Author Overload Spike has another competition o…
Author Overload
Spike has another competition on the go - our fourth in as many weeks. Because we’re great, damn it. There’s now 5 copies of Tree Of Pearls by Louisa Young up for grabs, in associations with our chums over at 2020shops.com.
Catharton is the sort of site I always promised myself I’d set up as a subsidary to Spike one day - essentially it’s a vast alphabetical list of authors, with a separate page for each to exhaustively list all the websites, mailing lists etc available out there. It’s basically a far grander and more ambitious version of what I’ve done with irvinewelsh.com, jeffnoon.com and jgballard.com. Best of all, though, it’s elegantly presented (except for the lack of a site search engine which is a bit mysterious) and it’s run by someone based in England who’s obviously got a great eye both for editing and writing. I just hope they can keep up the site’s maintenance, as it’s an invaluable resource already. Which is part of the reason I never got round to doing something similar myself. Because I’m a lazy bastard.
While looking at Catherton, I was pondering what a pity - actually, no, a downright tragedy - that there’s not more online advertising for books from the big publishers. Obviously I speak with a great deal of self-interest here, because I’d love Spike to generate enough revenue to be able to pay contributors, but also because I can’t help thinking how much the exposure of new books and authors would benefit from it. Book publishers still seem to be lost in the Stone Age when it come to Internet marketing, unable to recognise what a relatively cheap way it is to get the word out about authors and find a huge interested audience that would respond to such info. Certainly better than taking a quarter page ad in a national newspaper and praying. And it would help sites like Spike, Catharton and the Richmond Review thrive. I’ve often wondered what would happen if I could quit my day job and concentrate on Spike full time. Hmm. There has been a distinct lack of philanthropic benefactors thus far. All it would take is a lousy �100,000 for a year to give it a go - nothing compared to the money squandered daily on - well, everything but literary zines.
I’m still intrigued by the idea of a Spike magazine anthology, especially having browsed Xlibris and seen their free service to print your book on demand, both on paper and electronically. This sort of thing gets me excited because it’s definitely the future of the book and also because it appears it wouldn’t cost me much more than my time. But then I wonder if it’s just vanity publishing. And if anyone would give a toss. Hmm… Let me know either way, won’t you.
And lastly, thanks to Evan Williams at evhead for giving a favourable mention to Splinters within his own blog entries. As far as I can work out, Evan is one of the original Lovely People who created and brought Blogger to the world, so it was particularly kind. Although I bet he says that about all the new blogs 
I’m not that familiar with many other blogs at the mo, but two I recommend so far are the frequently hilarious Ampnet blog (”It’s the tits!”) and KitschBitch, even though the latter makes me feel very, very old…
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- Free New Books
- New Spike Stuff
- Authors - get free publicity for your new titles
- Women: know your place It’s taken UK book publi…
- When Authors Attack Interesting article in Wire…
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