Authors Electric

Author launch - Then (take one) I started publishing book-length fiction in 1999, about ten years before Amazon opened their Kindle Direct Publishing platform and made it possible for authors to publish themselves without first winning the lottery. In other words, there was only one route to market, and it relied on an editor saying "yes". My first book Song Quest did the rounds, agented by me out of necessity, and eventually came out with a small UK publisher in the traditional way: hardcover first with a modest print run of about 1,000 copies (which sold out), and then paperback with a slightly larger print run that probably would have done quite well in the shops, since by then my book had won the Branford Boase Award  given to a debut author and their editor for an outstanding book for young readers, on the strength of which I had been taken on by a top London agent keen to develop my career. Unfortunately, though, Element Books went into receivership a few weeks after t...

Some stories are so good they just rise to the surface like cream. It all started with a lunchtime conversation with a client from Rio . “I have a friend who has been trying to write his autobiography for years,” My client said, “can I put him in touch with you?” Gordon Lewis was an “unfortunate”, born in a home for unmarried mothers in 1950s Dublin . His mother was determined not to go into the Magdalene Laundries and risk losing her child, so she found a home run by Catholic nuns which would let him stay with her and kept him a secret from everyone, including her family. It wasn’t until he was eight years old that Gordon even realised he had any family apart from the other women and children in the home. Seeing that her spirited son was in danger of getting into serious trouble, running wild on the city streets, his mother took the decision of contacting Bill, the man who had been the love of her life before she fell pregnant by another man, in the hope that he wo...

“So, when are you going to write your own memoir?” people ask whenever I tell stories from my many, many years of ghostwriting. “Never,” I have always assured them. “I can’t because of all the confidentiality agreements I have signed, all the relationships of trust I have built up with clients over the years.” Well, now I have done it. Not every story can be told, of course, but for those that can, names have been changed, stories and locations mixed and matched, permissions sought and surprisingly readily given. In the days when I started ghosting, around thirty years ago, secrecy was everything. No one ever admitted they used ghostwriters, no ghostwriters were ever credited or talked about in polite publishing circles. That seems to have changed and most people now get the fact that books need to be written by professionals, edited by professionals and published by professionals. So on August 14th, “Confessions of a Ghostwriter” will be coming out from Friday Pro...