SUSAN PRICE: Kindle and Beyond!

Hello, and welcome to my first blog for Kindle Authors UK, something I’m very excited to be part of.  I can publish a book from my sofa!  Have, in fact, already published two – Overheard In A Graveyard and The Ghost Drum.  It feels a bit like science-fiction.

I started young – I was 16 when my Dad signed the contract, with Faber and Faber, for my first book, The Devil’s Piper.  (I was too young to sign a legally binding document.)  The photo’s of me when I was about that age.

In those days I hammered out books on an old iron typewriter, and it was hard work.  I could never type a page without making a mistake, I hated changing ribbons, and figuring out word-count was too much for my unmathematical brain.  In the late 80s I started hearing about computers but wasn’t too interested – they seemed expensive, and I didn’t want the bother of having to learn to use one.  Then a friend showed me how fast his computer could print off documents and I immediately went out and bought an Amstrad.  No more changing inky ribbons!  No more calculating word-counts and getting them wrong!  No more months of work to produce a good final copy!
I know it must have been 1985 or 6 when I bought my Amstrad, because I finished writing The Ghost Drum on it; and The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal in 1987.  That’s my Carnegie below (if you got it, baby, flaunt it.) 

And here (below, right) is a photo of me from around that time – 1980s specs and all.

Now I have a whole family of computers – Great Big Desktop, Middle-Sized Laptop, and Weeny-Little Netbook.  I still sometimes write by hand, if the mood takes me, but when I hear writers saying that they will never part with their old typewriter, and that technology gets in the way of the Muse, that writing by computer makes writers careless – well, I confess, I want to bombard them with scrunched up balls of paper and old typewriter ribbons.  At the least.

Now I have a Kindle too – and I love it much more than I expected.  I love carrying 50 books around in a gadget that weighs less than one ordinary book.  On my kindle at the moment I have: Shakespeare’s sonnets, the complete works of M R James, Kiplings Indian Tales and Traffics and Discoveries, the complete works of Jerome K Jerome, MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Fort’s Wild Tales, Mo Hayder’s Gone, Pratchett’s Sourcery, Celia Rees’ The Fool’s Girl, Victora Connelly’s The Perfect Hero, Katherine Roberts’ Spellfall, Mary Hoffman’s Troubadour, my own kindle books and an introduction to Hinduism.  However much I cram into it, it never weighs any more.

 

I’m looking forward to finding out how the kindle is going to change the book world.  I’m in the process of turning all my ‘Ghost World’ books into kindle e-books.  This is a series in which the first book won the Carnegie, which agents, critics, publishers and readers enthused about – and yet it’s been out of print for a decade or more.  The whole series, plus a new book, Ghost Spell, has been on offer to publishers for the last two years – cue more enthusiasm from agents here and in Europe – and yet no publisher will take it.

So I’m putting it on kindle – here – to see what happens.  Will it sell, will it bomb?  I’ll report here, on Kindle Authors UK.

So, from mechanical typewriters, agents and publishing firms – to Kindle and beyond!

I’m busy on the net today.  You’ll find my regular Nennius blog here – with a new Blot cartoon!  And my website is to be found here.