Authors Electric

I was procrastinating on social media the other day – as you do, or as I do, anyway – and got involved in a conversation where somebody posted the beginning of a book and asked if anyone would be interested in an ARC in the hope of a review on publication. The cover looked a bit home-made (and yes, it really does matter. Rightly or wrongly, people absolutely do judge a book by its cover), but the plot seemed similar to stuff I write – dark and gritty thriller – and so I said I’d give it a go. I like this sort of thing and I'm always interested in how other writers treat the same material. We can all learn from analysing other people's writing. I don’t do this often. Really, I don’t. I’ve been burned too many times by agreeing to read unreadable books, and I don’t like to be in a position where I’m unable to leave a ‘good’ review and feel morally unable not to leave a review at all. You’d think I’d know better by now, wouldn't you? A PDF duly arrives and I swap it for an e...

  Hi, my name’s Joy Kluver and I’m new to the Electric Authors blog. Thanks to Debbie for allowing me to join. I write police procedurals and my detective is DI Bernadette ‘Bernie’ Noel, based at Wiltshire Police. So I thought I’d kick off by telling you about some of my favourite police procedurals from 2021.   The Trawlerman by William Shaw This is the DS Alex Cupidi series sent in Kent. As Cupidi lives in Dungeness, it’s a wonderfully atmospheric book. Shaw always brings themes into his stories and this one looks at mental health in particular. Cupidi is dealing with PTSD and is signed off work but that’s not stopping her from investigating the case of a murdered couple.   Love Lies Bleeding by Rebecca Bradley This is the eighth book in the DI Hannah Robbins series. It’s fair to say that Rebecca Bradley has been pretty unkind to Hannah in the last few books and she’s a woman on the edge. Hannah is overusing prescription painkillers to deal with injuries ca...

Image Credit:  All images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. I like reviews. I write them reasonably regularly (mainly on books) and I use them as an indicator of whether I’m likely to enjoy a “product” or not for everything from groceries to books I’ve been recommended to read. It doesn’t mean reviews are always right of course but I find them a useful general guide. If everybody loathes something, there is usually a good reason for it. Now with my writing hat on, I find obtaining reviews difficult as most authors do and I refuse to go down the paid-for review route. Not very ethical to my mind. I want a review to be honest and not to be “bought”. (Also smacks of desperation to me but that’s another matter. I would far rather have fewer reviews honestly obtained). I recently received a one star review for my second flash fiction collection, Tripping the Flash Fantastic . Now ironically part of me is pleased about this. Every author gets these. It kind of shows you have p...

Most published writers crave reviews but what can we do if they are inaccurate or really quite nasty? I try to review every book I read on GoodReads. There are other platforms but I’m too lazy to change. GoodReads doesn’t allow half-star reviews so I am unable to give a book 4.5 stars and few books merit a five star review. But of course I’m wanting everyone to give me a five-star review! I haven’t ever given a book one-star although I did give one novel only two stars. It wasn’t a bad book but there were things I disliked about it and I tried to make that clear in the review. It also seemed to be a book that rather divided opinion. I felt guilty for only rating it two but in the end what matters is the content of the review not the star rating. One review of my own novel, A Bird in the House stated only that the reviewer didn’t like fiction or reading about faraway places (maybe read the book blurb?!) I read Monique Roffey’s novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch recently. I personally l...

… to submit your book details so what have you got to lose?  says the home page at some-book-review-site.dot-com. Maybe not to submit details, but to get any further you’ll have to pay a minimum of $99 for two reviews of your books. You can buy 50 reviews for $1,499 including ebook purchase. I’m not sure if that means all 1,499 reviews will come from the same purchase – in which case either one person is writing 1,499 reviews, or the ebook is being passed around 1,498 times, which means it might take a while before you get your reviews. Yet they'll be done in 14 days. Go figure.  Why am I even posting this? We all know that buying reviews is against Amazon’s t&c and in any case is immoral and downright dodgy (unless you are a famous writer who allegedly doesn’t even write their own books, in which case it’s apparently perfectly fine, but that’s another story). And we likes stories, don’t we?  I’m posting this as I’ve just spent an age removing hundreds of spammy comm...

The Dark Side It’s a grey stormy afternoon in February and I am contemplating the dark side.  “Comparison is Death” said my friend Jonathan and in terms of artistic endeavour he is so right. Jonathan was talking about acting, but it’s as true for writing. There is nothing more debilitating, or eroding of confidence as comparing your work with other more successful writers. In that lies misery and perdition. So many of us find ourselves asking why when we look at novels, no better no worse than ours that reach the best seller list. Even worse is when a writer you don’t really rate sells millions of books. Reading their novels won’t help. You might get an idea about what they do that appeals to their readers, but more than likely you will be plunged even further into the depths of…is it envy? That has to be part of it, but there’s something else operating here, which is to do with the vulnerability of being a writer. We all write to communicate, but the process...

I don’t review many books any more. There are several reasons for this – not least the fact that I no longer feel comfortable leaving an honest review. I’m me online; I have the same avatar for pretty much every account and I’m not hard to find. And I’ve seen perfectly valid, constructive, yet honest reviews where the author’s army of fans have hunted down the poor reviewer and trashed them publicly – one-starring any/all of their books and generally trolling anyone who doesn’t think their favourite author is worthy of a Booker… But another reason I’m becoming more reluctant to review is that so many books I read these days are just … forgettable. Meh. I enjoy reading them, don’t get me wrong. I refuse to finish books I don’t enjoy, as life’s just too short for bad books. But next week I won’t remember the title or the plot, and if I see the cover again I’ll have only a vague recollection of ever having read it at all. Why is that? There’s nothing inherently wrong with these...

