Authors Electric

No wonder I’m feeling exhausted. I’ve just published my third book in the space of three months. Now, I’m usually a book a year writer, so where did that spurt of productivity come from? I suppose it all started at the end of last year’s summer. I was working on my historical crime novel, The Death Game, but I’d taken a bit of time out to act as the Crime Writer in Residence for the Edinburgh Ebook Festival, and during that time I posted a series of twelve posts on the different subgenres of crime. Once that was out of the way I got my head down to complete The Death Game . Things were trundling along and the book was taking shape when a chance meeting with another indie author, Bill Kirton, suggested I turn my Writer in Residence posts into book form. That was what planted the seed. I went back to the Edinburgh Ebook Festival posts and discovered they were no longer online. They had vanished into internet cyberspace. All my lovely Pinterest postings now had no information...

It seems like yesterday that I was bemoaning the onset of winter. Now, summer is almost upon us (or at least it is here in Italy, where 25°C is considered a perfectly reasonable May temperature). And summer is, in my mind, associated with one thing above all else: the Edinburgh eBook Festival , masterminded by the unflagging Cally Phillips . Calling all Goths... This year I’ve been booked to write some contribution pieces about Gothic fiction. Since the Festival is concerned to a large extent with eBooks and self-publishing, I’d like to shine a light on some examples of good self-published Gothic fiction (ironically, I suppose, given the Gothic preference for murk and mystery). I’ve a few ideas already, but of course the sheer number of books out there is bewildering, so once again I’m sending out a plea for help: if anyone out there knows of any great self-published Gothic fiction, please get in touch. You can leave a comment, contact me via Twitter or Facebook , or email me: m...

It’s my birthday today, and guess where I’ll be? Yes, you’ve guessed it, I’m still partying at the Edinburgh eBook Festival . But, and it’s a big but, I’ll have to behave myself, and not partake too much of the happy juice. As if I would? You see my contribution to the festival today will be in the company of the police, because I’m examining the police procedural in crime fiction. I might be put in the position of saying – ‘It’s a fair cop, guv.’ I must admit this is the post that gave me the most problems. You see in my search for police procedurals, I went to the source. Policemen writing crime fiction. I wasn’t wrong, they knew about police procedures, but the writers I chose knew damn all about writing fiction. Now I’m sure there must be some good books out there written by policemen, but I couldn’t find them. Now I’ve tempted fate, and I’ll probably be harangued by police writers for evermore! My own crime novels contain an element of police procedures, although I’m su...

First of all, why are you here when you could be enjoying the wonderful Edinburgh eBook Festival ? Second, this has been a month dominated by a fever of around 40 degrees that has seen most of it spent in delirium (such as one day and night long episode when I was convinced that the Peak District had been made illegal and kept screaming out "but it won't go away"), followed by utter exhaustion. Which means my productive time has been somewhat curtailed, so forgive whatever rambling comes out. Nonetheless, this state of affairs has chimed in with a series of articles that has appeared recently in the Guardian triggered by the release of " The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink ", and also my recent reading, in preparation for hosting an event with the author at Waterstones (have they made their official minds up about the apostrophe yet?) Piccadilly, of Taipei by Tao Lin, one of today's most famously and unashamedly drug-fuelled writers. Not to mentio...

We come here to jam once a month with our friends in the swinging saloon called AE. Let me start off with this definition…so I don’t get in a stickier jam with those who think I mean jelly: A   jam session   is a musical event, process, or activity where musicians play (i.e. "jam") by improvising without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements. Jam sessions are often used by musicians to develop new material (music), find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session . To some extent, AE’s unique structure precludes an exact parallel: 29 writers who post once each month does not precisely equal a group of six musicians who hook up every Sunday. True. But we have enough in common to pursue the metaphor. In fact, the metaphor’s enriched by another significant difference:   our ‘solos’ can continue in the Comments section to our posts…and we’re free to sound off in the Comments to our colleagues’ posts. In the...

Copy-editing is the thing I hate most about being an Independent Author. It’s a grinding, methodical task that takes a lot of time and concentration and it has to be absolutely perfect, because one of the main criticisms of Indie published books is the standard of proof-reading and copy-editing.  I’m still being sent books for review that are littered with typos, punctuation and formatting errors. I don’t want mine to be one of them, but my books simply don’t earn enough to pay a professional - for a full-length book it can be as much as £750.  I can’t afford that as well as the advice of a good structural editor - and the latter, for me, is of the utmost importance. I’ve been doing the copy-editing myself, reading and re-reading, but something always slips through and I hate it!  Your eyes see what they think should be there rather than what is actually there.  And then you die of shame as soon as it’s up there on Kindle and someone points out what you’ve misse...