the future DON'T FORGET THE WORLD BOOK NIGHT GIVEAWAY! SCROLL DOWN!           With World Book Night just behind us, we've all been celebrating the published word in all its glory. But in a few years' time, I reckon, what bricks and mortar bookshops that remain will all be little kiosks: you'll go in, search and order using a touchscreen (which will be swamped by adverts put there in the last dying gasps of the legacy publishing system), then have a coffee while the nice lady behind the counter prints off a paperback on the Espresso Book Machine out the back, or transmits an ebook to your tablet PC. If chains exist at all, they'll be chains of franchises run by the online booksellers.           I think I'm havin' one of me mystic blasts here. I'll stick a tea towel on my head and dangle a couple of shower curtain rings from my ears. Let us gaze into the crystal ball (well, the goldfish ...

Don't you flash your close-ups at me, matey       I wasn't sure what to blog about this month.       After a quick and slightly upsetting look at my sales, I thought I might talk about the unpredictable nature of bookselling. After all, hits always, always come out of the blue. Aside from exhaustive efforts to boost word-of-mouth, and/or saturation media coverage, there's nothing anyone can do, for certain, to sell a title. If there was, the nation's publishers would never have printed an unsuccessful word... [insert raised eyebrow here]...       No, that's a total downer.       I thought maybe I should talk about the way the new Kindle, the little 'un, seems to be taking the mickey with its screensavers. All those close-ups of pens and typewriter keys and printing blocks. It's as if the cheeky whatsit is sitting there saying "ha ha, look at all this old tech, you don't need them...