Authors Electric

The electrification of “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” continues apace as the first mini-episodes of the television adaptation go up on YouTube drama channel, http://www.ThisisDRAMA.com    There is also a trailer and a “behind the scenes” film up there, (each of them just a few minutes long and highly digestible). I will attempt to put the trailer up here. So, Steffi is now traditionally published, e-published by her legacy publisher, (Blake), heavily featured on Wattpad and dramatised on YouTube – you have to give the girl credit for perseverance!

This month the folk at Wattpad turned their attention to promoting “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, which had been pulling in a few readers on its own but was lagging a long way behind its prequel, (“The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”, which has now had comfortably over 300,000 hits). As well as putting Steffi on their “featured” page, which is pretty much like getting onto the front table at Waterstones, they also suggested we put up a contest, asking Wattpad readers to give one good reason why they would like to become famous overnight, and one good reason why they would not. The contest is running for another couple of months but we have already had several hundred entries, all of which show a commendable grasp on the advantages and disadvantages of instant fame. This month also saw a preview of the finished television pilot for Steffi from Emerald Films, which is going up on the internet in February with all the attendant social media hoo-ha. The film is ...

This week the cameras started rolling at Twickenham Studios on a pilot episode of “Steffi”, a dramatisation of my book, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, which is destined to be broadcast over the internet and then go on to television through a maze of deals involving a variety of major sponsors and agreements so complex they make your head spin. In fact, I haven’t even tried to understand them, having total faith that the producers at Emerald Films know what they are doing in this “multi-platform” world. The cast are a mixture of established television actors, pop stars and internet stars and the producers have been working on the whole package for a couple of years since first expressing interest in the original book. In that time the print version, published in the traditional way by Blake publishing, has pretty much sold out and there are negotiations under way for them to produce an e-book version. Blake Publishing has always been one of the more fleet-footed, b...