Authors Electric

It's there, (in illegible white type) & I was Julia T then So what’s the difference between a life-writer and a biographer? As far as I'm concerned the difference is rooted in the words.  Life-writing comes from Anglo-Saxon: biography from Greek. They mean the same but the first has a sense of something unadorned and fundamental: the second is distinctly arty. Last Saturday, in an upstairs room in Felixstowe’s Orwell Hotel, life-writing met biography in conditions of great amity -- appropriately so. Whenever I come to Felixstowe, which is at least annually for the Book Festival and more frequently for agreeable connected matters, I think of it as the Happy Place – a reassuring combination of the Latin felix  (happy) and Old English stowe (place). Last Saturday's occasion had initially been prompted by biography. When I first wrote about the detective novelist, Margery Allingham, all those years ago in 1991, I wasn’t allowed my preferred title of “Adventures” th...

Copy-editing is the thing I hate most about being an Independent Author. It’s a grinding, methodical task that takes a lot of time and concentration and it has to be absolutely perfect, because one of the main criticisms of Indie published books is the standard of proof-reading and copy-editing.  I’m still being sent books for review that are littered with typos, punctuation and formatting errors. I don’t want mine to be one of them, but my books simply don’t earn enough to pay a professional - for a full-length book it can be as much as £750.  I can’t afford that as well as the advice of a good structural editor - and the latter, for me, is of the utmost importance. I’ve been doing the copy-editing myself, reading and re-reading, but something always slips through and I hate it!  Your eyes see what they think should be there rather than what is actually there.  And then you die of shame as soon as it’s up there on Kindle and someone points out what you’ve misse...