Authors Electric

It's 3 years now since the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) first stormed the closed doors of the London Book Fair and since then the dust has begun to settle.  Although there still seems to be some bewilderment at the change, authors are now firmly a part of one of the biggest book events in Europe.  It seems incredible that it was ever otherwise.  How can you have books without authors? It's as though the mainstream publishing industry has got into the habit of regarding us at best as inconvenient amateurs, at worst just the chicken that lays the egg. Just one of the halls at Olympia. This year, for the first time, I was able to go along and I had the most incredible experience.  Held at Olympia, the Fair is absolutely vast.  So big that I got lost on a regular basis, despite having a map, and on Day One I had three attempts to find the right exit before being escorted out by a burly bloke in a Book Fair T-shirt.  All the major publishers (an...

A strange thing has been happening recently. The bookish blogosphere has been talking about literary fiction. This is a fire it would be perverse of me not to stoke, so here is a little light mix of oxygen and fuel. It started with an excellent piece by Roz Morris about why literary novels can’t just be churned out. As if to prove her point, this coincided almost to the day with the announcement that after years of writing, arguably our greatest living literary novelist, Vikram Seth, had just missed the deadline for his follow up to A Suitable Boy, A Suitable Girl, and was being pursued for his seven figure advance. Now Roz’s piece was balanced and thought-out, and made no disparaging comments about genre fiction. Nonetheless it caused a considerable flurry of ruffled feathers. This in turn led to a superb piece from Porter Anderson in which he made some excellent points about genre-paranoia and the oppression of the “business-is-business” mentality. Yesterday one of m...