Breaking the Mother Goose Code

A strange conversation on Facebook, the other day.

Somebody I sort of know had put up a post demanding that we all boycott Cadburys because they're selling "Halal Easter eggs".

Now, the idea of halal chocolate was a new one on me, so I thought I'd check it out.  What had actually happened was this: Cadburys had put up a page on their website, indicating which of their many products are "halal certified".  In other words, it's essentially dietary guidance - a bit like listing which Cadburys products are "Suitable for vegetarians".  There was nothing "halal" about any of it, just a page letting Muslims know which Cadburys chocolate bars and so on are okay for them to eat.

I pointed this out.  But, no, that wasn't good enough.  Because, apparently, Easter eggs are Christian and so, by making them "halal" Cadburys were pandering to the Islamists and helping to sell Britain downriver.

So I came back - no religious text, to the best of my knowledge, refers to chocolate eggs and no religion has a monopoly on them (let's face it, God neglected to let most of the world know that chocolate even existed until comparatively recently).  But I was wrong, it seems, because the word Easter in front of "eggs" makes them Christian, and exclusively so.  And I was apparently attacking my friend's religion, which was a big No-No.  And that's when I explained that "Easter" comes from "Eostre", a pagan goddess - which explains the eggs, bunnies, chicks and other Eastery thingies.  There's no "Easter" in the Bible, only Passover.

And there endeth the Facebook friendship.

Which brings me to the subject of this post.  I was very keen to read Jeri Studebaker's Breaking the Mother Goose Code - How a Fairy-Tale Character Fooled the World for 300 Years, partly because it looked interesting, and partly because my theatrical hero - Joey Grimaldi, King of Clowns - appeared in the first modern pantomime, Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg, which did great business when it hit the stage at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in December 1808.

I wondered - just wondered - whether Jeri Studebaker might mention the Mother Goose pantomime in her book.  And I was not disappointed.  Jeri had done her homework.

The first part of Breaking the Mother Goose Code really does focus on the character of Mother Goose, drawing attention to the similarities between this alternately beautiful and grotesque figure and certain ancient European mother-goddesses, especially Holda-Perchta.  The second half takes the argument further, beyond Mother Goose herself, to examine the ways in which so-called "fairy tales" function as a kind of oral memory of the time when Goddess worship was widespread (and largely uncontested), and how these fairy tales - especially when shorn of their latter-day accretions - can be thought of as shamanic journeys and/or magical rituals and spells.

The idea, overall, is that patriarchy is a fairly new phenomenon.  And it's a stinker.  Whenever and wherever it appears, it pursues a sort of scorched earth policy.  But people - whole populaces - don't just alter everything they believe overnight because an angry man tells them to.  Those pre-patriarchal belief systems were natural and hardwired into our collective psyche.  In the face of barbaric violence and blanket intolerance, the old ways lived on - surreptitiously - and did so, partly, through the transmission of fairy tales.

I like this idea.  Mainstream history has been rather naughty, I feel, in taking such a dismissive and lofty attitude towards "folk" history (local legends, place-names, fairy tales).  Just because these things weren't written down till a late stage, doesn't mean that they don't provide us with important glimpses of ancient knowledge.  The Australian aboriginal sang the world back into existence with his song-lines, re-making the landscape by telling its stories, long before the White Man arrived to tell him he'd got it all wrong, and then make a slave of him.

Jeri Studebaker's research for this book is ample and impressive.  She really knows her subject and has gone into it in great depth, producing a book that is both readable and stimulating.  Hard facts mingle with interesting theories and speculations.  And nowhere, I feel, is Jeri at her best more than when she is taking a wrecking-ball to patriarchy.

The differences between patriarchy (recent, bloody) and pre-patriarchal societies (been around for ever, generally equitable and non-violent) are brought out in such a way as to illustrate, not only what a disaster patriarchal structures have been for the species and the planet, but what we lost when we allowed our more natural societies to be steamrollered by the maniacs of patriarchal thinking.  So many lives lost.  So much wisdom lost.  So much damage done.

