Authors Electric

This month has delivered another hard knock as regards the realities of life with a small publisher. I’m talking about book reviews, not on Amazon or Goodreads or the fabulous efforts of book bloggers (to whom I'm eternally grateful), but the world of the main-stream press, or the bits of it I thought would be accessible to the author of a small but perfectly formed (though I say it myself!) piece of Scottish historical fiction. Print copies don't come cheap I like to think neither myself nor Linen Press took anything for granted as far as reviewers were concerned.   Before Blink was published we made a list of potential review media from the general (Guardian, TLS, Scotsman) to the more niche photography journals. Rather than send review copies unsolicited, each of the reviewers  was sent  (as were many personal contacts, bloggers and bookshops)  book, author and cover info. I was buoyed up by the fact that we got replies from several large circulatio...

It's a well known fact that dogs prefer Bach. Yes, really. They've done studies on it. When I was surrounded by noise I longed for quieter, more tranquil surroundings: how much easier it would be to concentrate, I thought. How much more productive I would be ... Well, dear reader, it turned out that when my wish came true, that wasn't the case at all. I found that I actually missed the background noise. And without it, the need to grimly enforce a bit of concentration on what I was doing evaporated: without the background distractions, ironically I became more easily distracted. I tried to artificially reproduce it by turning on the radio. Music stations didn't always play selections I liked, and the chat ones were a disaster as I found myself listening to them rather than working, and during phone-ins often shrieking outraged retorts at it. Playing CDs wasn't much better as I tended to slow down and listen to the music - well, it was stu...

One of the great things about the self-pubbing revolution is the re-appearance of many out-of-print books and the opportunity to get reacquainted with past favourites without breaking the bank by having to pay through the nose for battered seen-much-better-days secondhand copies … Equally exciting, is when the enthusiastic response to the re-appearance of those books then leads to some terrific new fiction being produced – Caroline Akrill’s The Last Baronet being a great example of this. Like many other readers, I was a huge fan of her teenage and Young Adult fiction during the seventies and eighties, and rather sadly assumed that since then she had more or less given up writing activities. Well, the good news is that she is not only back, but on top form – and at least a part of the reason is down to self-publishing. To cut a long story short, a couple of years ago, after finding that her books weren’t available as eBooks I contacted her asking (well, demanding really) that she...