Back to business, ladies and gentlesirs. Today I want to look at who in the blockbusting big leagues was publishing in 2014, and what the market looked like when they did. I’ve been wading around in the book data again, my hand on my chin, occasionally contorting myself into an awkward (and poor) imitation of…
Category: Creating the Bestseller
Lights… Camera…. READ! How Writing Goes Live
One thing which made the transition from my business brain to my bookish brain lately was a certain trend in the music industry, which now seems to be making inroads into the book industry. It’s all becoming more and more about live performance. Part of what I do for a living (my actual living, which pays…
What A Blank Page Says To A Writer
Blank pages. You know what they look like, right? Empty, white space? Wrong. A blank page can be full of things. Daft people – optimists and the like – might say they are full of possibility. But a blank page can be chock-full of insults, jibes, and taunts too. Just look at what a blank page says to a writer. You can tell…
Look Away Now… It’s Irish Writing Kryptonite
Tell me. Have you breathed any air, lately? Got up in the morning? Smiled, any time in the last 6 weeks? Yes? Well, pull up a pew, then, because you need to listen to this. I don’t want to be the girl who cried wolf, here, because that could possibly ruin my cheap and nasty…
Self-Publishing: It’s Not For Christmas
There’s a reason that the ‘airport novel’ or ‘airport paperback’ was defined as category of books all by itself. It’s the same reason that there are large bookshops in airports, and why newspapers publish pathetically useless holiday reading lists. It’s because on holidays, everyone reads more than usual: regular, occasional and infrequent readers alike. And…
5 Terrifyingly Awful Books I Might Have Written In My 20s
There are very few writers who make it in their 20s. The few who do are endangered creatures; to be lauded, protected, and possibly locked up in a laboratory for serious scientific inquiry. Many people believe that nobody should be writing about life until they’ve at least lived some. And indeed, many writers in their…
What Puts Readers Off Self-Published Books?
Oh, we’ve come a long way from What Makes People Buy Self-Published Books last week, ladies and gentlesirs! Brace yourselves now, as we enter the dark side of book marketing: the things which make you REFUSE to buy self-published books. And we’ve all experienced this to some degree. Self-publishing often gets a very bad rap. If…
An Arts Festival Is No Time To Get Creative
Writing.ie has published an article I wrote about the fiasco that was my attempt to get writing last week, whilst out west for the Galway International Arts Festival. Go on. You know you want to read it. Go on. Seriously. Your week would be incomplete without it. If you don’t, you might never know why, ever…
Author Privacy and OverSharing: How Much Of You Is Enough?
I’ve been reading one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve encountered in a very long time (it’s also brilliant, and called piteously to me each and every time I was forced to put it down, despite the fact that I felt like I was bashed over the head with one particular metaphor towards the end). It’s called The…
Writing Weather
It’s been a sunny week in Ireland. This is more important than you know. Summer in Ireland usually lasts about a week. Think about what that does to the average human psychology. You trudge through a grey world for 355 or so days a year, knowing that actual colour will only be available for…
Tara Sparling writes 