Authors Electric

Fairlight Moderns Ask anyone to name a famous literary novella and odds on they’ll pick something written before the middle of the twentieth century: Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea? 1952. Animal Farm? 1945.  He art of Darkness? Back… back… way back to 1899….   And yet a quick scan of Amazon (other ebook platforms are available) shows how, in contrast, genre fiction today comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You want your sci-fi hit as a short story? a novella? a six-book box set? No problem. Literary fiction? Nope, novel-length only please.   Discussing this strange situation with some writer friends, it’s easy to see how this has come about.     Send a great manuscript in to a literary agent these days that has less than 80,000 words and you’ll be advised to go home, get your pen out and not come back until you’ve managed a respectable 90,000.   And pitch up with something less than 60,000? You won’t even get out the slush pile. As a wr...

The novella. It’s the wallflower of the literary world, continually snubbed and ignored, judged to be to nobody’s taste. Like an overlooked middle child, it has neither the star appeal of its big brother, the novel, nor the simple charm of the short story. Stephen King once described the novella as “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic”, and tellingly said that even he – Stephen King , who by his own admission could probably get his laundry list into print if he wanted to – had trouble convincing a publisher of his novellas’ worth. Big spines look good on shelves By many accounts , publishers are indeed reluctant to take on novellas. I’ve heard this attributed to a very simple, and brutally commercial, reason: novellas are simply too small to have much presence in bookshops. Readers are more likely to pluck a book off the shelf if it is physically prominent, with a thick, imposing spine. Novellas are also perceived to be less valuable: if a reader is going to spend his ...

          A few weeks ago I was giving a two hour talk in a local library on the wonders of e-publishing.           'So, there's no quality control?' one of the still-conscious attendees asked.           'That's right. Some restrictions on cover and content, but even those might not prevent initial publishing,' I said.           Another person woke, caught the thread of conversation and asked, 'How about title and author name? Any copyright or that sort of thing?'           'No. You can't copyright a title and you can call yourself whatever you want, within reason. If you use J.K. Rowling you might get into trouble. Let's take a look.'           I opened the Kindle Direct Publishing web page and proceeded to create ...

As I write this, just before Christmas, I'm feeling rather sorry for myself. I have a sore throat and a cough, which get much worse if I lie flat. I also have a painful back, which complains unless I spend every alternate hour or so lying flat on it! Sitting at a desk, even on my new super-dooper-bad-back-chair, is impossible for more than five minutes at a stretch. I have shopping, baking and cleaning to do, guests arriving for Christmas, a father up in Yorkshire who needs lots of help from me, his only daughter, and - urrgghhh, I won't go on... (Btw, I know, really, that I have many things to be thankful for and am much, much better off than some. But if you remind me of that, some nasty primitive reflex might be triggered and I might try to kick you, so please beware...) A kind Twitter friend just recommended that I try lying on my tummy in order to type on my laptop, placed on a stool at the end of my bed. It works, at least for a short time, and I'm very grateful for h...