Authors Electric

  Today, Authors Electric is delighted, and honoured, to bring you a guest blog from American indie author , Terri Giuliano Long, who offers all indie-authors valuable advice based on experience. Indie Publishing: 7 Mistakes I Won’t Make Again When I published In Leah’sWake I had no idea what I was doing. I could barely get out of my own way. I’m grateful that, despite my dumb mistakes, readers and book bloggers gave my novel a chance.  Today, as the number of books competing for attention increases, and the quality of indie books continues to rise, with many indie books rivaling those published by major New York houses, I might not be so lucky. When I publish my new novel, Nowhere to Run , this fall, I’m bound to make my share of mistakes. The industry is evolving and we’re all more or less feeling our way. Still, it’s foolish make the same mistake twice. Having learned from past errors, I’ll make adjustments. Here are 7 mistakes I’ll be sure to avoid: ...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morten_liebach/  No, that's not my desk. (Although I have to admit at the moment it's not far off.) This is a good illustration of 'Tagarene' (or clutter)  I used to have a regular 'Monday spot' on my  own blog, entitled 'weird words.' My source of wisdom when it comes to all things wordly is Michael Quinion* who stated about the word 'Tagarene' which I featured some time ago - "You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience..." "...A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it did much of his trade with ships..." Well my whole house, not just my desk has been like a tagarene s...

I've just been re-reading Linda Newbery's post on editors and editing, and I think that, on the whole, I've been very lucky. For my earlier books with Walker, I worked with Wendy Boase, Anne Carter and later, Mara Bergman, and in nearly every case, the process of editing brought added richness to the stories. A really good editor is like a midwife (sorry, guys, but even you can be pregnant with a good story which might have to be eased into the world in the most appropriate way). For one YA book, THE GAME, the introduction of a new character was suggested. I kicked, screamed and objected, finally capitulated, experimented - et voila! Something  amazing happened (thank you, Anne). The next of my out of print YA Walker books to become available as an ebook  will be WOLFSONG. It's set in a big, ancient house in Brittany, a real house which played an important part in my own life - its name, 'Chanteloup', translating satisfyingly into WOLFSONG - the song of th...

The Society of Authors has kindly put my name forward as one of four nominations for its Management Committee. If all goes smoothly and I join the other distinguished committee members I thought it might be useful to have a clearer idea of what it is that we would all like the Society to be doing for authors in these exciting times? What, I wonder, would George Bernard Shaw, (an early and active member of the Society), be campaigning for if he was around today? What would his views be on e-books and self-publishing, for instance? Would he be championing Amazon for making books so accessible or criticising their monopolistic and capitalistic tendencies? Would he be sympathetic towards struggling high street independents or would he see them as the architects of their own downfall?   What better place to launch such an investigation than here amongst a group of authors operating on the “cutting edge” of the electronic publishing industry. I would greatly welcome any...

Following on from yesterday's post about book covers from Sue Price, I should say I'm delighted with the cover designed for me, at a very reasonable price, by designer and photographer Rob Tysall of Nuneaton.   Rob did an excellent job of bringing alive my somewhat blurry vision of the character Charity from Charity's Child - imbuing her with a wonderful mixture of scariness and vulnerability that for me exactly captures her persona in the book. So huge thanks to Rob. I'll be asking him if he'd like to do some more work for me soon... and that brings me to the topic of my next book... This one is for adults and it's called Alexa's Song. The publishers of my first novel for adults, Low Tide, Lunan Bay , made encouraging noises at first but then decided that Alexa's Song  was 'too depressing'. (Gosh, I'm being my own worst publicist here. Though I actually quite like 'depressing' books...) Not that Alexa really is depressing...

Andrew's cover for 'Christopher Uptake'        One of the problems of self-publishing is: What about the cover?  (As Mark Chisnell was saying only the other day...)      Some writers are talented enough to do their own; or ask past publishers for permission to use the covers from their published editions.      I wasn’t talented enough, and didn’t want to go cap-in-hand to publishers.  Anyway, if I'm honest, I didn’t like many of my old covers.       Luckily, both my brothers are artists, and as my Twitter name is @priceclan, you might guess that I’m all for keeping things in the family.       Let me introduce the older of my brothers, Andrew.  I have eight self-published books on sale so far, and he has done the covers for them all.  So I asked him to tell us about how he learned his art. Andrew at the Price Clan Christmas Do  ...

World Book Night may now be over, but our giveaway hasn't quite disappeared. Follow this link  for more than a dozen free books by Authors Electric . But hurry - it won't last for ever... And now here's Simon Cheshire with his post for today.

Meet the future DON'T FORGET THE WORLD BOOK NIGHT GIVEAWAY! SCROLL DOWN!           With World Book Night just behind us, we've all been celebrating the published word in all its glory. But in a few years' time, I reckon, what bricks and mortar bookshops that remain will all be little kiosks: you'll go in, search and order using a touchscreen (which will be swamped by adverts put there in the last dying gasps of the legacy publishing system), then have a coffee while the nice lady behind the counter prints off a paperback on the Espresso Book Machine out the back, or transmits an ebook to your tablet PC. If chains exist at all, they'll be chains of franchises run by the online booksellers.           I think I'm havin' one of me mystic blasts here. I'll stick a tea towel on my head and dangle a couple of shower curtain rings from my ears. Let us gaze into the crystal ball (well, the goldfish ...

Yes you did read that correctly - FREE eBooks. In honour of and to celebrate World Book Night  over the 23rd and 24th April 2011the eBooks listed below will be FREE to download.  So please feel free to click on the link and download.  Once you've filled your Kindle with some great new reads tell your friends and family to visit us and take the opportunity to discover something new. And remember you don't have to have a Kindle to read these eBooks and enjoy them for FREE. Simply download the free app, so you can read them on your PC, Mac or Android phone. Just follow the 'No Kindle? No problem! link on the right.  We hope you enjoy! PLEASE NOTE: If visiting us a.m. on the 23rd our books may not be showing free on Amazon. It can take a few hours for them to change the books price to free. Simply bookmark our blog and come back in a few hours.     Authors Electric also have a new website here.   But here are the free books:- ...