De-blog

A little teaser trailer for Reunions - Season Seven of the Hiding Behind The Couch series.

How do we authors know if we've succeeded? Is it based on reaching a certain number of sales? Seeing our book on a bestsellers' list? Being adorned with copious five-star reviews? For many authors, these are precisely the measures they use to gauge their success. In capitalist societies, the accumulation of material wealth is the measure of success, and whether a book is a bestseller right then and there doesn't matter, so long as it's still generating revenue. Published works have a precarious half-life, subject to any number of factors, including, first and foremost, reading trends (currently popular genres, book sales in general), as well as the success of the author's latest published work, genre (literary fiction never dies), whether it's part of a series, and (the one factor we authors can control - I'll come back to this) the author's behaviour. But they do have a half-life, which means authors, potentially, earn some of their living from...

Father and daughters, at the pub, no doubt When I was in my final year of university, I had a major run-in with my lecturer. It began with me submitting an essay about the ways in which the postwar British welfare state maintained women's oppression and ended with him shrieking at me, "You don't know what it's like to lose your eight-year-old son because the courts are biased in favour of women." Past and present rescued canine chaps It went on for a good deal longer than that, but that's the gist of what he said. According to him, he had been the primary caregiver since his son's birth, and when he and his female partner broke up, she was given custody of their son. The outcome for me, which is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, was that he refused to mark my essay and told me it was barely a pass grade. I took the essay to another social policy lecturer and asked him to look over what I had written. He did so, and in his opinion, ...