;)
I joined Authors Electric in the autumn of 2011, not at all sure what to expect. I have found an interesting and varied group of professional writers who are both expert and supportive.
My 'job' is to produce a blog post on the 9th of each month. It's a promotional opportunity of course but also a stimulus to thought. Years ago, when I was a bookseller, I did enjoy reflecting on trade matters from my tiny patch on an Essex village high street. I wrote the occasional article for trade magazines and even spoke at a Bookseller's Association conference - on how to run your business from a BBC 'B' computer, if I remember correctly! These AE posts often give me a chance to think about the current developments in publishing and reading books-without-paper from my equally tiny base at Golden Duck. Or they're just an opportunity to reflect on the month that's past or the current problem - there's always something ...
Here are my posts so far:
October 2011 "A Bookseller's View"
November 2011 "What would an e-rep look like?"
December 2011 "Where to begin?"
January 2012 "Season's Greetings from YouGov, FutureBook and Julia Jones"
February 2012 "Making ebooks visible - Happy Birthday Mr Dickens"
April 2012 "He wrote all his life, he wrote for the Million - but was he an author?"
May 2012 "They Took His Life and Threw it on a Skip"
June 2012 "Relating to Ransome"
July 2012 "The Duck, the Hippo and the Goblin"
August 2012 "Should I stop reading?"
September 2012 "This book is for ...
October 2012 "Mother Love - the story of a story"
In November 2012 I wrote a blog post called Sparkles which was my notes towards the anthology that eventually became SPARKS. Somehow in one of my late-night finger-tangling panics I managed to delete it from the site. ...
December 2012 "The Year's Dying"
January 2013 "Comparing Accounts"
February 2013 "Margery Alligham: After the Afterword"