Authors Electric

Let me ask you something: who do you think is the most terrifying villain in literature? Mask of Him Who Must Not Be Named Plenty of candidates to choose from. Voldemort in Harry Potter , Sauron in The Lord of the Rings , the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories; or going back further in the canon, Macbeth, Iago, Edmund, Richard III (as depicted by Shakespeare, I hasten to add, before any Ricardians take me apart), Mephistopheles… These are all splendidly evil figures. But not, to my mind, the most terrifying, for one big reason: we know what they are. The reader is in no doubt, from the word go, that each one of these is a Bad Lot, and how the hero will or won’t overcome them becomes the central drama of the story. (In Macbeth’s case you could say it centres on whether the hero’s better self will overcome his dark side.)   No. Far more frightening, for m...

Image via http://9gag.com/ Post by Kathleen Jones Getting your book reviewed is one of the most difficult aspects of publishing a book - whether you’re doing it yourself or through a publishing house.  We’re all eager to have our books noticed and recommended to the lovely readers we hope to entertain, inform or intrigue.  Magazine and newspaper review sections have contracted over the past few years, so sources of hard-copy review are hard to find and usually closed to independently published books.  But, at the same time, Cyber-reviewing has expanded into outer space and beyond. Amazon and LoveReading encourage us all to rate and review the books we’ve bought, and there are other dedicated readers’ review sites - the vast Book Blogs and GoodReads   are the biggest, with Kindle Users Forum   not far behind.   And then there are all the thousands of private book blogs all chattering away like mad about books - and not just the ones that appea...