Anna Jones Buttimore

The ebook revolution is upon us, and with free publishing now available to everyone the landscape for writers has changed dramatically over the last ten years. Anyone, anywhere, with any level of skill can now write a book and publish it, at no cost to themselves, and it will be indistinguishable from a book published by a large, established publisher, like Penguin, HarperCollins or Macmillan. Many authors, including established authors with traditional publishers, are celebrating and embracing self-publishing. Some are putting out their out-of-print back catalogue in ebook format, while others are eschewing traditional publishing altogether and going for the bigger royalties percentage promised by self-publishing. And yet I continue to send my work out to agent after agent, publisher after publisher, again and again. I have now clocked up fifty-two rejections for my sci-fi magnum opus, Emon and the Emperor, and despite the regular assurances (often on the rejection slips) t...

The lot of a writer is one of long hours hunched over a keyboard in a dimly lit room with nothing but a cat for company. Shut away from the real world we pull faces and make hand gestures as our characters do, mutter dialogue to ourselves, and live in a strange environment peopled entirely by creatures of our own imagination. Alone we face the frustrations of edit after edit, and the crushing disappointment of rejection after rejection of our precious offspring. It's little wonder that many of us seem to be a little eccentric, if not downright mad. As least, that's how it used to be. These days writing is no longer the lonely and solitary profession. Today a dear friend and fellow author is coming to my house to work on her next novel, Race for Eden,  and do some pre-publication work on her sci-fi dystopian  New Earth: Beginnings. She's coming partly because I have a spare desk and she won't be tempted to do housework in my house (although I've told ...

I discovered, pretty quickly, that one of the problems with running a group of generous and kind authors prepared to edit other authors' work for free ( like, say, The Authors' Editing Co-operative ) is that those not used to having their work edited can very easily take offence at what they see as "criticism" of their work. It's very easy to see why. You send off a manuscript you have laboured hard over, honed and polished until it gleams, filled with characters you love and lines you are, frankly, very proud to have penned. Two weeks later it comes back with every little mistake, typo and misspelling brighly highlighted in bold red. Comments  may say "this sentence is unclear", or "this word is redundant" or (if it's anything like my first manuscript) "POV" many, many times. It's heartbreaking to see your precious manuscript torn to shreds. Here's what you need to remember: Every manuscript has errors. Usuall...

I've just woken up to the news about the explosions at the finish line of the Boston marathon. Whatever I was going to blog about today is forgotten, because, to be honest, when this sort of senselessly horrendous thing happens everything else seems really trivial and petty. So I'm stuck with having to write a blog about this traumatic atrocity but for all my writing credentials really having no words to make it better. That's because there are no words to make it better. There are no platitudes or soundbytes which can make any sense of this terrible tragedy, or explain away the evil which is evident in events like this. However, one of the marathon participants who was there inadvertently gave what I think constitutes the best advice to those of us reeling over the shock of this event. She told of how she had come to the finish line to find it full of carnage and horror, and race officials told her to "Just keep running". Imagine it for a moment. You have traine...

This weekend was a pretty historic one for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Following polite "protests" and appeals to the church leadership, a woman has given a  prayer in a session of General Conference for the first time. (Two women, in fact, in two separate sessions.) I missed this momentous occasion on account of being on a transatlantic flight, and then comatose, for much of proceedings, but I shall endeavour to catch up with the entire conference, including the prayers, via the internet once I am awake again. There may be those somewhere out there who imagine that allowing a woman to take part in proceedings in this way was some kind of tremendous climb-down or back-pedalling on the part of the church hierarchy. Not so much, however. A statement made by a President of the Church (too lazy to find the exact reference right now) decades ago explained that there was no reason a woman shouldn't offer a prayer at any church me...

I have to admit to being one of those really horrible people who go around correcting punctuation mistakes wherever I see them. I'm the militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection Society. I'm a Lynne Truss groupie. Recently a company posted on my Facebook wall suggesting I order some of its products for Easter. Their post read, "Easters coming, so order you're personalised gifts now." Naturally I felt obliged to point out to them that people might have more confidence ordering "they're" personalised gifts if they felt that someone at the company was actually literate enough to get the text right. But it's not just online. Oh no. I don't consider it vandalism to correct the punctuation on official signs. There's a local pet shop where I am no longer welcome after being caught annotating a display (in my defence it read "Corn Snake's") and I took a long walk around Thundersley Common with a black permanent marker shortly...

Sitting on the Tube last week (Circle line, St. James' Park to Liverpool Street, if you must know) I was struck by something about my fellow travellers. There were eight of us in the carriage (so, not rush-hour) and six were reading books. But there wasn't a single book. Two had Kindles, one had a Nook, two more were reading on i-pads and one was using a smartphone. The twenty-first century has well and truly arrived in subterranean London. So I was a little surprised to see certain comments on a competition in which an author was giving away several copies of his ebook as a prize. Many people were complaining that they didn't like ebooks and would rather have a physical copy, so they weren't entering the competition. I was, frankly, mystified by their attitude, because what's not to love about ebooks? Now don't get me wrong, I love print books too. I love the smell of a new book, and the smell of an old book. I love flicking through the pages to snatch a ...