My New Year’s resolution has nothing to do with self-improvement - I’m not going to give up dairy, or gluten, or exercise more often, or take up yoga- but a great deal to do with enjoyment. Simply: I am going to read more books. Last year was a bad year. I didn’t even managed a book a week, while the year before was golden with over one hundred read. Quite why I’ve denied myself the pleasure of becoming absorbed in a book I’m not sure, but I suspect there was too much watching not very good stuff on TV. Hand in hand with the reading will come the reviewing. No more downloads from Amazon that will be enjoyed but not commented on. Every book by a new, self-published, or published by a small press writer will be reviewed, with the caveat that the truly dreadful will be consigned to the to-be-read pile where they will remain until they have been forgotten. Good books, however, deserve a wider audience. There’s a meme currently on FB about sharing the love. You read, you review ...

Yeah, it's that time again. Another holiday season is upon us. Here in America, the season is ushered in on Thanksgiving. The day families all over the country come together to break bread, share turkey, and alienate each other as soon as Uncle Frank (damn you, Frank!) shows up with his MAGA hat and "Lock her Up T-shirt" and berates Cousin Mike (Jesus, Mike!) in his hemp-woven parka and Bernie 2020 button for being a godless socialist all in the name of celebrating a bunch of ill-prepared Europeans almost dying of pneumonia and dysentery before a bunch of Natives took them in, showed them how to farm, and promptly died of the common cold caught from a snot-nosed baby Puritan. That's one solution. It's also that time when we show our thankfulness and goodwill toward mankind by engaging in the Black Friday Hunger Games: Shoppers run the gauntlet of shopping mall crowds and limited-supply, one-day-only-sales while dodging crying children and the fists, feet...

From indie author Jacqueline Howett to Gothic horror author Anne Rice we’ve all reacted badly to reviews, only most of us do it silently. It isn’t nice when someone hates something you’ve trawled over for months or even years, but to take offence over another’s perspective is completely the wrong attitude. If you’ve a book to sell you’re asking strangers to buy your title, remember that, you’re asking them. You’ve no right to demand they like your book, just as you’ve no right to demand they write a good review. They are strangers. They don’t know you. They don’t care about you. They owe you nothing. Readers tell the truth. Readers like to tell other readers about their great finds or warn them not to touch. Whether they like or dislike a book is down to them. Writers have no right to be angry at ANY review—well, not publicly anyway. You think the low stars are bad for your book? What do you head for when buying? The high stars or the low? I know I head straight f...

Perhaps you’d like to guess which novel this is? ‘Great premise, appallingly written. The plot is replete with unexplained co-incidences and impossibilities…. Tedious, lacking any credible plot-line, immature and over-written in the extreme.’ Mary Shelley, eat your (or some random corpse’s) heart out! Yes, this is an extract from a one-star review of Frankenstein. 'appallingly written...tedious' I’ve blogged before about the brilliant and hilarious reviews people are leaving, such that creative Amazon reviews are becoming a genre of their own. Check out the Mr Men books,  Bic’s pens ‘for her’ ,  banana slicers , etc for some all-star gems, if you've not already enjoyed them. Now, to make us all feel better, let us enjoy the one-star review – in all its nasty glory – always more enjoyable when dumped on some other writer’s self-esteem. It was some enjoyable facebook posts by renowned actor, director and author Fidelis Morgan (check her website out  here ) which set...

Am I too old for this social media lark? Being slightly the wrong side of 50, I’ve always been transparent and open in who I am. Maybe that’s naïve in the new online world, where things last forever and once said, can never be unsaid this side of the (zombie) apocalypse. I’ve always been me online. My accounts are always as near to my name as I can get, and I don’t hide behind pen-names or aliases. I can understand why people do, but I’ve never felt the need until now. Because this post is really about editing. And I’ve done editing to death on this blog and others, but here’s a different slant on it. Take this book I read last week. Young adult fantasy and the blurb looked good and it was reasonably-priced with an OK cover. But I can’t review it. Why not? I hear you ask. You’re a writer – surely you know the value of reviews? Well, yes, of course I do. But I can’t review this one. And I haven’t. Because it’s YA fantasy and I can’t give it 5 stars and a glowing write-up. An...

Ah – that thorny old subject of book reviews. Our own Ali Bacon recently covered this topic , but I’d like to embellish that post, if I may, with some new information. I saw this link on a facebook post the other day. This shows a new type of review procedure that Amazon is apparently trialling. Now us Brits are often last in line for anything new on Amazon, but asking around, I found that it’s not the rumour-factory working overtime and people are indeed being presented with this new-style option when leaving a book review on Amazon.com. So this is a whole new can of worms. Readers are being asked, for example to rate the sexual content of a book: Seems fair enough, doesn't it? You can let potential readers know whether the book contains sex or not - warn people in advance. And No sexual content seems straightforward enough, I agree. But what is the difference between Some and Explicit ? Erotica is expected to have heavy sex scenes, so would a weak erotica novel ...