I’m always banging on about book marketing and book sales, the good and the bad, the glaringly obvious and the borderline insane. But if this blog were a book, how would I sell it? Would I be able to sell it at all? Of course I wouldn’t. In other news, the blog gets new pants.
I am sick to the back teeth (ew) of people going on about ‘grip-lit’. Not the genre. The term. We can’t get rid of it. We can only try to outshine it. For that reason, Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you Wick-Lit, Flip-Lit and Crick-Lit. Go forth with them, and prosper.
Why do so many female comedians struggle to be taken funnily? Is your mother to blame? Do you like broad beans? And why is there an ‘X’ in First Person?
We all know what it’s like to have difficult flatmates. Insomniacs. Musicians. Drug Addicts. Botanists. When things get really sour, a fictional flatmate would be ideal. But what if you were to live with a modern grip-lit heroine from the likes of Girl On The Train, Gone Girl, or Before I Go To Sleep?
The terrifyingly powerful Tark and Mara form a plan to find a true and quantifiable value for art, so that they can quadruple it, and then watch it increase. And if you have a spare million or three lying about, you can do it too.
Time for my now-annual tradition of reviewing the events of the book world before anything has actually happened, because I’ll be far too busy in December 2016 – smiting my enemies and sewing appliqué onto my elbow patches, etc – to do it after events have passed. This also saves you time: after reading this, you needn’t bother with the end of this year at all. Isn’t that wonderful?
In just 6 days, you became fat, ugly, lazy, stupid, weak, and a failure. How did all this happen in the seconds since Christmas? But just try the Anti-Resolution Diet for Writers, and watch the self-loathing fall away.
Sometimes I feel like I’m very harsh on authors for merely doing the same things everyone else does. Granted, sometimes it’s deserved, for being too pushy, or rolling out marketing techniques that were last employed by the Stasi or the KGB. Earlier this year, I did a pillory piece on authors who are so pushy that they…
I did my review of 2015 last January, because I was confident that I would be far too busy in December with things I hadn’t made up yet. At the time, I was fairly certain I’d be flat out right now with glittering parties, dazzling the hoi-polloi with my witty repartee. Sadly, I had to ditch that in…
It’s been a while, ladies and gentlemen… remember How To Know If You Are A Chick-Lit Heroine? Or How To Know If You’re A Cop In A Crime Novel? Not to mention How To Know If You’re In A Young Adult Novel, and my personal favourite, How To Know If You’re In A Literary Fiction Novel. Well,…
Tara Sparling writes 