Authors Electric

So I’m browsing around on Facebook – as you do – looking for something more interesting than writing a blog post for this month. As usual, time has run away with me and somehow we are already at the start of a new month. And I come across this post:   www.facebook.com/groups/20Booksto50k/posts/7481634218609644/   Now this is 20BooksTo50K® – a group dedicated to the business of self-publishing and I expect many of you have heard of it and/or are already members. Posts in this group are usually fact-checked, accurate and relevant. I say usually , because nothing is infallible and there’s no point encouraging people who just want to argue, and there are gazillions of other wannabe writers’ groups on Facebook that are probably not worth the screentime.  Anyway, this post struck me as something of a watershed for indie writers using KDP. To summarise – it appears that Amazon is going down the route of Identity Verification. Like I said, I generally trust posts in this group an...

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Okay, hands up, I buy books all year round. Just have to, right? But we are rapidly approaching the major book buying season of the year. Naturally I will have a list (and by the time this goes out I may be putting the finishing touches to it, ready to present to my loved ones. I am, at least, easy to buy for). I was wondering though whether you’ve found buying books for others fraught with difficulties. Do you ask them so they know what’s coming or surprise them with your choices? I do the former because I love being asked to make a selection myself but I understand the latter. My son loves reading political history across many eras so must ask him what he wants to avoid the duplicate book scenario. Has a book you’ve been given proved to be an unexpected choice for you? I spent decades focusing on reading fiction and that will always be my major love. In recent times, I’ve discovered the joys of non-fiction. This ha...

I was looking through my Amazon orders the other day. One of my orders fell over – payment failed, apparently. Thanks so much, Amazon, for refusing to accept my VISA credit card after many years of loyal service! Although it wasn’t VISA that was declined – I had a few more weeks to go for that, so in anticipation I’d added a Mastercard to Amazon for future payments and made a test purchase (any excuse for another book). Except that the Halifax had cancelled the Mastercard without actually bothering to ask or inform me!  So I go into my local Halifax – only to be told that the card no longer existed on their system. At all. They cancelled it because I hadn’t replied to a message I never received. Of course, I could apply for a brand new card which would take around 30 minutes … 30 minutes? I went home and decided to get an American Express card instead which took me all of 5 minutes online.  Anyway, having made several test-purchases of books – these things just have to be don...

Most published writers crave reviews but what can we do if they are inaccurate or really quite nasty? I try to review every book I read on GoodReads. There are other platforms but I’m too lazy to change. GoodReads doesn’t allow half-star reviews so I am unable to give a book 4.5 stars and few books merit a five star review. But of course I’m wanting everyone to give me a five-star review! I haven’t ever given a book one-star although I did give one novel only two stars. It wasn’t a bad book but there were things I disliked about it and I tried to make that clear in the review. It also seemed to be a book that rather divided opinion. I felt guilty for only rating it two but in the end what matters is the content of the review not the star rating. One review of my own novel, A Bird in the House stated only that the reviewer didn’t like fiction or reading about faraway places (maybe read the book blurb?!) I read Monique Roffey’s novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch recently. I personally l...

… to submit your book details so what have you got to lose?  says the home page at some-book-review-site.dot-com. Maybe not to submit details, but to get any further you’ll have to pay a minimum of $99 for two reviews of your books. You can buy 50 reviews for $1,499 including ebook purchase. I’m not sure if that means all 1,499 reviews will come from the same purchase – in which case either one person is writing 1,499 reviews, or the ebook is being passed around 1,498 times, which means it might take a while before you get your reviews. Yet they'll be done in 14 days. Go figure.  Why am I even posting this? We all know that buying reviews is against Amazon’s t&c and in any case is immoral and downright dodgy (unless you are a famous writer who allegedly doesn’t even write their own books, in which case it’s apparently perfectly fine, but that’s another story). And we likes stories, don’t we?  I’m posting this as I’ve just spent an age removing hundreds of spammy comm...