In fact, Studebaker doesn't belabour this point, but chooses her examples carefully, citing experts in these matters.  Her argument - that fairy tales like Mother Goose represent a sort of quiet resistance, a continuation of pre-patriarchal values in a time of patriarchal thuggery - grows, little by little, from her near-forensic analysis of Mother Goose (Holda-Perchta) herself to the wider world of fairy tales and their magical methodology - until, in my case at least, I was convinced.  Strip away the Disneyfication, and fairy tales really can take us back to a pre-patriarchal age of equality and possibilities.

For an illustration of how disgusting and despicable patriarchal thinking can be, one has only to consider that online run-in with my "friend" over the matter of halal chocolate eggs.  The intolerance, the ignorance, the "I can attack anybody's religion if I choose, but nobody can attack mine!" attitude (even though nobody was actually attacking her Christian faith) and that vague sense of a call-to-arms, a sort of "Let's have another crusade" subtext, are all indicative of patriarchal thinking.  It is crude, divisive, and usually ends in tears.

Mother Goose and her fellows, as Jeri Studebaker shows in her rather wonderful book, can show us that it doesn't have to be like that.  The Golden (Easter) Egg has nothing to do with Christianity, and those who squabble over it - "I can have it, you can't!" - are infantile and deluded.  The Egg was delivered by Mother Goose, the Eternal Feminine, and we can all have it, if we're prepared to play the game.

Click here to go to the Moon Books page for Breaking the Mother Goose Code.

THE GRAIL ... Coming Soon!!!

A sneak preview, friends, of The Grail, coming soon from Moon Books.

Publication in March 2015.

Looking good, isn't it?

I've set up a Facebook page for the new book (click on "Facebook page" to go straight to it) and I'll keep you updated as the launch date draws nearer.

Meantime, work proceeds on Shakespeare's Son - my "Life of Sir William Davenant" - which has been keeping me pretty busy.  And hoping to have some interesting news pretty soon regarding Shakespeare's skull.

Plenty more to come, folks!

How Conspiracies Work

Buoyed by the news that Who Killed William Shakespeare? has sold out its first print-run within two months of publication, I've been wondering what Shakespeare would think if he came back today.

At first glance, you'd imagine he'd be pretty chuffed.  Nearly 400 years on from his death in 1616, he is still far and away the leading figure in his chosen field.  No one comes near him.  Shakespeare is, without doubt, the most famous poet-playwright ever to have walked the planet.

He might find the internet exciting.  He would surely be impressed that the journey from Stratford to London can be done in two hours, as opposed to the two days it took on horseback.

But, to be honest, I think he would be appalled - and certainly very uncomfortable.  After all, it's one thing to be celebrated as the world's greatest dramatist and poet.  It's another thing altogether to be completely misremembered.

The Shakespeare industry is as busy as it ever was.  New books about Shakespeare appear all the time.  And most of them spout unadulterated rubbish about him.

There seem to be, essentially, two sides to the argument.  On the one hand, Will Shakespeare was a humble Warwickshire lad of extraordinary gifts - and, more than anything, humble and self-effacing; he went to London, made his fortune, wowed the Queen and then the King, and then he thought, "Ah well, I've had a good run, time to go home", and he sort of vanished.

The alternative argument goes something like this: That semi-transparent and quite frankly boring individual, better known for grain-dealing in Stratford, could never have been the universal genius who penned those marvellous comedies, histories and tragedies.  So somebody else must have done all the hard work.  William Shakespeare was just a frontman, a cardboard cut-out, undeservedly remembered as the greatest writer in the English language.

Both arguments are fundamentally flawed and - to put it bluntly - stupidly simplistic.  The latter arises from the former.  For as long as the academics, the Shakespeare experts and the tourism industry insist on selling us a see-through Shakespeare, a man who kept himself to himself and wrote entirely from his own imagination, steering well clear of the controversies of his day, there will always be those who cry "Foul!" and demand to know who the real William Shakespeare was.

