Authors Electric, 10 years and counting... Katherine Roberts, Susan Price, Debbie Bennett

Amazingly, this year is Authors Electric’s 10th anniversary (the picture is a screenshot of our all-time page views). A huge thank you to everyone who has been with us over the years, past and current bloggers and our lovely readers - we would not exist without you! For our tenth anniversary post, we thought we’d get our three founding members together to bring you this glimpse of a distant past, when ebooks were a rude word as far as our publishers were concerned.

Please welcome to the virtual stage Katherine Roberts, Susan Price and Debbie Bennett.

*polite clapping and a couple of wolf whistles*

KATHERINE: It all started in 2011 at a secret location in deepest Oxfordshire, where two prize-winning authors got chatting about their books going out of print and the general state of the publishing industry.

SUE: I think both of us arrived early for the Scattered Authors’ conference at Charney Manor. So we sat in the sunny garden, with swifts screaming in squadrons from the chimney pots to the lawn and back round the chimney pots again. We talked about what a huge effect the internet had had on the music business. People weren’t buying records because they could simply listen to music on-line. Katherine said that, inevitably, the internet was going to have much the same effect on the publishing industry. I said, "Strange you should say that..." I’d been thinking exactly the same thing.

Before this, the possibility of 'authors doing it for themselves' by self-publishing and clubbing together for promotional purposes was just too costly and impractical. Where would we store all the books? How would we persuade bookshops to buy them? Then, some weeks after Charney, Katherine sent me an email. It was a link. Following it brought me to Amazon’s KDP (then known as the DTP), its first appearance in the UK.

KATHERINE: It seemed US authors had got there first and a few had already made their first million, but Amazon was quickly opening up their self-publishing platform to authors in other countries. I loved the idea of ebooks - no storage issues, just listed at Amazon if someone wanted to download one. I had the rights back to one of my early novels Spellfall and the publisher kindly said I could use their cover, so up it went as an ebook for Kindle. To my amazement a few people actually bought a copy, and Amazon paid me the royalties just two months later (rather than almost a year later, as with traditional publishing). Formatting an ebook was fairly simple even in those days, and more of my out-of-print books followed, along with a tsunami of titles from other authors eager to join the party.

Spellfall
(original Chicken House cover)
ebook
paperback

SUE: I’d never done anything like the programming required for the first e-books and I found it pretty challenging at first. I remember texting my brother at about 2am, saying, "This is doing my 'ed in." He replied, "You’ll get there. GOODNIGHT." I also remember that you, Kath, pretty much taught several of us bewildered beginners what to do. Since then, of course, Amazon has done a lot to make things easier, with their templates and help pages. Formatting an e-book or paperback has just become one of the things I do, in between washing up and grocery shopping. 

Kindle ebook

Paperback 

 

KATHERINE: Ha, and paperback formatting STILL does my head in! But formatting a digital title and publishing it online was just the start. Readers obviously weren't going to find our books all on their own, so we needed a way of promoting them. After another Charney conversation, Authors Electric was born with the aim of doing some group publicity. We were never going to recruit 30 authors from our Scattered Authors Society to post each month (most traditionally published authors in those days seemed to think we were mad).

SUE: I can vouch for that! We had our heads so firmly together in Charney Manor’s rose arbour that questions were asked. When we explained what we were talking about so intently, we saw surprised and even shocked faces and heard a lot of dismissive comments. “We have publishers for all that,” seemed to be the general opinion. Except – a lot of us didn’t.

KATHERINE: So we decided to open the blog to other indie authors by invite - and I immediately thought of Debbie Bennett, who I’d previously met at Fantasycon and admired her writing and her energy.

DEBBIE: Way back in the when, I was a beta member of Authonomy – the first of the publisher-sponsored web sites for 'discovering' new authors. There were only 100 of us for quite some time and we developed online friendships that still last to this day. Having been agented for my first crime thriller book Hamelin’s Child back in the 90s and getting a favourable HarperCollins review via Authonomy, I knew I was ready for more. And then my dad bought me a kindle in early 2011.

I test-published a collection of short stories on Amazon first. They’d all earned their keep elsewhere and I retained the rights, so it was a useful exercise in mastering formatting and uploads. Hamelin’s Child came next and I sat back and wondered what I was supposed to do now! Then I got an email from Katherine, who I’d met at fantasy conventions and whose work I admired – was I interested in joining this new co-operative she was setting up? Except it wasn’t called Authors Electric back then, I don’t think? It was something using kindle as a verb as I recall? And Amazon wasn’t happy … I do remember thinking we must be really important already if Amazon has noticed us!

Amazon UK

KATHERINE: Yes, that gave me a bit of a shock! We originally wanted to call ourselves Kindle Authors (since mostly we were just doing ebooks for Kindle back then), but after a late night phone call with a lovely person at Amazon who gently explained 'Kindle' was their property, we saw the error of our ways... and Authors Electric works much better for us in the long run, since most of us now also publish in epub and print-on-demand paperback formats.

