Authors Electric

Deadlines – as Ann Evans was saying just a blink ago – doncha just love ‘em? Following the principle that there’s more to life than working, or even writing, I found myself this week towing a twenty foot sloop from the north to the south to launch and berth her with my brother-in-law near Portsmouth. The sun was shining, all was delight. Two days later, soaked, frozen, and exhausted, I noticed the date. It’s Friday evening now. I've just got home. You’ll be reading this, sensation seekers, within brief hours of me finishing it. Okay? I also came to realize that I’d put a day-specific post on my own blog – janneedle.com – last week, and the event I was talking about, and appearing in, had come and gone. One never knows if anyone reads these things, but if they do, I need to apologise. Or at least get rid of it, quickly. As quickly as the June weather put paid to my hopes of nautical bliss (suntan included). A third thing, now remembered, gnaws at me. I’ve ...

Jan Needle           All writers are different, but all writers want people to read their books, preferably in sufficient quantities to finance the odd bit of high-life (like putting filly con carne on the menu occasionally. Sorry – not my joke, I got it off Facebook.)           Now, some of our AE members are a lot more energetic and knowledgeable about promotion than I am, or ever will be. To name a couple at random – John A.A.Logan and Julia Jones. Follow them for any length of time, and you see two people who are working their socks off at far more than the original grind of writing. They enter competitions, they follow other people’s blogs, they review, they respond to comments, they make comments themselves.           I don’t know John (although I’d like to – I love his writing) and I do know Julia. Love her work, too – and she also has...

One of the beauties of swimming in the ebook pool is the flexibility that comes with it. I recently finished the second book in what I intend to be a series of thrillers about an odd partnership between a hardened cynic of a journalist/investigator in his forties and a woman not yet thirty who is learning the tricks of this vulgar old trade the hard way. The first book has been out for about a year now, and has had nothing but five and four stars on Amazon, and a few good formal reviews to boot. It’s called Kicking Off, and is about the modern bleed of criminality into the more respectable world – high finance, politics, the self-styled ‘moral’ press. It starts with the ‘extra-judicial’ death of a rooftop rioter in a Scottish jail, which leads the authorities into a desperate, and spreading, cover-up. At the same time a massively rich businessman is unexpectedly given a sentence much harsher than the one he had paid good money for, while an American super-criminal is ...