Authors Electric

Amazon has just suggested my next read should be The Handmaid’s Tale . I feel like a recalcitrant schoolchild, who’s up till now avoided reading the class book and been found out. Nothing in my buying history – Walter Kempowski’s All For Nothing , Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows  - can have pointed Amazon to this. No. It’s as if the super giant just knows what I’ve been up to and is holding me to account.      Or not up to. Because I haven’t watched a single episode of the TV version and have no intention of reading the widely widely widely publicised sequel, The Testaments . In other words, I am a complete Handmaid’s Tale refusenik. I can already see myself in the Bateman cartoon of The Woman in Waterstones Who Does Not Know The Handmaid’s Tale.    Except that I feel I do know it. Inside out, back to front, top to bottom, from here to eternity. Pretty hard not to when discussions of it fill every magazine, newspaper, even becoming, good grie...

Recently a writer friend (who it has to be said ranges widely across genres)  remarked on how people wilfully discount huge swathes of  literature because of an apparent antipathy to one particular genre. In this I count myself guilty since, pace John Wyndham in his pomp, I have pretty much avoided sci-fi all my life.  And I doubt that this throwing down of the gauntlet would have stirred me to change my ways if three sci-fi books  hadn't come my way this year, all by writers whose work I knew in other contexts and which I was eager to read. So how did I get on? Avoiding any arcane discussion of what constitutes sci-fi and its near relatives, these books were remarkably different in the style of the narrative and the worlds they created and so I think I picked a good sample for my tour of future worlds. I found The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett (recently out in paperback) a gripping read, especially the opening in which heroine Jamie  contemplate...

For those of us who are self-published authors, flexibility and control over every aspect of our product (the book) is one of the best things ever. Speaking for me, control over pricing, publishing, cover art, and the possibility of changing all of these at a moment’s notice may well prove the reason I’ll never visit the traditional publishing model again. In these past years of self-publishing, we have seen many promotional models come and go as the field expands and develops. A few years ago, the self-published or “indie” authors were few and every new strategy they devised was fresh and successful. When Amanda Hocking published her books, setting the first one at 99c and the rest at slightly higher prices, she changed the publishing world. Her books sold like hot cakes, and a new model was born.  Soon after, 99c wasn’t drawing enough readers, as the market was flooded with 99c books following Hocking’s example. More and more authors saw the benefits of self-publishing new w...