Authors Electric

December is a time for looking back and although I’ve written a few Christmas letters in my time reminiscing about what we have been up to as a family I have never looked back at what I have achieved as a writer in the past 12 months. To be honest I tend to play down many of my writing exploits, but with my memoir about to be published in the New Year it’s time for a change, a time to be bold and update my writing CV. In January I discovered a new opportunity writing for Paddler Press magazine .  My piece based on Silence was accepted on January 6th and the magazine arrived all the way from Canada on the 28th.   According to my diary I was also very busy writing lots of 100-word stories for my memoir. At the beginning of February I wrote a 100 flash for the Retreat West monthly microfiction competition.   By the end of the month, I was crowned the winner and I took home the People’s Prize as voted for by the readers. March was a month where life took on a ne...

Until three weeks ago I had never heard of a book blog tour. I had also never looked at many book blogs. When I was raising the funding for my memoir 'Dead Babies And Seaside Towns' I had some great support from book blogger Isabel Costello at The Literary Sofa. I was also asked to write for various book blogs. But still the whole world of book blogs remained a bit of a mystery to me. Then I realised that authors now often have a book blog tour and so I thought - why shouldn't I do that as well? It turns out that basically a book blog tour is a schedule of 'visits' which a book / author makes to a number of blogs. It is rather like the traditional book tour but instead of going to physical bookshops you are 'visiting' blogs. These visits might involve a review, an author interview, books being given away or an author Q & A / interview. I asked a number of writer friends for advice. I soon realised that the problem for me is that not many book...

I am in a strange no man's land at the moment. My book came out yesterday but the book launch isn't until next week. And more importantly, a couple of articles in the national press about the book will also not appear until next week. So the book is out but it isn't. And I have no idea what to expect. A couple of friends who have no knowledge of the book world have said, 'You must be feeling pretty confident about all of this.' My response is, 'Unless you are an absolute fool, then you never feel confident about a book.' Having said all that, the omens are quite good. The book has had a lot of good publicity, the cover is great, I think. Although the book was crowd funded, it is being distributed by Penguin Random House. Certainly, it should do better than my novels did. But the truth is that 95% of books sink without trace. And this is true of good books as well as dodgy books. Even publishers are often completely unable to understand why,...