Women’s Prize for Fiction Contender: Elif Shafak

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Elif ShafakStill two weeks to go before the shortlist is announced for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013 (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction) and I’ve just finished Honour by Elif Shafak, in contention as one of 20 longlisted novels. I’m rather ambitiously planning to read the shortlisted novels as part of Anne’s April Reading Challenge – a challenge that also encompasses a bunch of books vying for the Arthur C Clarke Prize.

‘Honour’ by Elif Shafak

This is the first novel I’ve read by Elif Shafak, who writes in both English and Turkish. Her novel The Bastard of Istanbul was longlisted for The Orange Prize and she is also well known for The Forty Rules of Love. Shafak has written eight novels to date. Read more

Hay Festival, Arthur C Clarke Award and more…

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Any graph of my reading habits over the past 10 years would reveal vertiginous spikes in April and May. These are the months of my self-imposed, manic preparations for Hay Festival. This 10-day literature event (23 May to 2 June) is a high point in my calendar despite the obligation to camp on a sloping, […]

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Self-Publishing Tips: Manuscript to CreateSpace Paperback

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As soon as I released my Kindle eBook last November, I began formatting a paperback. Here’s a lengthy post with a few tips on self-publishing a paperback based on my experience with CreateSpace – a print-on-demand (POD) service operated by Amazon. The whole process was less fraught than I expected. In fact, I really enjoyed it.

Making a paperback is a fundamentally different process to creating an eBook. In the case of my Kindle eBook, I uploaded a Microsoft Word document – I explained the process in an earlier blogpost. In essence, this Word document was a long, single scroll of text. When readers download eBooks from the Amazon Kindle store, they can control the font and font size; those decisions are out of the author’s control.

pod dHowever, for the paperback, I had total control and at the end of the formatting process I uploaded a PDF to CreateSpace – so I knew exactly how the paperback would look. So here are my self-publishing tips for making a paperback with CreateSpace.

Before I plough on, I should point out that some authors prefer to publish their paperback before their eBook. This allows them to send advance reading copies to reviewers, and sometimes these ARCs are sent out with a draft cover design. However, I wanted to reach as many potential readers as possible in the shortest possible time so I started with an eBook. I might change my strategy for a second novel.

If you’re planning to publish a paperback, look at your own bookshelves and examine the differences between books. This will help you to make the following choices: Read more

I’ve Survived the Move from Posterous to WordPress

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I’m ridiculously excited that I’ve shifted across to WordPress. I had to make the move because my previous blogging platform, Posterous, will be shut down at the end of April by its relatively new owner, Twitter. It’s a shame.

widgetSo this blog looks different from today: a little more (ahem) sophisticated with extra features such as a home page, category clouds, a little tweet feed, and ‘Anne’s Best Work’. These appear in the website sidebar, all thanks to widgets. Posterous didn’t do widgets – and I didn’t know what I was missing! Read more

Well Done God. Revisiting Cult Novelist B S Johnson

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I’ve set aside time this week to plug the gaps in my knowledge of B S Johnson, thanks to a splendid new compendium of his plays, short prose and journalism (including On Football). Three of the plays have never been published before including One Sodding Thing After Another. Such is the lot of an experimentalist.This year is already shaping up to be a Big Year for the late-B S Johnson. This month sees the 80th anniversary of his birth and so far there’s been: Read more

Paperback Paperback! Released

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I can’t express this any better than Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell: Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

I’ve really enjoyed fine-tuning the paperback version of A Calculated Life and it’s now available on Amazon. Read more

Kindle Dollar Royalties Sorted, At Last

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Indie-authors who operate outside the US often feel like country cousins who invariably arrive late to the party. But slowly things are improving. One breakthrough came earlier this year when Amazon’s CreateSpace switched to regional distribution for print-on-demand books. This alone persuaded me to go with CreateSpace for my paperback (announcement coming imminently on that front). Read more

Flashlight Worthy: 10 Novels on Art, Artists and Art World Shenanigans

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Art_list_flwI’m wearing my artist’s hat this morning and I’m chuffed that Flashlight Worthy Books has published my list of recommended art-related novels: Novels on Art, Artists and Art World Shenanigans.

FLW operates from the US and brings together ‘Handpicked Book Recommendations on Hundreds of Topics.’

Here’s the full list, not exhaustive, but it covers a broad range from historically based novels to others with a contemporary setting. This list first appeared on The Huffington Post. Read more

Did the First SF Magazine Appear in Russia in 1894?

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via io9.com

As many of you know, I’m a fan of the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin and I decided on the title of my novel A Calculated Life when I read this sentence from his science fiction dystopia, We:

But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?
The ‘yellow-eyed being’ was a human, one of many, excluded from the perfect world of ‘One State’.An article in io9 this week, Did the very first science fiction magazine appear in Russia in 1894?, gives fascinating insights into Zamyatin and the emergence of Scientific Fantasy, Nauchnaia Fantastika, in the years before the Russian Revolution. It includes exclusive extracts from We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity by Cornell University Professor Anindita Banerjee (Kindle edition more expensive than the paperback!) She delves into the history of early Russian science fiction and explains the Russian obsession with all-things-modern.
Banerjee says:

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Buy Your Own ISBNs To Unlock Pre-Ordering

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Isbn_postI have discovered, unexpectedly, a major advantage in buying your own ISBNs for the print versions of your books. Self-published paperbacks (and hardbacks, I assume) with ISBNs can be pre-ordered on certain Amazon sites before the publication date.

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