Category: Independent Presses

Coming-of-age novels with a difference: Abigail & The Wysman

18/6/2020

The young protagonists of these two novels are worlds apart in time, geography and social class and expectations. The first is a Hungarian translation about a girl sent to an elite boarding school during the Second World War; the second is a fantasy about a street kid trying to rise above his physical and social disadvantages. Both feature endearing teenagers grappling courageously with injustice and, in the process, learning about themselves.

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Become a celebrity, write a series or win a major prize: My real and fantasy writing goals for 2019

21/1/2019

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If my smile in this photograph seems slightly strained, it might not be only because I’m not sure if the self-timer on Mr A’s camera is going to work. You see, although last year was wonderful in that Inspired Quill published my third book and first short story collection, it was also the year it came home to me how hard it is to get readers, irrespective of the quality of the book. It’s hard for everyone, unless you’re a celebrity, are writing a series or have won a major prize; so should I make those my writing goals for the year to come?

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Can you recommend a #reading #charity for me to support through my #booklaunch?

22/10/2018

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When my publisher suggested releasing an anthology of my short stories, I didn’t plan to do much promotion. In the UK, short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell. But when I thought about the unpaid time and effort she’d put into editing, and the money into another gorgeous cover, as well as the enthusiasm of my readers for a third book, I reconsidered. My short story collection, Becoming Someone, scheduled for publication on November 23rd, deserves as much chance as any other book. So I got creative.

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Not all may have prizes … but how does funding play a part in who enters the race?

16/10/2018

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With the Man Booker Prize winner announced tonight, my fingers are crossed for Washington Black, although I’d raise a cheer for either of the other contenders I’ve reviewed (The Mars Room and Milkman). Right now, my thoughts are also with those authors who not only don’t succeed in dazzling the judges, but don’t even get the chance to step onto the stage.

You’re familiar with those email scams, aren’t you? Congratulations, you’ve won a prize! Just send us a cheque to cover administration costs, and we’ll deliver it. Feels good, doesn’t it? Until you wonder whether the winnings will cover your fees. But that wouldn’t happen in the literary world, would it? Awards are dispensed purely on merit, surely? No paying for prizes there?

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Does white space matter in #amreading fiction in print?

30/4/2018

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While I’m neither a reader nor a writer of poetry, I do appreciate that the shape of the lines on the page matters, the white space almost as important as the words. But does something similar apply to fiction? Do we need wide margins and paragraph breaks to give the sentences space to breathe?

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My reading goals for 2018

30/1/2018

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2018 Reading Challenge

Anne has read 8 books toward their goal of 100 books.

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8 of 100 (8%)

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I’ve registered for the Goodreads challenge for a fifth year and, although my totals have increased year-on-year, I’m sticking to a goal of 100 books. Even though it’s hardly a challenge to curl up with a novel most evenings, in a business that is mostly about failing, why not give myself a target I know I can beat? Besides, this isn’t a marathon. Reading is more about the experience than a numbers game. That’s why I’m setting myself some specific targets in relation to quality and diversity, building on my analysis of 150 books read in 2017.

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My twelve favourite reads of 2017 #amreading

29/12/2017

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I’ve read 150 books this year (the image shows only a selection); according to Goodreads that’s 40,927 pages, with an average rating of 3.5. That’s slightly more books, but fewer pages, than last year. All but nine of this year’s reads were fiction, of which 19 (13% – slightly down on last year) are translations. An analysis of my first 100 reads found 71% were from independent publishers. Enough with the figures, let’s take a closer look at the year’s overall favourites.

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93% novels and 71% independents: My first 100 reads of 2017

30/9/2017

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Earlier this month, I met my “challenge” of reading 100 books this year. You can see them pictured above, beginning with my most recent read. Why not join me in reviewing the balance (or otherwise) of fiction versus non-fiction, type of publisher and percentage of translations versus English-language originals?

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A difficult second novel? I’m about to find out!

19/2/2017

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When I was struggling to find a publisher for my first novel, if there was one thing that annoyed me more than advice to keep trying, you’ll get there if it’s good enough; it was moaning about the difficulty of producing a follow-up. While I’m not renowned for my glass-half-full mentality, I’m screaming first world problem to the power of ten. These writers were blessed with a burden I’d have willingly taken from their shoulders, so how do I feel now I’m about to release a second novel of my own?

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What’s marriage, anyway? Wait For Me, Jack blog tour

20/1/2017

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Blinded by the sun as they walked slowly back to the car, they leaned towards each other. They felt wrong together, mismatched, a mistake taken too far. But from a short distance they looked like many couples did to outsiders – exclusive, close. From a greater distance, they looked like a single person.

Jack and Milly’s marriage is like the weather, with sun either too fierce or blocked by clouds. They inhabit a climate with myriad variations of hot and cold, seeming different from the inside than from outside, from morning or evening, when filtered through a prism of the promise of happiness or resignation to “for better or worse”.

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Land and sea survival: Beast & Cove

18/1/2017

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I’m sharing my thoughts on two short books from independent publishers, in which a lone man, estranged from himself and the community he’s come from, has to fight for survival after being injured in a storm, the first on land and the other at sea.