And, if they happen to be of the all-aristocrats-are-excellent-and-infinitely-better-than-the-rest-of-us school (which dominates so much comment these days), they will insist that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat - like the Earl of Oxford (who died while Shakespeare was still busily writing plays) or, more crazily, Queen Elizabeth I (ditto).

These are two extreme positions: Shakespeare was just an ordinary bloke, and Shakespeare must have been someone of high social standing.  They are the curse of Shakespeare studies.  Neither standpoint does any credit to William Shakespeare himself.

In a sense, what we are looking at is two sides of a conspiracy theory.  The first - and, apparently, the more innocuous - side claims that Shakespeare was just a patriotic middle-class Englishman; the second argues (quite rightly) that such a Shakespeare is a sham.  But, ultimately, both sides are wrong.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the circumstances of Will's life and death.  It's been described as a conspiracy theory.  Which it isn't.  The real conspiracy theory continually pours out of Stratford and the cloisters of academe, fiercely countered by the fanatics who want to believe that somebody else altogether was the true genius.

Let us take a moment to consider the similarities between Shakespeare's lifetime and that of Arthur - the first historical Arthur on record, that is; not the silly and mythical King Arthur.

First of all, even though these two individuals lived a thousand years apart, their periods were subject to very similar strains.  In Arthur's day, a foreign religion (Christianity) was taking root at the same time as Germanic settlers were forcibly conquering much of southern Britain, beginning with the eastern side of the country.  In Shakespeare's day, a sort-of foreign religion (Protestantism) had entered the country from Germany, working its way across the land from the eastern counties.  One of the results of the spread of Protestantism was enormous social change.  The old gentry was almost entirely ruined, as Protestant parvenus stole fortunes and scrambled for precedence.

In other words, both in Arthur's day (late-6th century) and Shakespeare's day (late-16th century), a dangerous and disruptive movement was spreading across the country from the east and seeking to destroy and/or seize everything in its path.  The old religion (paganism, first; Catholicism, later) was under concerted and violent attack.  If you adhered to the old form faith and the social order which had obtained before the 'tempest' blew up, you were more or less doomed.

Both Arthur and Shakespeare stood for what could be called the 'true' Britain.  Arthur was no Christian, but there were Christians in his circle.  Shakespeare tried to pose as a Protestant, only to return to the faith of his forefathers when he saw just how vicious and corrupt the regime of Elizabeth I really was.  Neither of them was a fundamentalist, in any meaningful way; rather, they saw that what Britain needed was an end to the religious strife that covered a multitude of sins.  As Shakespeare had John of Gaunt say in Richard II:

"That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."

I believe - and have offered evidence to support my belief - that both Arthur and Shakespeare were treacherously betrayed.  Murdered, to all intents and purposes.  Why?  Because both of them, in their different times, stood in the way of the triumph of Britain's enemies - the greedy, the self-serving, the corrupt, the dishonest, the over-zealous, the cruel and the depraved.

Now, here's where we enter the realms of conspiracy.  And the simple fact is that no conspiracy can succeed if (as is commonly supposed) it comprises just a handful of shady individuals.  Any conspiracy of that kind is likely to fail, or at least to be quickly exposed.

If it had been that simple - if, that is, the premature deaths of both Arthur and Shakespeare, had been brought about by just one or two fanatics - then we would have known the truth for some time.  But I would argue that such a scenario is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

The real conspiracy requires many, many more people to engage in the cover-up.  It needs generations of commentators to collude in the crime.

In the case of Arthur, the treachery stemmed from the early Church - and, one could say, a particular religious establishment set up by one prominent churchman.  In the case of Shakespeare, the treachery stemmed partly from professional rivalry and partly from the paranoia that was loose at the court of King James.

Now, consider this: could future generations, wedded as they were to the cause of Christianity, acknowledge the role played by the early Church in the assassination of Arthur and the destruction of Britain?  Were there own beliefs not essentially the same as the beliefs which led to Arthur's death and the betrayal of Britain to her enemies?

