Authors Electric

One of the drawbacks of Indie authorship is that you're a one-man (or in my case a one-woman) band. You have to do what would normally involve an office full of people in traditional publishing all on your own. You are author, editor, proof-reader, publisher, printer and publicist. It can be exhausting and is one of the main reasons cited by authors for dropping out of the cyber-publishing sphere. It's also very hard for one person - a minnow in a very large lake - to make much of a splash. So, when Australian author, musician and book designer Jessica Bell came up with the idea of some of us banding together to publish a Box Set of novels, it was the kind of intriguing experiment I couldn't refuse. 3D cover by Jessica Bell There are seven of us.  It might have been more, but some authors decided that they didn't want to commit their work to a group project and risk losing individual sales.  So we became 'The Magnificent Seven'. We're all members ...

I was tagged for this Blog Hop by Joni Rodgers, aka The Girl With the Shakespeare Tattoo: http://jonirodgers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/howiwrite-blog-hop-free-falling-being.html Joni is the New York Times bestselling author of Bald in the Land of Big Hair, Sugarland, Kill Smartie Breedlove, The Hurricane Lover… http://www.amazon.com/Joni-Rodgers/e/B000APBBDK/ref=la_B000APBBDK_pg_2?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_82%3AB000APBBDK&page=2&ie=UTF8&qid=1404155502 She also heads up the online Writers Collective, The League of Extraordinary Authors: http://www.leagueofextraordinaryauthors.com/p/meet-authors.html Thanks, Joni! The Mission of this Hop Tour is for me to answer 4 questions, and then tag 4 fellow authors to do the same – I will be tagging the redoubtable Dennis Hamley, Cheryll Barron, Julia Jones, and Michel Sauret at the end of this post… But first, to the questions! 1 )      What am I writing? Well…I am c...

2012 was my first year of epublishing. I began it by sending an email to Linda Gillard, whose example had inspired me. She kindly replied, offering me welcome advice, which included the suggestion that I might feel at home in a group called Authors Electric. I’d seen the website in 2011, another example which had inspired, so I sent off an email to AE, giving the same account I had given to Linda Gillard, about my writing history and experiences with literary agents and publishers over a number of years. I was invited to join AE and, at first, throughout February, I was convinced that this had happened by accident or misunderstanding. Yes, I’d been published by Picador and Vintage, but only single short stories at a time, never a book. Yes, I’d been represented by more than one literary agent over the years, but they had never succeeded in selling my work! I was convinced throughout February, as I waited for my first March 11 th blog slot, that Authors Electric only a...