Authors Electric

In the beginning there were only storytellers and those who made up their audiences. Then the storytellers learned to write and the audiences learned to read. Next came the middlemen offering bags of gold and countless ideas on how to bring these two sets of people together more effectively. Some offered to print the words, design covers and transport the results to the audiences. Others offered to open shops where the stories could be displayed and promised they would be able to ensure that the stories were talked about and praised by all the right people. Then they offered the possibilities of displaying the most favoured stories on stages and screens, building cinemas and theatres for the audiences to come to and inventing radios and televisions which would carry the stories into people’s homes. All these services that the middlemen were offering were so useful to the storytellers and their audiences that both became lazy, willing to allow the middlemen to do all the hard wo...

'Now' is where it's at (or rather when it's at). 'Now' is the moving blade that chops our lives, over and over again, into past, future and that infinitesimal but overwhelmingly significant instant we call 'now'. Prague Astronomical Clock OK, so I was lying in bed musing on what to blog about this month, trying to force myself to think about e-books. Nothing wrong with e-books, of course, but my brain sometimes refuses to think about them to order. Now if I was the kind of organised person who posts my blogs up here months in advance (respect, to those of you who do), I might find it easier to 'focus', as my English teacher used to say. But I don't, and instead of being organised, I sense one of Douglas Adams's infamous deadlines about to whoosh up behind me, whirl me round in a storm of panic and then hurl me onto the jagged rocks of midnight on the 25/26th, with no time left to write this month's post (see below for a disc...

          Everybody has a story. 'The Story Collector by Susan Price '          Old Mr. Grimsby, a lonely widower with little to do now he's retired, makes a hobby of listening to stories and writing them down.         He asks the people around him for their stories, and they tell him strange tales and funny tales, of dancing shillings, of clever women who fall in love with handsome fools, of a boy who learned to speak the language of birds…          Mr. Grimsby writes them all down.         Sergeant Lamb, an old soldier who fought at Waterloo, tells him of a soldier who found a quiet lane leading from the midst of a battle’s din, and followed it to Heaven and God’s chair…        A dying woman tells him of a murdered girl whose hai...

When you enter any trade fair you're handed all sorts of leaflets, cards and magazines. The London Book Fair has a daily news sheet  The Bookseller Daily . On the first day, this was the front page headline: Self-Publishing, Agency Under Debate "The future of self-publishing, the new agency model and the Penguin Random House merger will be the hottest talking points at the London Book Fair, industry figures predict. Self-published authors will have a greater voice at LBF than ever before, with agents and authors coming together for the LitFactor Pitch curated by AuthorRight, while the Alliance of Independent Authors celebrates its first birthday at the fair. Agent Luigi Bonomi said: "I think we're really moving into a very different world. To date it has been a reticence, a diffidence towards publishers by self-published authors, and vice versa, and maybe this year the Cold War between these two communities will be broken by the two sides meeting face to face, a...