And consider this of Shakespeare: the very people whose devious and bloody-minded behaviour was exposed in his plays ended up running the country.  Protestantism, which provided so many of these ogres with the excuse they needed to rob and slaughter their fellow countrymen, became the official religion of the land.  Future generations of scholars set out to prove that this was an inevitable and desirable process: it's what made Britain great.  And so, if Shakespeare had opposed this very kind of extremism, and his vocal opposition had led to his death, then it was absolutely necessary that the biography of William Shakespeare should be rewritten and the circumstances of his death ignored and forgotten.

The original conspiracies - the murders of Arthur and Shakespeare - required only a few determined and unscrupulous individuals to succeed.  Initially.  After that, though, huge numbers of likeminded people had to play along, to connive in the original crime, to become complicit in the cover-up (for reasons of faith and/or political expediency).  They became accessories after the fact.

It continues to this day.  There are still scholars who spout absolute gibberish about Arthur.  They steadfastly refuse to explore his northern roots.  They get unreasonably angry at the very suggestion that the first Arthur on record might have been the original Arthur.  Why?  Because they are colluding in the conspiracy that led to Arthur's death.  They are studying Arthur purely from the point-of-view of his enemies.  They are happy to continue the cover-up, because their mindsets and belief systems would have led them to participate in the original crime.

The same goes for Shakespeare.  His story is repeatedly written up by his enemies - even though they claim to love and admire him - because they harbour the same set of beliefs, ultimately, as the men who killed him (the one who wielded the weapon, the one who commissioned the crime, and the faction which kept it quiet).  So the conspiracy continues, perpetuated by the very character-type that was involved from the start.  Naturally, these academics cannot tell the truth about Shakespeare.  They might not have been there at the actual assassination, but they can continue to assassinate him by lying about his life, his works, his beliefs and covering up the harsh reality.

That's how conspiracies work.  If it were just a hugger-mugger huddle of plotters, their crimes would soon be exposed.  But it isn't.  It's an ongoing propaganda war.  Those who would have applauded and approved of the crime continue to cover for the criminals.  They misrepresent Arthur and Shakespeare and attack anyone who points to the realities of the time.

So Shakespeare, I believe, would find his visit to today's world a truly depressing experience.  His enemies triumphed.  They continue to tell his story, and to tell it all wrong.

And here's where we should take note.  Conspiracies can only prosper in a society, in a world, where there is sufficient fanaticism for the crimes to be covered up.  We don't all have to wield the knife - only to lie to ourselves and each other about what really happened.  And we do so because our belief systems are so horribly skewed.  We will justify atrocities because our blind prejudices assure us that they were justifiable.

Have you been on Facebook lately?  Read the below-the-line comments beneath any online newspaper story?  Fanaticism is flourishing.

Somewhere out there is today's Arthur, today's Shakespeare.  They will be betrayed and put to death.  And future generations will be none the wiser.  Because there are enough maniacs out there who will happily spread lies in support of their extremist positions.  And that's all that is needed for conspiracies to succeed.

Amazon Reviews (About Last Night)

I've often thought of the post-war generation as the luckiest in history.  The Baby-Boomers - in the UK, at least - had so much: universal healthcare, free education, welfare, jobs and houses ...

The present generation appears to have even more.  But I think they have less.  True, they have access to the most remarkable invention of all time, the internet.  Practically all the knowledge in the world is available to them in an instant.  We can talk, face-to-face, with almost anyone, wherever they are, in real time.  Music, books and films can be downloaded, often for free.

No one has ever enjoyed privileges like those before.  And I suspect that they will not last.  The infrastructure required to maintain a healthy internet is mind-boggling.  Besides which, the internet may effectively eat itself.  The way things are going ...

Let me illustrate.  Yesterday, a really rather lovely review of my book, The King Arthur Conspiracy, was posted on the new Review blog.  The reviewer knew nothing about the book when it first arrived, and I had never met, heard of or communicated with the reviewer before she received it.  For the record, she is an avid and active reviewer of books, for the Historical Novel Society and others.

She very kindly posted her review on the Goodreads website, entirely on her own initiative, and then posted it also on Amazon.com.