Brahe's lost star tracker Happy new year! Time to reckon, to reflect and to resolve, or so they say. Not my strong points. My mind roils with riptides. I have to swim criss-cross if I'm to make it ashore. Don't expect any consistency here. Besides, as Emerson pointed out, it's overrated. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he wrote, "adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Now we march into the third decade of the twenty-first century, too many out there goosestepping to the deadly drums of tyrannies past. You can't call this mess millennial anymore. No more excuses. With a precious few notable exceptions, this brave new century has been a big disappointment. Those of us who came of age in the last century expected so much more.  We see no magic-bullet cures for major diseases, only Big Pharma raking in obscene profits for incremental palliatives with terrifying side effects that announcers list i...

What we can do now seemed like an impossible dream twenty years ago when I first became involved with direct, digital publishing. Yet, as an indie writer in the midst of reading another book for release, I've gone from being awed by the digital tools at my disposal to feeling frustrated with their limitations. How fickle and ungrateful can we creative types get? By the late 1990s, publishers for which I had worked had been using digital technology for almost a decade - eg., word processing, and desktop publishing. But the process had remained industrial - requiring costly, professional software, high-speed printing presses, and distribution channels that requred sizeable, although diminishing, capitalization that was out of the reach for most writers -- even successful ones. As always, futurist predictions aside, everyone in the business assumed that the status quo would be a forever thing -- even those running the high-tech business magazines for which I freelanced interviews...

2015 or thereabouts, and I was four years into this self-publishing lark. Four years seemed like forever at the time; it was in early 2011, after my dad bought me a kindle for a birthday present, that my life as a writer changed forever. From a collection of short stories which had already earned their word count, through a young adult fantasy which had only narrowly missed acceptance by a couple of big trad publishers and into a six-book dark crime series – and I thought I was there. Summer 2015 and I’m making a respectable second income … … and suddenly everything changed. I can't even pinpoint when it was when sales tailed off, when the Facebook posts became less frantic, when twitter stopped dominating out lives. Was it the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited Lending Library, KDP Select or just changes in algorithms? Or maybe the bubble just burst, but things seem very different now in early 2019. From the authors I knew a few years ago – the group of independent writers...

Last week after much back-and-forth, I finally got the okay from Polar HQ to interview The Elf Himself. I wasn't going to complain about being offered this primo "get" at the last minute, what with December here and lights already strung everywhere. I would like to think that I got the twinkle-and-nod because the Jolly Red One wanted to meet the author of Milagro on 34th Street . I even fantasized that might give me an award for my past service as a "real bearded," department-store Santa. No dice, however. The reality, I suspect, was that Polar PR had called on me as a substitute after a celebrity television interviewer dropped out due to sexual misconduct charges. Can't have Santa's name mixed up in all that. "Unseasonably warm," Kringle muttered, fiddling with a thermostat as I was escorted into his cluttered workshop office by a bony, baleful, elf from IT, who obviously didn't like the task. Santa extended a chubby white-gloved hand...

My first ebook Around 2007 I began to take interest in ebooks and started reading the reports of booming ebook sales. Seeing sales were increasing month on month I decided to join this revolution. So in 2011 I published my first collection of short stories as an ebook. Based on my sales I followed this ebook with others. Then came the print on demand (POD) revolution, where authors like myself and the Author Electric team could publish a physical book without holding stock. So in 2014 I decided to combine my two Anansi ebooks and release as a POD book. At first sales were slow, then they started to match those of my ebooks. Now they outsell my ebooks. This made me wonder if it was just my ebooks or if ebook sales were down generally. So I did a little research. I discovered sales of ebooks have been falling for the last couple of years. Some of the large publishers have given figures in the region of a 12% fall from 2015 - 2016. I found several reasons being suggested for this...

It's that time again. The third week in November: when, here in America, we give thanks for all our nonmaterial blessings a mere 24 hours before we quite literally try to kill each other over the latest toy or electronic gadget we just have to get our Sweet Baby Boo-Boo for Christmas (because of course, nothing says "Happy birthday, Jesus" and "Welcome Prince of Peace" like a bloodstained plasma television set with surround sound and built-in blu-ray player). Screw you, Tammy! Sweet Baby Jesus wants me to have this! Well, as I did last year, I'd like to take a moment here to give thanks, in no particular order, for the things reading/writing related that I am thankful for this year. Venture and Hold Fast Presses: This year has been good to me as a writer. The first two volumes of my Western retelling of the King Arthur legends, Guns of the Waste Land , were picked up by not one, but two independent presses. Venture Press  purchased the ebook right...