Authors Electric

Let's start off with hair, since we all love our hair though we're often driven nuts by it. From (t)hair we can move on to killing our mates when they hate the books we love or don't share our craving for pasta. Luck allowing, we'll have time to share a few thoughts about ebooks. Okay! You have four basic choices for cutting your hair: 1) You can cut it yourself. 2) You can go to the cheapest spot in town. 3) You can go to an old school-style barber who's mastered all the basic cuts and charges only a few dollars more. 4) You can go to a salon and pay designer prices for a more individual and expressive look. You can shave have your pate or mow your hair down to a passable buzz cut. For anything else, though, you really should pay....top dollar to get what is best for your hair. Good, we're making progress here. And, because you're all clever, I know you'll have guessed that the same four options apply to the killing of spouses. ...

Kathleen Massara at Flavorwire did a series a while ago on the weird writing habits of famous authors. Truman Capote was a completely horizontal type who could only think lying down. John Cheever wrote in his underwear, a very common habit in these days of laptops in bed but perhaps not then. William Faulkner drank whisky. Definitely not for me that one, nor music or views thanks very much, though I love listening to radio plays & stories on BBC Radio 4 Listen Again when ebook formatting. The BBC International Short Story Award finalists are there for the taking at the moment. Vladimir Nabokov used index cards, a common one these days for early plotting, characters & ideas. Nabokov was one of those tool fuss-pots, his cards had to be of a particular type: “My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” T. S. Eliot tinting his face green to appear corpse-like is...

Hello. I'm thrilled to be here amongst so many fantastic UK authors who are also embracing digital publishing. For my first post I've been asked to say a little about me. I began publishing at the beginning of 2010 when ebooks were very much an American affair. US Amazon Kindle was well underway but ebooks were mostly PDF documents sold from websites. They were packaged with funny, box-like, mock 3D real-book images, and usually advertised with lots of scrolling, bright red, writing with a massive "one time offer" only deal of £50.00, or even more, at the bottom. I was trying to make ends meet, as you do when you've got an agent but no publishing deal and a very sick partner, working at home for a TV script transcription company. My only other regular work was as a household tips columnist in The Guardian Saturday magazine. I was asked to transcribe an interview with Tay Zonday for a programme about the future of the media. When his song Chocolate Rain w...