And then something odd happened.  Her review on Amazon was instantly "disliked".

Now, I'm no expert on Amazon.  So when I heard through Facebook that her review was attracting numerous dislikes, all very suddenly, I couldn't pretend to have any idea what was going on.  All I  do know is that she became very hurt and upset by the reaction, which seemed to have little or nothing to do with the review itself.

Within a very short while, Amazon had deleted the entire review.

Previously, The King Arthur Conspiracy had attracted four 5-Star reviews over a fair period of time, all extremely enthusiastic and complimentary.  Then, a while back, somebody took the trouble to post a 1-Star review, pronouncing the book "pure junk".  His reasons for doing so were a bit bizarre (he criticised my use of place-names, which he pointed out were not recorded until several hundred years after Arthur lived - but then, Gaelic culture was entirely oral, and no one felt the need for maps, and to pretend that place-names were spontaneously invented just before the maps were drawn is silly, to say the least).  Otherwise, his review was a mere bile-spewing exercise.  But hey, what can you do?

I didn't respond.  What would be the point?  Just as you can't really answer back when a professional reviewer slates you, so you can't do much when an amateur tears into your work.  Best to stay out of it.

However, it is a problem - because anyone who visits the Amazon.com page for The King Arthur Conspiracy sees, first amongst the customer reviews, a rather savage - if barely reasonable or logical - assault, instead of the preceeding 5-Star reviews, which were uniformly glowing.  In that regard, another pleasant 5-Star review was a bit of a boon, because that would then take precedence.  The crude rubbishing would fall back into second place.

So having that 5-Star review attacked and then removed is disappointing.  It means, of course, that the nasty - and entirely less-than-typical - review returns to the top of the pile.

I'm really not sure what happened.  There are two ways of looking at it:

1) the reviewer has her detractors, who keep an eye out for her reviews (of which there are plenty) with the intention solely of "disliking" them

2) the book has its detractors, who keep an eye out for positive reviews, which they then seek to spoil and, if possible, force Amazon to take them down as quickly as possible

I can't think of any other options.

Whichever it was - concerted intolerance towards the reviewer or the book - we're looking at something unpleasant, ignoble ... and sadly all too common in the internet age.

There are "reasons" why option (2) might be the right one.  Arthur arouses strong emotions, especially among those who have - shall we say - imperialistic notions, and want Arthur to be the familiar knight-in-shining-armour of the medieval fantasies.  Such people are hugely intolerant of any research into the historical Arthur.  In much the same camp, broadly speaking, are those of a hard line religious persuasion, who would no doubt seek to harm the book and its reputation because of its revelations about the early Church.

On the other hand, if option (1) is correct - the frenzied attack on the review was motivated more by animosity towards the reviewer - then I'm slightly more perplexed.  Why do that?  As far as I have been able to determine, the reviewer is a hard-working, conscientious person with a genuine love of books and a commendable desire to promote authors if and when she feels that their work is worthy of recommendation.  And she recommended The King Arthur Conspiracy very highly.

It's all rather puzzling.  Whatever the cause or motivation, an independent review of my book on the historical Arthur immediately became the target of a concerted attack for reason or reasons unknown and by persons who were too cowardly to show their faces.

Overall, Amazon's policy of inviting and encouraging customers to leave reviews of their products has always struck me as a good thing.  It's very democratic, and intended - no doubt - to be helpful to all parties.  But human nature is what it is, and the system has repeatedly come in for abuse.

Some writers have got all their friends and family to flood their pages with excellent reviews.  Some authors have set out to sabotage rivals by posting anonymous scathing reviews.

Now, either individual reviewers are being targeted (why?) or individual books are being targeted because a group of people don't want others to read them and so they will take steps to ensure that only the most vicious (if wholly useless) reviews remain immediately visible.  Either way, we're dealing with some extremely sad and twisted people here - people who will undermine the unpaid work of a dedicated reviewer or strive to harm book sales for their own ideological reasons.

