Authors Electric

This month has delivered another hard knock as regards the realities of life with a small publisher. I’m talking about book reviews, not on Amazon or Goodreads or the fabulous efforts of book bloggers (to whom I'm eternally grateful), but the world of the main-stream press, or the bits of it I thought would be accessible to the author of a small but perfectly formed (though I say it myself!) piece of Scottish historical fiction. Print copies don't come cheap I like to think neither myself nor Linen Press took anything for granted as far as reviewers were concerned.   Before Blink was published we made a list of potential review media from the general (Guardian, TLS, Scotsman) to the more niche photography journals. Rather than send review copies unsolicited, each of the reviewers  was sent  (as were many personal contacts, bloggers and bookshops)  book, author and cover info. I was buoyed up by the fact that we got replies from several large circulatio...

Big books from monthly book-clubs (growing dusty!)  In my childhood everything- even Mallory Towers! -  was in hardback, and in my early married life I indulged in a book club (remember them?) which delivered a chunky novel once a month.           I think I can pin down my change of heart over hardbacks  to when I asked my young teenage daughter for a copy of the newly published Donna Tart ( The Little Friend ) for Christmas, on the basis it wouldn’t be too big a drain on her pocket money. Being out of the book-buying habit at the time, I'd missed that it was only out in hardback and was filled with guilt as I unwrapped the unwieldy and expensive brute.           From then on, I have never chosen to buy fiction in hardback. (Non-fiction, poetry and illustrated books are a different matter). A novel in my mind is either e-book or tree-book, and a tree-book is a paperback. A ...