Authors Electric

First up, I'm asking for help. I blogged two months ago about my World War 1 novel Ellen's People and how I'm republishing it as my way of marking the 1914 centenary. I haven't put it on Kindle yet: I'm waiting to see if we get the Blank Page Press up and running so it can appear under the Blank Page imprint as  that putative organisation's first published book. It's also the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 2, which means that Ellen's sequel, Divided Loyalties , set between 1935 and 1946, can follow soon afterwards. Everything was going well with it until I hit a sudden big snag which I should have seen coming. Here's the original Walker cover. I think it's great. It has the same house style as the cover of Ellen's People - the girl's face surveying the telling action photograph underneath.  I didn't want new covers: I wanted those. The half-completed third book in the trilogy - which will have to appe...

Well, we've paid our respects, the Cenotaph is once again just a big stone in the middle of a busy road and our poppies are no longer in our buttonholes. But don't throw them away yet. They may be needed before next November. Because 2014 is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, that act of gross stupidity which sentenced the world to seventy-five years of upheaval, dread and violent death.  'Wars are caused by the vanity of those who don't have to fight them.'  Who said that? Read on to find out. Anyway, I have my own way of marking the centenary.  Remembrance Day seems a good time to announce it.  In 2006 my novel  Ellen's People  was published in the UK by Walker Books and in the USA by Candlewick Press under the title  Without Warning.   It, and its sequel,  Divided Loyalties,  didn't do as well as   we   hoped (how often have we heard that?) even though both were shortlisted for awards.  I now h...