Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. What is your policy on recommending books? I have a couple of policies. Firstly, I only recommend a book to someone I know well enough where I have a reasonable knowledge of their reading tastes.  I want someone to enjoy what I recommend. Secondly, and if it is a book I’ve found useful for my writing, I will share my thoughts on it on social media. I occasionally recommend books on Goodreads . I write a weekly blog on that so if a useful book has gripped me, I will mention it there. Fiction can be more difficult to recommend, I think. Tastes differ. While I love fantasy, not everyone does. Even for those that do, there are different kinds of fantasy writing.  I always go for the humorous type rather than the deadly serious (with the exception of The Lord of the Rings , which encompasses everything. Yes, there is a deadly serious story. There is also humour. The hobbits, Pippin and Merry, make me smile, espe...

 How do you choose which book to read? Are you persuaded by a fabulous five-star review?  Or does it take the personal recommendation of a friend to convince you? Perhaps you choose a book because you have read something by the author before. Personally, I know anything by Kate Atkinson or Louise Penny are worth picking up, and Elly Griffiths’ series of Ruth Galloway stories are always a winner. some of my favourite authors But when you are confronted in a bookshop, library, or charity shop with a plethora of books by unknown authors how do you choose? Do you judge a book by its cover? What a book looks like is very important. Is the cover design eye-catching? Ultimately your first impression may lead you to pick it up, turn it over and read the blurb on the back. Then you may discard it or turn to the inside pages. Presentation, the overall look and feel of a book, can be almost as important as the words themselves. They need to complement each other. If choosing a ...

  So, confession time; I'm rather fond of Twitter. On the whole I only follow people I like or am interested in, so I have seldom been troubled by trolls or hate speech, and whenever it has managed to infiltrate, I can mentally filter it out, in the same way I do with the horrors that pop up on the television news or the front pages of newspapers, concentrating my thoughts on things that I can do something about myself – of which there are shockingly few. I enjoy the distraction of the gossip on the Twittersphere, and the feel-good videos that go viral, and I learn more about what is happening in the publishing and writing worlds than from any other source. The last few books that I have read have come to my attention from tweeted recommendations. I can see that social media has handed a megaphone to people with some pretty nasty opinions, but these people have always been there, sounding off in the pub, or berating their partners and families with their unsavory  views ...