Authors Electric

Yes, it's my birthday. They seem to come so frequently lately. I chose the 14th as my posting day because the date is to me so iconic that there was at least a reasonable chance that I wouldn't forget to blog on it. And, though the year it heralds is a little further up the chain than I would like, I certainly feel very good about it. For at last, at last, I'll have ebooks up and running very soon and won't feel such a blogging fraud. But in a sense I still am. It's late at night and the cover images I've been preparing won't seem to load and, sweating with frustration I've decided to go to bed So further down the page you're going to find a lot of descriptions with no images to go with them. I'm so sorry about this. We've tried and tried - and last time it seemed so easy. More about that later. First, I must tell you about a remarkable circumstance which harks back to the old world of publishing and has cheered me and several other people up...

I've been in the writing game now for nearly forty years. When I first started doing school visits, I was so pleased when kids came up to me and said, "I've read all your books." As the years went by, I was even more pleased when they said, "My Mum says she read all your books." When they started saying, "My Gran loved your books when she was little," I wondered - just for a moment - whether my time might be up. I suppose that in a sense it is. Being published by such as Scholastic, OUP, Walker, Franklin Watts, once something I took almost for granted, now seems a far-off dream. Thus is the hubris of the complacent writer extinguished. Now I'm on my own and everything has changed. Part of me feels like a farmer who has thrown off his ruinous Tesco contract , opened his farm shop to sell direct and now sniffs the heady air of freedom. The other part feels scared stiff. But why should I be? I have a long list of books to kindle. Some are...