SUE: Oh, those early days, eh? I bought myself one of the first basic kindles back in 2011. I remember being in a country pub in deepest Oxfordshire, waiting for my agent (we’d agreed to meet midway between our homes.) I sat at the bar in view of the door and had my kindle propped up on a box of peanuts. A retired major type passed behind me with his good lady and stage-whispered to her, "That lady has one of those new electric books." Another day, I was reading it in a supermarket café when a waitress grilled me on it. How much did it cost? How did it work? Did you own the books on it? She was thinking of buying one for her sons, to make reading seem more exciting to them.

In those days, Kindles were new even to students. I was an RLF fellow from 2009 – 2011 and students coming into my office used to exclaim over it. "One of those Amazon thingies! – Is it any good?" I’ve never been in the forefront of fashion before. And now, of course, I’m sadly behind again and no one would think my Kindle Fire worth a glance. 

Kindle keyboard

KATHERINE: It'll be retro soon, Sue! I'm still using my old Kindle Keyboard, which I think is even earlier? But I agree, it's hard to keep up. Every time I look at the KDP, there seems to be a new feature. The latest addition at Amazon is a print-on-demand hardback option, so I have a feeling the digital learning curve has not peaked quite yet.

DEBBIE: I’m on my third kindle I think. The first was a keyboard one, and I’ve had two paperwhites since then – the old ones get recycled to my daughter. I use it for editing as well as reading. But KDP looks more complicated every time I log in and I can’t help wondering why anybody would even want to publish a hardback via KDP. Hardbacks are for libraries and it’s probably easier to get into libraries via Ingram. The one thing I wish somebody had said to me back then is GET YOUR OWN ISBNs. Yes, they are expensive in the UK. Yes, Amazon provides an ASIN, and Draft2Digital and Smashwords do their own thing. But to be truly platform independent – to have one edition of one book available everywhere - you need a 'proper' ISBN. And I just can’t face doing new editions of everything now.

SUE: I think you need more energy than I have to do the ISBN and multiple platform thing. I did buy a block of ISBNs but my books didn’t really fly on other platforms – perhaps adult books do better across the board? These days, I mostly stick with Amazon, despite some guilty pangs.

DEBBIE: Vella (kdp serial fiction) looks interesting though and I’m contemplating having a run at that.

SUE: Good luck with Vella, Debbie. I’m not interested in serialisation myself but I think I might just give the hardbacks a go, if it’s not too difficult. I know I’m unlikely to sell many – but then, I was sure that paperbacks wouldn’t sell as well as ebooks and foolishly held off making them for quite a while. In fact, they sell better! Most of my very modest income is from paperbacks, not ebooks. I have a few titles that have sold into schools and it’s just possible that a school library might buy one or two. And I’ve published some picture books which might work better as hardbacks (better for whacking your annoying brother with when he steals your toy elephant). I haven’t looked into it too seriously yet (because I’m struggling with completing another couple of titles) but I might give it a go. After all, it won’t cost me anything upfront, except my time. Things I’ve appreciated about this whole ten years are the friendship and community of AErs (even if mostly virtual) and the constant learning of new things.

DEBBIE: Definitely the friendship and community of our AE group. People come and go (and come back again….), but I’ve met so many varied writers across the globe. So many different points of view and opinions. And while it’s not always been easy coming up with posts month after month – and God knows, I’ve produced some rubbish – it’s been ultimately rewarding. Deadlines are powerful motivators, even when they are just blog posts. I’m not sure where my writing career is going at the moment, but I’m not planning on leaving any time soon!

KATHERINE: Glad to hear that, Debbie :-) Like Sue, I find print sells best for younger readers. But one advantage of having an ebook edition is the ability to run a 99p promotion (not possible with print copies because of basic production costs), which might then lead to sales of the paperback or hardcover. That’s something I should probably do a bit more of. However, as with any kind of promotion, it's not enough simply to drop the price, at least not these days with so many 99p titles available on Amazon and elsewhere. So readers need to know about the offer price, too... which brings us full circle back to why I started Authors Electric in the first place!

Thank you very much Katherine, Sue and Debbie (*hands out three long-stemmed red roses*) We look forward to seeing where Authors Electric takes us in the next 10 years!

*cheering and clapping, more wolf whistling*

Authors Electric’s founding members step down from the stage and head off to a secret location for a well-earned drink.

*

KATHERINE ROBERTS writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers. Her debut novel Song Quest won the inaugural Branford Boase Award in 2000. Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

SUSAN PRICE has won the Carnegie medal for The Ghost Drum and the Guardian prize for The Sterkarm Handshake. She's published over 63 titles and self-published over 20. Find out more at her website https://www.susanpriceauthor.com/ 

DEBBIE BENNETT started out in fantasy, but now writes mostly dark and gritty crime thrillers. She'd tell you more, but then she'd have to kill you. www.debbiebennett.co.uk