Authors Electric

Standard advice for newbie writers seems to always be never pay to play . Generally speaking, that’s true – twenty years ago or so, you could confidently say that you should never, ever pay anyone to publish your books, that money always flows to the author and never in the other direction.  These days, it’s still good advice – although there are occasions when it’s ok for an author to put his hand in his pocket. I’m not here to discuss vanity or even ‘hybrid’ publishing, and for the new writer just getting to grips with it all, I’ll only say to do your homework. Google. Look at reviews. Check out ALLI  and Writers Beware before you part with a penny. And yes, it always has been perfectly ok to buy in editing and design skills if you don’t have them yourself. I’m a writer, not a designer, and while I can look at a bad cover and have an idea what doesn’t work and why, I couldn’t tell you what to do to fix it. My cover designer, on the other hand, can take my vague suggestions...

  There was another burst of indignant publicity this month about how little authors are paid. The figure of £7,000 a year has been put forward as our median annual earnings, following a survey by ALCS, a brilliant organisation that collects money on behalf of writers.   I fear that the figure, however, while useful for giving the story a media-friendly hook, doesn’t really mean much. In the age of self-publishing, I would posit that a large percentage of the books earn their authors nothing. Just like the vast majority of paintings and the vast majority of music.   That is not a reflection on self-publishing, which I genuinely believe to be a giant leap forward for civilisation, because I would suggest that a similarly large percentage of traditionally published books have also earned their authors virtually nothing, despite having taken many hours, months or even years to write. I have certainly had first-hand experience of writing books that earn nothing, as well a...

Venue and reason for my murderous gathering... A gathering of assorted people intent on murder, in the spooky, beautiful old Lit and Phil library, on a wet snowy night - it could have been the start of a Golden Age crime novel, and who knows, several novels and stories may emerge from the twenty writers who attended my ‘Time for Crime’ Workshop as part of Newcastle Noir crime fiction festival. The old massively-carved tables had been arranged in a long line, as if some League of Assassins were expected. Some attendees had dabbled in crime fiction, and others were hesitating on the brink of villainy, as I assigned writing exercises to produce Chandleresque 'first lines' to grab the reader by the throat, then others to help create villains and to evolve detective protagonists who might become as famous as Vera, Lord Peter Wimsey or Jack Reacher. I was not slow to remind them of one of the joys of crime writing, revenge on school bullies, cheating exes and abusive bosses. ...

I hate typos. I really do. They irritate me beyond belief, distracting me from what I'm reading and making me itch to pick up a red pen or a highlighter. They seem to stand out from the text, thumbing their little fonty noses at me. Naturally, when I proofread my own stuff I go through it very, very carefully. It annoyed me no end when one publisher airily told me, "Don't you worry about correcting typos. We have a very good team who are very good at dealing with that side of things. They are really hot at picking up typos." Dear Reader, they were not. Despite the fact that I corrected all the typos anyway, they not only ignored them, but just for the hell of it added in some entirely new ones. The one that especially made me froth (apart from the change of surname of a Famous Person in the index) was the change from 'Excerpt from a Diary' to 'Exert from a Diary'. Obviously the 'team' the publisher used was a computer spellch...

The idea of making money from writing gets a mixed reception. Those who regard themselves as professional writers see no problem with this. In fact they expect to make money because of their professional status. Then there are the hobbyists who write solely for the love of creating something. They are quite happy to distribute their writing, whether that is poetry, stories or novels, for no payment. They get their reward from knowing their work has been read. But among the hobbyists are some writers who are developing their work and themselves into semi-professional status. These are the writers who are happy to charge for their writing in order to acquire a bit of extra income, although many of them do not make a profit. In among these groupings there are some who believe that writers should not be paid for their work. They should supply everything free to their followers and readers. While this is a noble concept it is not a realistic one. It is easy to say money is u...

Success. For some, it’s a fact. For others, it’s a dream. For still others, it’s a stick used to beat people with. But what exactly does it mean? The idea behind this month’s post has been swilling around in my mind for a while now. While I was doing some research, I googled ‘self-published authors' success’. Not surprisingly, some of the top results were '10 Best Selling Self-Published Authors’ ,   ‘Bestseller Success Stories that Started Out as Self-Published Books’ ,  and ‘Writers Who Rocked Self-Publishing’ . Hardly surprising, either: these are all genuine success stories, which give the lie to the idea, still occasionally aired, that self-publishing is the last resort of talentless amateur scribblers. The problem is that it’s easy to crudely equate success with sales. I've done it myself. I've beaten myself up because my book didn't sell x number of copies in such-and-such a month. I've gazed with wistful envy at the authors climbing up t...

One of the strangest things about being a published, or accepted, or arrived author is the possibility of earning a living. I guess most of us discovered early on in our 'careers' that there is often more money to be got from talking about it than actually doing it, and lots of schools (for instance) would far rather spend a fews tens, or even hundreds, of pounds on getting an author in than they would in buying his or her books. I have actually visited educational establishments (God spare the mark) that happily admitted they didn't have any of my books on the premises, and didn't know if any of their victims had ever read one. I've mentioned before how many of them don't even bother to check my gender. What's the idea, then? Usually the answer is something on the lines of 'encouraging the children to write.' I did go to a school in Sheffield once where an extremely chippy (on the shouldery) young teacher told me that it was an easy way of making a ...