Authors Electric

Gone are the days when the haunting of second-hand bookshops was one of my chiefest pleasures. Many of them have gone out of business, often because of the pandemic, and those that remain are so much more trouble than searching on AbeBooks. Besides, although we have bookshelves in practically every room of the house, they are all full. My wife is agitating for a “one-in, one-out” rule, as is already in force for my T-shirts. Old-fashioned books of paper and ink are still around me all the time, but rarely get a look-in, even the ones I really want to read. However, there is (obviously) no question of getting rid of them, and new ones do still occasionally reach the house by some kind of osmosis. A crisis may be brewing.  Most of the reading I do nowadays is on my Kindle, and the changes to my reading habits are more profound than I would have expected. For one thing, I regularly have about twelve books on the go at once. I would never have done this with physical books. To have a ...

The other day I was re-reading an old online review of a book by Olga Tokarczuk, in which I encouraged new readers to start instead with my favourite book of hers, Primeval and Other Times . When I checked on Amazon, I found it was now out of print - a second-hand copy was available for about £75 - and the Kindle edition had vanished completely. How is it possible for the best book (IMHO) by a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to disappear like this? And how can it be possible for an e-book to go out of print? And why is it that so many of the books I want to recommend to people are now available only at silly prices, or not at all? Is it just me?  My current literary enthusiasm - my wife might say obsession   - is for José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and writes in Portuguese. The first novel of his that I read was A General Theory of Oblivion , which was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2016. Ever since, I have been reading everything by...

Getting published can be daunting. This post is written for every writer who has felt the sting of rejection and it about to give up. Maybe you have dreams of publishing an important novel, a trilogy of Sci-fi adventures or a heart wrenching memoir; but your efforts haven’t gotten very far. Did you ever think that perhaps your first book might be something different.  Sometimes you have to start small. A great place to begin is with shorter work.  I’ve always written poetry, but I seldom sent it to magazine. My poetry was private. For me poetry is a form of shorthand, a way to express and record my feelings for later reference. My poems are usually written in free verse.  Another type of short form writing I enjoy is flash. And when I think of flash, it has to be short, very short. I’ve published 50 -word stories, and 250-word stories and 700 -word stories. Much of my work is inspired by true life events and observations and thus is considered Creative Non Fiction (CNF). ...

There’s nothing more deflating for a writer than finishing a project, meticulously preparing it for publication, and releasing it to little reaction. Publishing new titles has been especially difficult during lockdown , depriving authors of the “chance to make a splash” with exciting book launch parties, as Griselda Heppel puts it . But even in the good ol’ pre-COVID days, visibility in the form of book readings, launch parties, or media attention just wasn’t there for everybody. Particularly for debut authors without publishing connections, it’s incredibly difficult to get anyone to pay attention to you and your new project. This is something that we’ve been thinking about a lot at Reedsy (if you haven’t heard of us, I wrote a post for Authors Electric last January sharing what we do and talking about our various free resources). We hear from authors a lot, and most of them get in touch with us to ask how they can solve the problem of not getting enough interest and eyeballs on their...

Publishing independently doesn’t have to be stressful. Many aspiring authors rely on networks of fellow writers like Authors Electric to grow their knowledge of the publishing world and its multiple facets. Because we all know the labours of self-publishing don’t stop at writing — they also involve editing, designing, and marketing your book.  But not everyone has a support network at their fingertips. Many talented writers have no idea where to start with self-publishing (or even traditional publishing) and need information on some of the more technical aspects of making your book available to the public. For anyone looking to learn about publishing, I’m here to tell you a bit about Reedsy’s marketplace and free educational resources.  What is Reedsy ?  Reedsy is a digital marketplace connecting authors with publishing professionals (editors, designers, illustrators, marketers, and even ghostwriters). You can browse the handpicked profiles of some of the most experience...

I was starting to teach a course on The Short Story for my WEA students when I noticed a reference on Twitter to  Not Here Not Us , Short Stories of Syria (2018) by Bronwen Griffiths. Having an interest in the recent history of the country, and thinking I needed something to add to my usual fare of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Shirley Jackson et al I sent off for a copy.  When it arrived I had just started teaching the course and I read on the cover that it was a collection of short stories, flash fiction and poems about the Syria crisis. I mentioned the book to the class, and they asked me what flash fiction was. I said that I didn’t know but that I would find out for next week. This involved reading the book and so I did. Reading can sometimes be for me an extraordinary experience, rather like a trip, and so it was with this book. The pieces with titles like ‘Sniper’, ‘Death and Survival’ and ‘Syrian Spaceman’ flowed together in one unbroken reading st...

A recent article in the Guardian said research had shown that reading time spent on books has doubled in the lockdown. I am an avid reader and an auto/biographical narrative researcher in adult education, so I decided to examine the books I had been reading and whether they had helped me in any way to cope with the isolation the pandemic has caused The first, Apeirogon by Colum McCann, a biographical novel set in the midst of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, was long and challenging. Although it gave me lots to think about, it failed to take off and like its many-sided title left me with more questions than answers. The second, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, was better and it was surprisingly easy for me to be taken inside the mind of Tambudzai, a young girl in Zimbabwe, and to encounter her struggles with her uncle and her parents, and her friendship with her cousin, Nyasha, as she begins to find herself while the country is simultaneously freeing itself from colon...

Reading great and good literature, I thought, could help us regain our balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium as a result of illnesses, disabilities or traumatic events encountered in the course of an ordinary life. I had read Montaigne, Dante, George Eliot, and a number of more modern authors like Jay Griffiths on the subject and I wanted to test the idea that our emotional health could benefit from reading and discussing novels and poetry in a learning situation and that this could directly affect our wellbeing. Mark Edmondson in  Why Read?   (2004) says that we can construct ourselves from novels, poems and plays and that like Proust, writers can get the reader to feel what they feel.  I set up a project with adult education students to test my idea. The course was free and took place over five weeks with students advising me how to plan it. One came up with this: 'Reading can enhance our life: reading poetry/novels can lift us out of our...

“You have exactly one minute to catch the bus!” the woman at the airport told me. “Is there enough time?”, I asked, alarmed. “Oh yes, it’s just outside. Go out and towards the left.” I crammed my wool cap on my head, put on my jacket, and ran outside with my luggage cart. Outside, a parking lot filled with cars, three people smoking in a group, and a few buses could be seen. But, I couldn’t see my bus and within seconds, the icy wind made my eyes water and my glove-less hands tingle. As I circled around the parking lot, my anxiety took over, aggravated by the cold. What if I don’t find the bus? What will I do? I didn’t have enough spare cash…what if the bus leaves me behind? I had just landed at Reykjavik and had pre-booked a bus to pick me up at the airport and drop me off at the hotel, which was about 45 minutes away, through an online website. Fortunately, the bus was waiting, and when I finally figured out that “left” meant the left side of a road outside the parking l...