I would ask everybody to be aware of this.  For the sake of free speech - which I believe is a given - I do not seek to have negative reviews deleted, nor do I respond to such reviews.  Assuming that the review in question represented a genuine response to my work (and not, say, a kneejerk backlash based on ignorance or prejudice), then it has every right to remain there.  The balance remains with the positive, 5-Star reviews.

But it would appear that there are people - acting in concert, it would seem - who don't believe in free speech at all.  Whether it's the work of the reviewer which they seek to spoil or the work of the author which they disapprove of, the outcome is the same.  A good review is attacked and then removed.  The reviewer suffers (she was very upset), as does the author, whose sales are inevitably affected.

If the type of internet troll or bully who indulges in this sort of behaviour had any form of moral courage and integrity, they would either ignore reviews they disagree with or give reasoned and rational grounds for attacking them.  Entering into any sort of debate, though, is anathema to such people.  In fact, free and open debate is the opposite of what they want.

They want to shut down free speech and bury historical research.  They want to prevent hard working writers and reviewers from having their say, simply because they have developed a grudge.

You are not allowed to write about the historical Arthur or the early Church in Britain, unless you do so in the terms approved of by these invisible trolls.

In other words, you are not allowed to write about history.  Or religion.  Because they will swiftly move to have you censored.  And anyone who reads and admires what you have written will be victimised.

It would seem that we don't burn books on bonfires anymore.  We just rubbish them on Amazon.  And so the internet proves to be every bit as bigoted and fanatical as the Inquisition.

In years to come, people will gather in caves and tell stories of their predecessors - gigantic people, who ate whatever they wanted whenever they wanted (food was "fast"), who made heat and light happen just like that, and who had all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips. 

But they destroyed it all through petty bickering, jealousy, selfishness, and a weird fascination for the pointless and inane. 

And because some of them could not tolerate free speech and the results of painstaking research.

Blog to Blog

I wasn't around much yesterday - was down in London town on a secret mission - so I didn't get chance to flag this up.  But that's okay, because we've extended the deadline for the "Win Yourself a Signed Copy of Who Killed William Shakespeare?" competition until tomorrow (Saturday).

Still time, then, to answer the question, which you'll find on the "Spectacular Virtual Review Group Blog Launch" Facebook page, and be in with a chance.

Here's the short piece I wrote about researching Who Killed William Shakespeare? for the new Review blog:

http://www.thereviewgroup.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/simon-stirling-special-feature-fact-or.html

And thanks to those great guys in the Review Group for all their hard work on getting this started.  A worthy cause, my friends!

Win a Signed Copy

Just a reminder ...

On Facebook tomorrow - Thursday 12 September 2013 - there is an opportunity to win a first edition hardback copy of Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, the Motive, the Means, signed by the author (me) with whatever message the winner desires.

There will be an oh so simple question to answer, and the winner will be chosen at random.  It doesn't matter where in the world the winner might be - the signed copy will be posted for free (which means that if the winner is in the United States, for example, they'll get their copy before the book is even released over there!)

This will be just the latest fantastic giveaway taking place on the all new Review Group Blog.  So, if you get this message in time, please pop over and have a look.

https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/368011109968529/

Good luck!

The Grail

I just had to share this with you.  It's an awesome and amazing image, isn't it?

The hugely talented Lloyd Canning created this.  It's a sort of overall concept of the Grail, as discussed in The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion, which I'm currently publishing in monthly chapters on the Moon Books blog (www.moon-books.net).  Every chapter comes complete with a black-and-white graphic drawing specially created for it by Lloyd.  But this full-colour acrylic painting is essentially the whole thing right there on canvas, and it first saw the light of day at the launch event for Who Killed William Shakespeare? at Waterstones in Stratford.  Now it's available as a high-quality print.

It's not exactly the best photo I've taken (doesn't really do justice to the original) but you get the idea.  Check out Lloyd Canning's Art on Facebook for more of his work.  I think we'll be hearing a lot more about Mr Canning as time goes by!

New Review Blog Launched TODAY

The ecology of publishing is changing.

