Authors Electric

My magical cover quest for  Spellfall began back in 2000. In those days, publishers took care of everything except the writing. They took my manuscript (this book was originally written on a typewriter!), edited it, proofread, formatted, typeset, commissioned the artwork for the cover and sent the resulting book to the printer. They also did most of the publicity, secured reviews and started my book on its journey from warehouse to bookshop, where it could make its way into the hands of my eager readers... provided they liked the cover. Because, no matter how brilliant your story or your editor or your publicist, most of your wonderful words remain hidden inside that cover, and somehow you have to persuade a potential reader to pick your book (from among the hundreds on offer) and open it to see what lies within. I loved my publisher's first cover for Spellfall, and thankfully so did my readers because the hardcover sold out and the paperback went on to sell well, too. SPELLFALL (...

Now there’s a question. I’m still waiting for the Number One Question Writers Get Asked (according to – well, everyone.) JK Rowling, Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, heck, probably even Dickens himself got asked it. “Where do you get your ideas from?”   Back in the day when I was just a freelance writer and hadn’t started writing fiction, I didn’t need to have that many ideas. I interviewed people then turned two pages of rambling notes into 600 words according to the brief I’d been given. I didn’t have to make stuff up or come up with a new and exciting take on the writing game.   These days, I’m fortunate enough to write for two blogs and even occasionally my own. Most of the time, I’ve got a topic up my sleeve, but this month it’s been hard. My parents (combined age 187) have getting rapidly frailer and last week involved a mini stroke, a seizure and blue flashing lights.   My husband and I run a catering company and this is our last year. I’ve juggled my burgeoning ...

My other half and I recently gave in to the wave of nothingness and repeats on Freeview TV and acquired Netflix.  A week on, and several evenings of watching we've only touched the surface the stuff that is available.  When I say that I now have Netflix people often smile knowingly and utter dire warning of  binge-watching, but a week on I can’t say it has been any different to before.  Oh  I admit there is an awful lot more of it, and it is so very easy to access, but that Curate's egg conundrum of good versus bad in more or less equal measures remains. We’ve done a lot of sampling and/or catching up on things that we've missed. Watched random episodes of things that we’ve only ever heard about before. My other half likes super-hero fiction whereas I am fairly indifferent to it so perhaps I have not really indulged in bingeing as such. Watching a whole series in a few days is not exactly new to us.  We have bought enough boxsets to prove that!  ...

Fuelled partly by guilty displeasures... I've been enjoying, and contributing to, a facebook thread of Julie Burchill's about 'guilty displeasures' - we are all familiar with guilty pleasures, but Mark Mason, in his Spectator column , has exposed some of his GDs, things he hates which are supposed to be cool. In his case, strawberries, Ella Fitzgerald, and champagne head the list. This has got me thinking and raging about my own guilty displeasures, such as classical music. Virtually all of it does nothing for me, though I have a liking for early polyphonic choral music such as William Byrd. Classical music makes a nice soundtrack in films playing in the background while you are watching stuff happen. Classical concerts are the worst, watching people do something totally not visually interesting, with no way of alleviating the tedium. I've been assumed to like it many many times because I'm involved in 'the arts' and have caused shockwaves by sayin...

Love her or loathe her, Ms James certainly pushes buttons, doesn’t she? The recent #AskELJames Twitter Q&A had some interesting questions posed to the author, my favourite being from @skepticosaurus Will you be rewriting the book from Stephenie Meyer's point of view next time? Or this one . One wonders whether her publishers were expecting this kind of reaction or whether they expected her legions of fans to produce a flash-mob of adoration and publicity. I’m sure there were a lot of people praising the woman, but you never hear about all the nice stuff, do you? That doesn’t make news. But #AskELJames does - even on ITV ! Here's the full hashtag thread. So what is it about certain people – certain authors – that polarises opinion? EL James, JK Rowling, even Stephenie Meyer? They don’t write literary fiction, no, but neither do a lot of other authors and it doesn’t matter. We laugh, criticise and castigate. Are we jealous of their success or money? Maybe some ...

  Yes, I got a book signed by Nick too!      Not long ago, Nick Green kindly signed a copy of the first of his Cat Kin books for my godson's birthday. Actually, I couldn't wait that long to give it to him, so he ended up getting it at Easter instead.       "Look!" I told him. "It's a signed first edition!"      "What's a first edition?" he asked, turning the first pages. "Oh no! Look, someone's written all over it."      I explained to him that the person who had written the book had written a special message to him, which made it a bit extra special.      His mum came over to take a look.      "Oh, you must look after it very carefully" she said.      "No, no!" I cried, "It's more important that you read it and enjoy it than that you worry about creasing the spine or leaving fingerprints on the pages ..." ...

A friend told me this story recently. I don’t remember the details so I've made some of them up, but it came about that Fairly Famous Author visited a school. She met Famous Author on her way out, and discovered (by embarrassing accident) that he was getting paid around ten times what she was getting paid to talk to the same children. Upon questioning this with the school, she was told to look in the car park. Puzzled, she did so... parked beside her small economical car, surrounded by an admiring gang of pupils, was a bright red Ferrari. “Of course he has to charge more,” said the school secretary. “He drives a Ferrari!” Now, this story stuck with me for two reasons. First of all because it says a lot about the fame business – be it authors, footballers, singers, artists, or chefs – and secondly because it says a lot about me. Before you ask, I am not Fairly Famous Author in the above story, although I could easily have been. I too have done talks in school...