Or do we? There was a very interesting article in last week’s Sunday Independent LIFE magazine, and it has got a lot of people talking – about money. Author money, no less. *sharp intake of breath* The piece, by Emily Hourican, made for very interesting reading indeed and includes some fascinating comments and insights from authors about the thorny subject of earnings. I was also mentioned in the piece (ahem) and had my photo splashed...

It’s an old problem. One we skip past on DVDs, warning us of illegal copies of films. One we may not even be aware of when we download an album from a website our friend told us about. Piracy is, unfortunately, everywhere – and now it has a grip on books. My books, very famous books, and most probably your books too. In a recent blog post, author Heidi Cullinan shares her own thoughts on this...

There have been several times in the last three months when I have felt like a proud or an anxious mum – and this has nothing to do with school reports or scraped knees. I am referring to my debut novel THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME. Three hundred and sixty pages of words. My third child. The only thing in my life that I react to with similar emotions to those evoked by my kids (except perhaps...

Which is, quite possibly, the worst title I’ve ever come up with, but it really says what this post is about better than anything else my feeble brain can conjure up right now (I need a holiday so it’s a good job I’m going on one next week.) So, in a general ’round up’ here are some interesting literary things that have caught my eye recently: 1) #TheBook – this is a really interesting social...

I don’t think there can be many people who didn’t hear about the awful nightmare that happened to author, Kate Kerrigan, earlier this week. Kate left her laptop in a Dublin taxi. The laptop had her entire new novel on it – and she didn’t have it backed up. GULP! After a huge social media drive to track down the ‘quite handsome’ cabbie Kate remembered chatting to from Heuston station, and after the involvement of...

On Wednesday, 14th May, I will be the guest host on the Twitter feed @LitChat. LitChat is a community of readers and writers who participate in a one-hour, moderated chat on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’m thrilled to have been invited to guest host this week to talk about THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME, writing a debut novel, Titanic and anything else that comes up! To participate, follow me on Twitter @HazelGaynor and follow @LitChat or the #LitChat...

In recent interviews, I’ve been asked about the writers who have inspired me. This is a difficult question for me to answer with a snappy, erudite soundbite. I tend to waffle on about my love of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen, before harping on about how much I admire Philippa Gregory and Rose Tremain. But it’s an important question because – whether I am always conscious of it or not – there are many, many...

At 8.20pm on Monday, 14th April my phone rang. I’d been waiting for the call all day, because this was my first live interview with a radio station in America. To say my heart jumped when the phone rang is something of an understatement. This was my time to ‘Lean In’! Ten minutes later, it was all over (thankfully, it went really well). The host couldn’t have been nicer and we had a great chat about...

There are plenty of misconceptions about the life of a writer. If our existence was really like that imagined by our friends and Hollywood script writers, we would all be writing in idyllic, rustic cottages in the French countryside, just like Colin Firth’s character in Love Actually, because that’s what writers do, right? We would stop work at noon to have luncheon with our editor, swing by our agent’s office to chat about the latest...

I often judge a book by its cover (although, clearly, I know that I shouldn’t), but there is another school of thought about how to determine whether a book is for you – or not. In his book HOW TO READ A NOVEL, John Sutherland suggests that readers should apply the page 69 test.  He argues that, “Dust jackets, blurbs, shoutlines, critics’ commendations (“quote whores”, as they are called in the video/DVD business) all jostle...