Authors Electric

The fight over the supremacy of ebooks or "real" books roars on. Everywhere I look (on my Facebook feed), people are arguing back forth with the same venom and aggression as mildly inconvenienced English professors in a faculty meeting discussing the proper placement of desks and lecterns. In a straight damned line, Barry! I'm tired of your hippie circle crap!  It's getting pretty nasty out there for real. Clearly, people have not caught on that I settled this question years ago . Spoiler Alert: They're both equally good but for different reasons. Despite that, recently I found yet another tiresome list of why "real" books are superior . I thought about countering each of the reasons with an equally good reason for ebooks, but that would pretty much involve copying and pasting the blog I've already hyperlinked. Instead, I want to make the case for a third format by countering most of the points listed in the article. 5 Reasons Stone T...

I’ll tell you what’s an eye-opening experience: editing someone else’s writing. As well as being a handy source of extra work on the side, it gives an invaluable insight into how the whole creative process operates. This process may be wildly different for different writers, but it’s those very differences which, when laid side by side, show you how a piece of fiction comes into being. My commissioning editor (I’ll call him my commissioning editor, though our relationship is both closer and less formal than that) recently got in touch with me to help out with a particular book. He’d had a submission from one of his regular authors, and was asking for my help with getting it right. Basically, he knows this author from long experience, knows his many qualities but also his limitations, and admits (his words) that ‘he’s never going to get this thing readable by himself’. Thankfully my editor knows me just as well, knows my rigorous approach to story structure, plotting, voice an...

The new - and the really old! I used to have a favourite independent bookstore. This was many years ago, long before Amazon was a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye and it was run by a couple of people who loved books and writers too. You could go in and chat. They knew local writers and helped to promote them. They got to know their customers and could offer suggestions. Then, one of the big chains moved in over the road with their high staff turnover, their front of shop table displays for which publishers paid handsomely and their three for two offers. When they complained, they were told ‘business is business’ and that was that. Within a year they had closed. Those of us who resolutely kept on shopping with them were clearly in a minority. Cue forward some years. I’m browsing in the big Borders in Glasgow just along the road from Central Station. The cafe – Starbucks as I remember it – is nice. Sometimes I meet people there. The store is pretty good too. Back then I often browse and...

           I think it must have been something like that.  People don't change much.         Writing was a gob-smacking break-through.  Think of it - instead of memorising all the harvest records, you could write them down on clay-tablets and refer back to them to work out, say, which fields were the most productive.  (Writing seems to have been used for record-keeping before any artistic use.)          And then - another break-through! - instead of struggling to hear the story-teller above the rowdy singing, you had the story pressed into clay, and read it while sitting quietly by yourself.  Bliss!  It was worth selling those slaves to afford it. A clay tablet with cuniform writing          Heavy clay tablets must have been a nuisance, though - difficult to hold and bulky to store - but th...

          Blott - the writer's muse who manifests as an ink-blue cat - investigates e-readers ...            I'm cheating a bit here, as Blott is written and drawn by my brother, Adam Price, and not by me.  But I thought it might give people with old and brand new Christmas pressie e-readers a laugh.           More Blot cartoons can be found, most weeks, at my blog: http:// susanpricesblog.blogspot.com /           And at my website: susanpriceauthor.com           There may even be a Blott e-book one day....