With all the confusion surrounding Covid-19, what better time to overwhelm Amazon with self-published cookie-cutter guides which copy government guidelines. These guides are frequently riddled with spelling errors and poor grammar and are nothing more than just cash grabs trying to profit from Covid-19 fears

After having talked about three prolific writers, I thought it would only be right to talk about the ‘one-hit wonders’ in literature. People often talk about the one-hit wonders of the musical world, but you rarely hear about authors who struck big with just one book. Authors that then they did not write another or their subsequent attempts did not match up with the notoriety of the first.

Since the boom of parody books in 2016, publishing companies attempts at keeping the genre relevant have often fallen short and in my opinion, have started to come across as a cash grab. Though parody books had existed before 2016, the inception and popularity of the ‘Ladybirds for Grown-Ups’ list meant that more and more companies were turning towards their older or more traditional backlists and revamping them with contemporary topics.

When you are successful at something, why stop? If your quality of work is not declining and you still enjoy what you do, why stop? And if you want to write one hundred or more books, why not? It takes a special kind of author to be able to write a great book and then sustaining that strength over a long list of titles.

While Climate change has become a popular topic for publishers, and the number of books published about climate change, both the causes and effects, has increased, only a few publishers have made an effort to become climate neutral. In the US alone, the publishing industry annually uses about 32 million trees to make their books.

After emerging in 2007, the New Adult market brought together readers in their late teens and early twenties, that are often left out of the pages of both the Young Adult and Adult books, into the limelight. However, in the years following it has built up and struggled to overcome a heavy stigma, and almost always following plots which can be summed up as ‘Young Adult fiction but with explicit sex’.

In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman, or more colloquially known as a ‘coming-of-age’ novels, is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood in which character change is important. When you’re young, you do not measure time in calendar years - you measure it in school years, the end of summer before transitioning from primary to secondary school, and then onto college are traditional coming of age times.

More and more authors are starting to turn to Kickstarter, and similar platforms, to fund their publishing projects. ‘Kickstarter is the forefront of a new path for self-publishing, with a huge number of quality works coming from it,’ said first-time author A.Y. Chao about her decision to Kickstart her book Soul Affinity. However, can authors and readers really trust a site that has become notorious with scams and let downs?

A chance encounter, six or seven years ago, at the small library in town, introduced me to the world of Crime and Thriller novels, and my interest has not wavered since. Piecing together the clues that the author has left scattered within the book, often to the wrong conclusion, never seem to get old. And the inevitable twist that seems to pop up in so many of these novels never fails to catch me. However, there is one sub-genre that has only recently caught my eye: Nordic Noir.

Cast your mind back to 1994. Jeff Bezos had just founded Amazon, the first PlayStation was released in Japan and would go on to sell 100 million units, Justin Hall created the first blog post at Links.net, and The Lion King hits the big screen with box-office success. Now, one of these things isn’t like the others, and it isn’t all that accurate either.