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From 146 books to my top 12 novels of 2016

29/12/2016

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It’s been a good year for fiction – and I don’t mean the lies and denial that have blighted politics on both sides of the pond. But when isn’t it rosy for readers? For every novel that leaves us baffled and bludgeoned or tempted to give up, we’ll always find another dozen that provide comfort or relaxation or, with or without prickly characters, transport us on a magical mystery tour.

My book consumption has increased since I started reviewing from around 60 a year to over 100. But I’m slightly embarrassed to have “beaten” last year’s pinnacle of 120 by, at the time of writing, 26. I know I devote a lot of time to the printed word, but 41,783 pages smacks of greed.

Just a few of the books I've read this year!

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#Bookbirthday celebrations and beyond

2/8/2016

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I spent my book’s first birthday observing customer behaviour in a bookshop, and chatting to those who weren’t so adept at avoiding my gaze. One was a self-declared non-reader, hanging around while awaiting her appointment with a tattooist. Not my thing at all, but I was intrigued enough to ask to see her chosen design as well as to enquire whether the process was addictive, given that she had a couple of earlier tattoos on display.

I might have had in mind my own addiction to blog tours, given the five-week tour I embarked on last year when I launched my novel. I was slap in the middle of another, this one much more modest – in its fortnight’s duration, if not in ambition – that has now come to an end. My thanks to you if you’ve been following, or hosting; here’s my summary of how it went … and what’s still to come.

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3 routes to a baby: New novels by Rebecca Ann Smith, Helen MacKinven & Pamela Erens

29/7/2016

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In between celebrating my book’s first birthday – and finding the clichéd book-as-baby metaphor more apt than ever – I’ve had the pleasure of reading three novels about the begetting of real human babies: a debut scientific thriller from England; a second gritty comedy from Scotland; a third novel in the literary genre from the USA. As if the authors have responded to a writing prompt to bring a novel angle to “having” a baby, there should be something for everyone in this selection. If you’d like to recommend any others, you can do so via the comments.

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Supporting small-press published authors

24/7/2016

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Each time I’m baffled by a heavily-hyped but mediocre novel from one of the Big Five, I’m tempted to restrict my reviewing to small-press published novels. Not that there aren’t a fair number of turkeys among them, but at least the publishers aren’t screaming at us to read them each time we walk down the high street or go online. I know so well from my own experience with Inspired Quill how hard it is for the small publishers to get readers to take notice, but I don’t want to miss out on the good stuff that the heavyweights are putting out.

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Mothering her mother: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

31/3/2016

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Sofia and her mother, Rose, are spending the summer of 2015 in Almería. Although Sofia spends the day on the beach, this is no holiday. For much of Sofia’s life, certainly from the age of five when her Greek father moved on, Rose has suffered from a mysterious illness which renders her intermittently unable to walk. They have remortgaged Rose’s house in London and come to Spain in search of a cure at the unconventional Gómez Clinic.

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Struggle without Stupidity: Jihadi by Yusuf Toropov

9/3/2016

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Since childhood, Thelonius Liddell has striven for excellence in an attempt to forget the trauma of seeing his father murder his mother. At a university careers day, he’s recruited into the US intelligence agency by Becky Firestone, the somewhat disturbed daughter of the director whom Thelonius eventually marries. When we first meet Liddell he’s already a dead man, writing his memoir in the ten metre square cell in the clandestine containment unit he calls The Beige Motel. Now preferring the name Ali, he was converted to Islam by his wizened cellmate in a squalid (presumably Iraqi) prison, where he is accused of the murder of a man and his young daughter and of desecrating the Koran. His conversion was part of a deal brokered by a young woman, Fatima, but, like almost everything else in this multi-layered thriller about the war on terror, we have to keep on turning the pages to uncover the truth. While I’m inclined to agree that, as Fatima says, Stupidity has taken over the process of government in both countries, there’s nothing stupid in this complex tale of compromised morality and the fragility of the human mind.

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Walk or gallop? The question of pace.

28/2/2016

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Walk. Trot. Canter. Gallop. Each of these words conjures up precisely both the speed and style of movement of the horse.

On a writing course once we were tasked with finding as many possible ways of replacing the word entered in the phrase She entered the room. I might never get the chance to use She hopscotched into the room in a piece of fiction, but I learnt something in thinking it up.

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Held Captive by Neurodiversity: Truestory by Catherine Simpson

19/2/2016

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Alice doesn’t get out much. In fact, the only time she is able to leave the Lancashire farm where she lives with her husband, Duncan, and eleven-year-old son, Sam, is for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon when she sits in a sad café nursing a cooling cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit. It’s not that she’s overly busy with farm work. It’s not that she’s kept away from the world by a controlling husband. But her life is restricted by her family: Sam is a boy with problems, averse to change, terrified of noise and the colour yellow, and, although he won’t let her comfort him the way a mother might, he’s liable to go into “meltdown” if she leaves him too long with a father who has little understanding of the boy’s needs.

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Elemental by Amanda Curtin: Review and book giveaway

9/2/2016

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In her declining years, as her memory for the past overtakes her connection to the present, Meggie Tulloch sets out to write her life story. Addressed (in the mid-1970s) to her hippyish granddaughter, and kept secret from her daughter, Kathryn, the girl’s mother (although, as time goes on, Meggie increasingly confuses the two), it’s a story of migration from north-east Scotland and the Shetlands to Fremantle, Australia, a journey through the elements of water, air and earth, and finally (in a contemporary strand picked up by the daughter herself) fire.

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