Authors Electric

It seems hard to believe, looking back, that it was only a little over a year ago when I brought out my first indie e-book. It’s been one of the best moves of my career. But I had no idea when I first started planning this around April 2011 that it was going to be at all successful. In fact, I’d been warned against it by industry professionals who made gloomy predictions that a) all the books would be immediately pirated, and b) that nobody would buy them anyway. But it was a decision born of frustration as much as anything else. Time and again I was told by potential readers that they always preferred to start reading a series from the very beginning. The early books in my Charlie Fox series had been out of print since my UK publisher was bought out by a larger house, and the US small press who’d contracted to produce them folded after the death of the publisher, while my mainstream US publisher considered the European-set early books “too British” to find an audience. In...

Yesterday was a very important day for me.   My wife and I celebrated our one year anniversary yesterday.   Anniversaries are typically a day where you celebrate fidelity, staying together, and renew your vow to stay together in the future. When it comes to writing, however, I have not been that faithful to my genre.   Sometimes writers like to write the same type of book over and over – always YA books, always non-fiction, or always thrillers.   There is some logic behind it since it is easier to develop the fifth like-styled book than it is the first because you have experience with it.   But for me, I have found that I have so many different stories to tell that I cannot stay within one genre.   My first book, Tears for the Mountain , is a non-fiction about a medical mission trip to Haiti following the deadly earthquake there.   The story follows the delivery of 20,000 pounds of medical supplies to hospitals damaged in the eart...

 Autumn - time of mellow fruitfulness etc. Well, it was officially the end of British summertime at the weekend. What summertime? I hear you ask.  Good question, it was a bit damp and miserable for the most part wasn't it?  And the promised 'Indian Summer'failed to materialise.  However, in a couple of days it will be Halloween, so I thought I'd share some ghost stories. Nanteos Mansion One of my favourite places in all the world is Nanteos Mansion, near where I used to live, in Wales. I used to keep my horses at the stables and spent many a happy hour soaking up the atmosphere of this historic house, built in 1738. The Mansion has its share of ghosts and an interesting history. Late at night the stables would ring with unearthly screeches, like souls in torment. Actually it was nothing more sinister than a colony of screech owls nesting nearby. (Or so I was told.) The owner of the stables, which, when I was there, had been sold as a separate entity from...