Successful authors

Top selling authors on Kindle of all time:

EL James
Lee Child
Stieg Larsson
Suzanne Collins
George RR Martin
Gillian Flynn
Diane Chamberlain
James Patterson
Peter James
Sylvia Day

I saw this on the internet this morning and forgot to copy the reference, but I had simply followed a link on sucessful authors and up it came. There was also a list of the cities in England that read the most and surprisingly London was not included. Nor was Newcastle, I have to admit!

 There are two authors listedthat I have never heard of - Chamberlain and Day. We all know the infamous, possibly notorious, E L James and the other names I know though they may not be among my favourite authors. I could not  hack my way through GAME OF THRONES, and Peter James is good but a little longwinded for me. I read him when I've nothing else handy! (Sorry Peter!)  Stig Larsson could have done with a good edit, especially in the first half of the first book, but that is only my opinion and what do I know? I'm not even in the list!.

I've read all of Lee Child's bar ECHO BURNING and the MIDNIGHT LINE, which will be remedied shortly.What interests me might be the names that are not there - Rankin, Gregory, Gabaldon, Bolton and Nora Roberts to name one or two. Are their books not available in Kindle? I've never checked. If they are, I suspect they are as highly priced as the paperbacks. In the last month or two I have noticed Kindle versions that are priced higher than the paperback and those I'm never going to buy and I hope no one else does either. An author I enjoy is Peter May, another is Robert Goddard, I tried Julian Fellowes BELGRAVIA earlier this year but found the writing rather sketchy; perhaps he is more of a screenwriter than a novelist and there, he excels.

Since it is sleety-snowing here today I've added a grey snowy day picture! 

Say nothing at all

Memories of summer

A  friend is upset because of a poor review. I sympathise. I've had some myself. We have to accept that not everyone has the same taste, in books, reading or in anything else, but some people seem so sure that the fault lies with the author and not with their own poor attention span or the fact that they chose the wrong book for their reading tastes?

These so-called reviews often consist of one star and one line, perhaps two, and  make no effort to describe the setting, the writing style or the story. They are not reviews at all, and Amazon ought not to publish them. The author probably took a year to write the book, and a one line bad-tempered comment is hardly a fair reward for that effort.

 Such people fail to find even one good point, but instead claim the book is boring, boring, boring, dismal rubbish, or words to that effect. All this in spite of the fact that the author has several good reviews from people who enjoyed the book and gave it five stars. Perhaps they don't read reviews before they buy? Perhaps they should. Or perhaps they just like writing miserable comments because it makes them feel better?
It's become a joke that there's always someone on the Trip Advisor website who rates the hotel or venue as one star with a catalogue of faults listed. I assume they were hoping to get their money back - and I hope they did not!

In these days of instant access to the world, it is so easy to rush into print if the slightest thing has niggled  your day. If causing pain and misery is your aim, then go ahead and write negative one-liners. The sensible ones among the reading public will take no notice of them, but simply sigh and say oh s/he must have had a rotten day to write something like that.

My mum always said "If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all." That's good advice for all of us.

VAT ALERT!

Usually I find out about new legislation far too late to do anything about it, but this time, thanks to Facebook, I'm up there with the news! There is a fiendish plan afoot to place VAT on digital products - yes, that will mean e-books!

New EU VAT regulations come into force in Jan 2015.

Micro-businesses selling Ebooks direct to customers will forfeit their VAT exemption threshold by doing digital business in Europe.

"From 1 Jan 2015, the new ruling means that should you make a sale to the EU (how one can prevent that with online services is not clear) from the first £1 of revenue your business earns you will need to be VAT registered in the UK and under the VAT MOSS Europe-wide scheme – meaning that you will immediately have to apply VAT to all your services, including those in the UK.

Furthermore, this this means a quarterly obligation to submit VAT returns, increasing the accounting burden significantly; as well as, the cost and complexity involved with meeting the letter of the law regarding the capture and retention of evidence of its customers’ location will bring (which needs to be retained for 10 years)."

In 3 years I have sold less than a dozen books to readers in Europe.

I don't know how I can stop them buying, and I certainly don't want VAT on my other sales in the UK.

Click on the link and sign to petition against it -
https://www.change.org/p/vince-cable-mp-uphold-the-vat-exemption-threshold-for-businesses-supplying-digital-products

Publishing in 2012

There are around 530,000 different books released per year in the UK and America. That’s a staggering figure and proably contributes as much as anything else to the fact that success is getting more and more difficult to define. One marker of success is winning an award, yet I read over the holidays that the Pulitzer committee of 2012 failed to agree upon a single work of fiction that deserved their prize - a first in the 35 year history of America's most prestigious literary award.

Could this reflect a lack of quality American fiction? The literary elite rejected this idea. 1992 Pulitzer fiction winner Jane Smiley declared she could not believe there wasn't a worthy title and suggested it was more a case of a committee that couldn’t agree. In the UK, the 2012 Booker judges said the UK’s premier literary prize remained resolutely committed to rewarding critical merit over accessibility. In 2011 they claimed 'readability' - much to the horror of the literary establishment – was the most important factor.

