
Is it ever possible for a writer to be happy with what they’ve achieved? Or do the goalposts keep moving? Today we ask a most un-Christmassy question… is it much harder to succeed when you’re a success?
What goes around, comes around. Apparently, we are regressing, in terms of fiction, back to the sensationalistic stories of old. People seem surprised by this. I am surprised by people’s surprise. It’s like being taken aback because skirt lengths have changed again. If you didn’t see it coming, you were standing in the tunnel with…
I can hear them now. “That Tara Sparling one. She’s some tulip.” “Come again?” “She tried to tell me how to buy a book. Feckin’ cheek of her. What’s next? How to get up in the morning? How to breathe??” Look – I know it seems simple. But this is more of an inquisitive How…
…and, from the emerging author’s perspective, are they a Woo-Hoo, or a Boo Hoo? 1. Back Catalogues Sell Slowly, Or Not At All Back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, when a reader stumbled across a new author, their latest book was often the only one available. If the author were really successful, the bookshop might stock…
In which we revisit those bestseller lists, and I wonder if I should have drawn some nice bunny rabbits to make them prettier* Another pattern is evident from the 2012 bestseller list. Of the top 15, there were only 3 men, and one of those was Tolkien, who had already been dead for some time. Despite Lee…
If we can’t tell who is going to be a bestseller anymore just by the author, can we tell what genre of book or story will be a bestseller? It’s easy to say that a good book will sell itself, but that’s simply not the case. Sometimes a certain genre will become very big very quickly and authors…