Authors Electric

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...

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too. I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital. But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.  D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward. You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break. Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for a...

I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff online lately about keeping, discarding and re-reading books. In the era of ebooks and online reading, the first two may no longer really be relevant – I have no idea how many books my kindle will hold and even if it did get full, I can store the rest in the cloud on my Amazon account. Not that I entirely trust the cloud (I’m too old. I grew up with the idea that clouds were just weather!). What happens if there’s no internet access, or worse still no computer or no power? What then? It’s a bit like online bank accounts, really; how do you prove that little nest-egg in an online account ever existed if you have nothing to show for it? Which is why I always have a passbook even for mostly-online accounts, so I have something physical with numbers on that proves the existence of my money. I expect that if the internet crashes – if one morning there is no world-wide-web, or maybe the power goes off and doesn’t come back on – that I will have more important ...

I mainly read books but split that between “proper” books and Kindle reading. I have a soft spot for audio books though.  My favourites are the Terry Pratchett Discworld series, which I think work well. (I go for the ones narrated by Sir Tony Robinson). When going on holiday to Scotland, a couple of those audio books will take my family and I from Hampshire to Sutherland, but we will have been entertained and had many a laugh on that trip. Then we have the joy of two more Pratchett audio books on the way home.   No matter how often I hear these, I always pick up on some new nuance I missed on previous hearings plus there is always the joy of re-hearing favourite lines.   Audio books are wonderful shared experiences too. Read a book, laugh out loud, and you’ll get some funny looks (or so I’ve been told, honest, guv).  Share an audio book and have two of you laugh out loud - not such a problem! Stories strong on dialogue work best for audio, I think. It is like e...

“The Awesome Adventures of Poppy and Amelia” would never have happened if it hadn’t been for lockdown. In those first couple of months, like so many writers, I found working on my current book very slow going.   A day’s work felt like ploughing through porridge. Very little got done and what I did write had somehow lost its flow. The impetus to write had also faded and most days I found it almost impossible to get going. Nothing much seemed to matter. While other people re-decorated, caught up with DIY or re-modelled their gardens I let the time slip past. Except for my four times a week Skype lessons with granddaughter Maddy. At the start of lockdown all grandparents had been roped in to help with home schooling and my brief was to deliver her English lessons. Having been a teacher in a middle school as well as in secondary education, this wasn’t going to be too hard. Or so I thought. Working through what the school had sent, however, was far from simple. No blame here t...

I am just coming to the end of the editing marathon for my next crime novel In Her Defence , and nervously awaiting final corrections and comments. As always the section that has been poured over and fretted upon is that first chapter. Yes, the end matters almost as much, but I am very aware, to the point of near paranoia, of the need to start with a hook. Those opening few pages are all important, and increasingly so when so many potential readers will be using the ‘look inside’ feature on Amazon to sample your wares.   So what constitutes the opening hook? The first page? Two pages? Three? Taking a quick glance at Kindle books the Amazon Look Inside function varies on how much of a taster you are allowed and depends on the quantity of prelims, but three to five pages of story available to read seems to be the average. When a page is around 300 words on average it’s a scary prospect to realise that the decision to read my many months of work will be judged by the firs...

Me typing wistfully at the   American Writers Museum I featured here last September Raise your hand if you've ever used a typewriter. Wiggle your fingers if you made a living with one. Thumbs up if you still own one. Our numbers diminish. It's safe to say that most people alive today never as much as pecked at a mechanical keyboard. Despite this, a die hard few collect and still write with them, and some even dream of a typewriter comeback, though it's debatable whether typewriters ever really left us in the way of quills to become antiques. This isn't about technology or trends, however. It's about first love, and bonding with a writing machine in a way that one never could with a computer, even with an hypothetical, pretty robot. I got my first typewriter at the callous and tender age of 15 - a voluptuous -deco, 1950s, manual Smith Corona "Silent" portable (meaning it weighed about as much as seven or eight Powerbooks.) I inherited it when ...

Norah Lofts I'm enjoying the book I'm reading on my kindle.      No surprises there. A complaint I've heard all my life and still hear often (especially from my partner) is that I'm 'always reading, ' always 'got my nose in a book.'      Although it's hard to put your nose in a kindle. I have found that when you read in bed and doze, the falling Kindle strikes your nose a far more destructive blow than a paper book. Wakes you up. This hasn't stopped me, though. The book I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying at the moment (despite the risk to my nose) is The Town House by Norah Lofts. I've just finished her similar Bless This House . Bless This House was first published in 1954, before I was born. The Town House , first published in 1959, is the start of a trilogy, being followed by The House at Old Vine (1961) and The House at Sunset (1962). Bless This House by Norah Lofts      Bless This House is almost like ...

You know how everything happens at once sometimes? Of course you do. It's Christmas Eve, and if you've five minutes to read blogs, I'm impressed. And Life doesn't stop because it's Christmas. People get ill, babies arrive, kids fall off their bikes, grandmas complain about their knees in the cold. The weather can be kind, or angry, or simply perverse. Central heating breaks down. Many are working their socks off so that others can spend the time with their families. Some young people have exams when they go back to school. You get the idea. So it was a pretty silly time for me to launch a novel. But having spent forever researching and writing and editing and generally faffing about every word, it is now Finished! So why not wait until the New Year to launch it? Because I'm off to Malawi for six weeks in January, and who knows what will fill my hours when I get back. So it was publish now and be damned. Of course you don't have time to fill you...