Authors Electric

I’ve worked in publishing for a long time now in various capacities. My first job was as desk editor for a small press in Gloucestershire - back in the days when galley proofs were still a thing, and my first job was proofreading medieval city records in Latin (letter by letter...). The company was leading the way in computer typesetting, but overall little had changed since Gutenberg.  Caxton's printing shop After a spell back in archaeology, I moved briefly into medical, then management publishing – where I learnt numerous buzzwords and reluctantly retailed the bulls**t beloved of that sector. Being pushed towards management didn’t appeal – neither wrangling staff nor overseeing the editing of magazines – so I moved back to what first drew me to the industry – working directly with collections of words that other people had lovingly crafted. Newly freelance, I targeted academic publishing companies as potential clients – that’s where I’d started and where I fe...

Ghosts Electric was the first published anthology I wrote a short story for, and I had my reservations. While I love to read novellas or a two-page story spread in magazines, I never thought it was something I’d be able to successfully master. A collage of promotional images put together by the authors involved with the second anthology I have a short story published in      During my youth, I wrote untold amounts of small stories in notepads and colourfully designed  hardback books and treasured them for many years. But they were just for me. A collection of ideas that one day I hoped would evolve and grow and become a full-length novel. Those stories have never managed to make it out of the dusty drawer – and that’s probably a good thing – but I do finally have the ideas I need to make those novels. And, regardless of age and my state of imagination, the basic premise of writing is that the story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. But, when ...

As the summer weather really hasn't been much cop so far, we have decided to attempt to spread a little cheer by extending the period in which you can buy an e-copy of our latest anthology Another Flash in the Pen until the end of July for the bargain price of 99p. It is also available from Amazon in paperback if you prefer something a little more papery ... AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON HERE! We are also excited to be able to announce that this year we are publishing not just one, but two anthologies of short fiction stories ... here's a sneaky little preview of what we have planned for October ...

It would be hard to ignore today's results from the UK's Referendum. Like most people I know, I'd assumed we would (and had voted for) 'Remain', but came down this morning to the news that the Farage tribe had succeeded. We now seem to be in bed with some very unlovely people - 'Approved by Trump' is not a sticker I'd want to flaunt, and as for Marine le Pen... I've just signed a petition to request a second referendum, which is gathering pace - apparently some of the people who voted Out are now regretting it. There's also a feeling that the Brexit team didn't ever expect to win this one, so making unrealistic claims was OK as they'd never be called on to implement them . My husband, David, used to say that there's an old Chinese curse: 'May You Live In Interesting Times'. Well, unfortunately, we do, we do. 'Another Flash in the Pen' came out recently . I'd already pre-ordered it, but forgotten, so its ar...

I don’t know what it takes to fall in love with social media (warped personality? lack of real social life?) but for a while I was head over heels, first of all with my blog and then with Twitter. Behind the blog      Blogging came about because of a work remit (I must be one of the few members of the human race who did a course on it!) and shortly after I was offered a paid blogging opportunity on behalf of a golf marketing company. Since I played golf, this was fun, and as long as I churned out a couple of posts a week I was sent a modest but satisfying cheque at the end of each month.      Nice work if you can get it.      And by the time the Rather-Be-Golfing goose had stopped laying its golden eggs, I had put together my own writing website using the free Wordpress facility which I knew would provide ‘static’ website pages as well as a blog, enabling me to feel like a) an IT whiz-kid and b) a proper author with ...

Yes, we're back - bigger, better, bolder than ever before! Well, all right, so we haven't actually been away, but whipping up a bit of frenzied hype is de rigeur for publicists, surely? Well alright, so maybe we don't need frenzied hype either ... Let's start again. They said it couldn't be done but we proved them wrong!   Sorry. Right, here goes, more sensibly ... You may remember that last year we put together an anthology, called   A Flash in the Pen . A Flash In The Pen No? Well we'll just patiently wait here while you go order it up from Amazon. Here are the links: UK: A Flash in the Pen US: A Flash in the Pen Got it? Good. No, you don't need to start reading it right now, you can do that after you've finished reading this blog. Because we've only gone and done it again ... Another Flash in the Pen  contains yet another superlative line-up of stories from Authors Electric, and until the end of thi...

For quite a few years now I've been running writing workshops and classes for adult who are just starting out on their writing careers. Almost two years ago, I started a new six week course called Focus on Fiction with eight or nine people on the course. All went well – in fact it went so well, that at the end of those six weeks, no one wanted to say goodbye. Friendships had been forged and Monday night's class was something they enjoyed. They asked if I'd keep running the classes and so I did. A six week course turning into a 20 month course! It's just brilliant to see novice writers coming on in leaps and bounds, and I'm so proud of my bunch, who are now seeing the fruits of their labours, with various writing successes. Over that time a few people have dropped out and others have joined, so it's always fresh and we never run out of things to write about – nor topics to teach. We've now put together two anthologies of our w...

Someone asked me recently about collaborating on a book with another author. I’ve done quite a few and so far they’ve all been a joy to do and I’ve always learned a lot during the process. The best advice I could offer though, was to only write with people you like, respect and get along with: it’s a policy I’ve always followed and has allowed us to thrash out disagreements over content in an amicable way, to have a happy time doing the book and to remain friends afterwards. Creating an anthology should be a piece of cake in comparison, but it requires a different sort of collaboration: it’s more to do with organisation than actual creative input. First of all there is the tossing up in the air of the idea of doing one in the first place – to be honest I can’t understand why we haven’t produced one before, as we all write fiction …  Sue Price: I can't, either, Karen. I mean, we all write fiction - what better way to introduce our work to a new audience than an anthology ...

I love short stories - bite-size confections, entire books distilled down into tiny, perfectly formed delicious delights ... looking along my shelves I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised to see just how many collections of short stories I have acquired over the years. Plenty of them are anthologies with multiple authors. I first came across this sort of collection while at school, where excerpts and short stories were gathered into text books which were read aloud during a lesson and then discussed. I couldn't bear listening to the stumbling, monotone reading of my classmates so used to stuff my fingers in my ears and race through several more stories while the current one was being murdered. They were good stories too, and I took note of the writers, and looked them up afterwards in the library - and in this way I was introduced to Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Saki and many other authors whose work I love, but might never otherwise have stumbled acros...

My visit was connected to the 2014 Felixstowe Book Festival Some months ago I was asked to work with some nine and ten year old ‘reluctant writers’ who were also doing an Anglo-Saxon history project. Could I help them use writing to enter imaginatively into the Anglo-Saxon world? My heart leapt! Decades ago, when I was at university, I’d been lucky enough to enrol on an immensely old-fashioned English literature degree. We started at the beginning, somewhere around the late 7 th century, and spent the next three years thundering on chronologically, until we collapsed exhausted somewhere between the First and Second World Wars. This was in the 1970s so we were only a generation or two from home. Many of us felt a little apprehensive when we were instructed to purchase our copies of the most recent edition of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader – initially published in 1876 when it was shockingly modern even to consider English literature as a subject for study. Our nervousness deepened...