The Booker judges chose Hilary Mantel's novel Bring Up The Bodies. It is the second in a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, which also won Mantel Author of the Year at the National Book Awards. Since debut author Madeline Miller won The Orange Prize for Fiction with a story about a prince in Ancient Greece, historical novelists might be forgiven for thinking that historical novels are back in fashion; or that the literary establishment has at last realized their worth.

Female writers generally did well in 2012. E L James's 50 Shades Of Grey won Book of the Year at the National Book Awards, and Clare Balding won Biography/Autobiography of the Year, with Miranda Hart (Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year) and Rachel Joyce winning the New Writer of the Year award.

Inevitably the rise of eBooks and the decline of print have the publishing industry contemplating its navel once more over the question of popularity of certain titles and if popularity alone should now be a mark of literary merit. The literary elite may have to accept that the internet is changing the old standards and book awards must move and change with it, otherwise they will be meaningless.

Lightbulb Moments

We're off  gallivanting again today. We're off to Barnard Castle, click one time haunt of Richard III, where dh and I will then split. I'm off to a Border Reivers Writers' Group lunch for a couple of hours, and dh will enjoy a stroll around the country town, the antique shops and a pub lunch. He may even go as far as Bowes Museum, but no doubt I'll be driving back home!

Barnard Castle is in the south of County Durham, and it's about as far south as our group extends. It's only fair that the member who lives there should have everyone come to her instead of it always being Sue who travels miles and miles to reach us, whether we're in the Tyne valley, Morpeth or as far north as Alnwick. Today we're supposed to be discussing sex/seduction scenes, taking examples of our own writing of said scenes for discussion. That'll be fun! Maybe there will be notes on it here on Monday. Maybe I'll report my funny little experience with the Amazon tags - which all reverted back to normal when I checked a couple of days later. I've even considered re-instating them! I could at least label Far After Gold as a steamy romance....

Last night I had a lightbulb moment. I've re-written a whole chapter of the first Matho story in the last few days, and I suddenly realised the chapter would read better from Meg's POV because she has more to lose and it will give the reader a chance to feel Meg's fear and observe Matho's anger at her betrayal. So when I get home this afternoon, that's what I'll be doing.

The qualities an author needs

According to McKee, a writer needs certain qualities.

First of all comes a love of story and the dramatic, with all its sudden surprises, and revelations.

Close behind it comes the love of truth and the belief that lies cripple everything, for every truth must be questioned down to one's own secret motives.
The list goes on ~ a love of humanity, an ability to empathise, to crawl inside the skins of others and see with their eyes
A love of sensation - recognition of the physical and inner senses
A love of dreaming - where imagination takes you
A love of humour - life's saving grace, the one that restores balances
A love of language - the sound and sense it creates, an understanding of syntax and semantics
A love of duality - that feel for life's hidden contradictions, and a healthy suspicion that things are not what they seem
A love of perfection - to write and write in pursuit of the perfect moment, the perfect sentence
A love of uniqueness, the thrill of audacity and a stone-faced calm when met by ridicule
A love of beauty, that innate sense that treasures good writing, hates bad and knows the difference
And finally a love of self - a strength that never doubts, loves to write and bears the lonliness

PR

There comes a time in a writing person's life when promotion seems to take over from the writing. Somehow that seems wrong, but it happens. Or it is supposed to happen. I think you need a gift for it. PRing yourself and your work does not come easily. Not to me, anyway.

By its very nature, writing demands that the writer spends a lot of time communing with people who don't exist outside of the the author's head. A lot of time alone, usually, though some say they write in the living room with the tv on and the kids around.

Maybe this self-imposed retreat into silence, or for those who like music while they write, a retreat into a room where they are alone - is one reason why authors' conferences are such noisy affairs. I haven't been to more than three, but each one had mealtimes that almost took the roof off with the noise of people talking. So little time to talk before going back to the self-imposed solitude, perhaps? I'd always thought writers to be shy, introverted people. How wrong! I found myself surrounded by vibrant, self-confident people talking at a rate of knots.

Maybe the people who write thrillers are shy and retiring? Or the literary authors? But romantic authors? No way. Most of them are parents and writing while deep in family life and consequently with amusing stories to tell, and they tell them well, as you'd expect. Maybe such people happily promote themselves. I wish, I wish... I'll just have to pretend I'm vibrant and self-confident, and talk about me as if I'm talking about someone else.

18th March, 2007
I started my writing diary on 10th November, 2006 and for a while I felt as if I was putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. Might be a long wait before anything comes back to me!
I started the blog over at Yahoo 360, so if you are interested, pop over there and see what happened between November and now. I think I shall maybe keep both running for a while, and see which I find easier to handle. The url below will take you there. Don't forget to check the pictures in the albums....

http://uk.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-dphP5lUmcrJkVI_t8wLgBzwI

There'll be more here tomorrow!