Authors Electric

  Book launches scare me, I have to confess. I’ve done a couple for my own books. One I had at home, inviting friends and neighbours for wine and cake and suggesting, as tactfully as possible, that if they would like to buy a copy of my new book … Needless to say, everyone bought a copy of “ House of Shadows ” which should have left me feeling elated, but being me, I started to worry if they had felt obliged. Once the guilt kicked in, it was hard to convince myself to repeat the process even though in financial terms it had been very successful. Each time I’ve had a new book coming out, I’ve thought about doing it again and each time I’ve shied away from the idea. I suppose it’s all part of my writer’s fear of being rejected, which to a certain extent is compounded by being Indie published. Not that I want to change that though I suspect that the validation of traditional publishing would give me the confidence to host another launch. The crazy part of all this is that when...

A LIFETIME BURNING   (Kindle 88p/$0.99) I've just re-published my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING on Kindle. First published in 2006, it was one of those still-born books torpedoed by its cover and ignored by reviewers, perhaps because it belonged to that non-genre, accessible literary fiction. My publisher had no idea how to market the book (neither did I) and it sank without trace.  Well, not quite.  Readers loved it. (And a few loathed it.) A LIFETIME BURNING has only 5-star reviews on Amazon (twenty-five of them) and over the years its devotees have described themselves as haunted - even disturbed - by the book. A few have complained they were up all night finishing it and one man told me he read all 410 pages in one sitting. I started making notes for A LIFETIME BURNING even before I’d finished my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY . I didn’t have a publisher then. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find one, I was just writing to amuse myself. I'd just ...