In the Industrial Age, books were printed and bound in quantitites.  They were then transported, stored, distributed and stacked.  It was an expensive and fairly complex process, but essentially the same as any sort of manufacturing industry.

That still goes on, of course.  But new technology has allowed alternative publishing models to thrive.  Now, a writer can register online with a print-on-demand company.  He or she can then create two files (one for the inside of the book, one for the outside) and send them to the printers.  A bar code or "ISBN" on the book means that all the relevant details can then be displayed by online booksellers, such as the mighty Amazon.  When the book is ordered, the message goes out to the printers, and a copy is printed, bound, packaged and sent out.  Overheads ... practically nil.

And then there are ebooks.  Once a book has been written, edited, formatted and converted into the right kind of file, the sky is the limit here.  Any number of ebooks can be sold and instantly despatched to ebook readers at no real cost.  There aren't any production overheads: as long as the consumer has a Kindle, a tablet, a computer, an ebook reader, then the book can be "produced" for free.  Which means that most of the profits go straight to the author.

What this means is that a whole new publishing industry has developed.  Gone are the old, painful processes of acquiring agents, approaching publishers, piles of rejection letters, long waits and tiny royalties.  Publishing can now be almost instantaneous.  Everything is in the hands of the writer now.

But what about the reader?  Well, there's suddenly a lot more choice out there.  And most books published by the new methods are considerably cheaper to buy than those which have gone through the traditional process.  A newly published ebook, or nicely-produced print-on-demand copy, can be purchased for - what? - about $3 maybe.

When there's an explosion of new product, readily accessible at relatively low cost, a new form of marketing has to emerge.  The old system relied on the marketing contacts, resources and budgets of the publishing houses.  The new system relies on networking, social media and recommendations.

Reviewing books is effectively the new trend.  It's about the only way that a reader and prospective purchaser can decide whether or not they want to try out a new book.  And this year, reviewing is taking off in a BIG way.  I've just received a new hardback novel to review for one of my favourite historical websites (those lovely Historical Honeys), and will soon be getting a couple more to review from the fascinating Moon Books stable. 

Authors are going to be spending a lot more of their time reviewing other authors' books, because we can no longer rely on the traditional marketing methods.  Now, we do it ourselves.

So ... it gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of a new blog dedicated to reviews of new books, along with author interviews, competitions and prize giveaways.  This REVIEW blog grew out of a very active and exciting Facebook group, and such has been the interest in the new REVIEW group blog that the official launch party has been extended from a week to a fortnight!

Please pop over and have a look.  My day is Day 6 - Thursday - and I'll be giving away a free signed copy of Who Killed William Shakespeare? to go with my own blogpost about historical fact and fiction.

This is how we do things nowadays.  The old media are lumbering along.  New media is where publishing is really happening.

http://thereviewgroup.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/welcome-to-review-group-blog.html

New Review Blog About to go Live

In these days of t'internet, writers are able to help and support each other in ways which just weren't possible not so long ago.

This has its downside as well as its upside.  Where do you start?  How much time do you spend on social media?  What do you do to get your work seen, read, reviewed and talked about?

Well, there's a new resource on its way, and I'm very pleased to be a part of it.  A Facebook group known simply as "The Review" is about to hold a week-long launch party for its new Review blog.  The blog will include reviews (naturally), interviews, guest posts, recordings and all the fun of the fair.  There are also some spectacular goodies to be given away.

I have a guest blog post on the subject of "FACT OR FICTION", which will go live on the Review blog next week.  And because so many juicy morsels are on offer, I felt that it would only be right to place my own giveaway on the table.

We'll be giving away - for free - a signed first edition hardback copy of Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, the Motive, the Means.

So, if you're interested in books, authors, writing, reading, go to this page and join the Spectacular Virtual Review Group Blog Lauch party:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/368011109968529/

Sign up for your chance to win all sorts of freebies (including a signed copy of my booky-wook) and to keep track of the excellent work of these dedicated reviewers.  The party starts this weekend.

Don't miss it!  And spread the word!