Authors Electric

  Warning: a true tale, in its own way, of my appalling biker past. She was waiting for me, God knew where. Her name, I believed, was Elvira. I'd barely glimpsed her in Seattle when she split with a biker the size of The Rock and flipped me the bird on the way. I felt a story coming, but not one I could write as a writer whose only bike had been a Schwinn. But then one night, at 3:00 a.m., I awoke from a dream of Elvira with what I thought was a rocking idea: what if Elvira waited in not one town but two? You could blame Lee Child for the idea about two rival towns. After all, he'd written Nothing to Lose , a tale about two rival Colorado towns with just twelve miles between them. But I blame myself for the goddess perched upon that Harley, daring me to find her and teasing me with the riddle of her role in the two sites, She'd have nothing to do with a loser who considered ripping off Lee Child, his setting and cool plotline. Hell, everyone rips off Lee Child--who ripped o...

Coventry's Lady Godiva, Pru Poretta at the Heritage weekend. Photo by Rob Tysall. As most people will know, Coventry, which is my home city, is to be the UK City of Culture 2021. Naturally, everyone is delighted and hoping that the new status is going to bring more prosperity into the city, as it has done for Hull, the current UK City of Culture. There was competition for the title from Paisley, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland and Swansea. And actually, if Sunderland had won it, that would have been my second choice as my parents and past ancestors all hail from there. The title is awarded every four years and Coventry will be the third UK City of Culture. Londonderry being the first in 2013, followed by Hull. Our city has so much going for it despite no longer having the motor and machine tools industries that it once had. During the 1950s  and 60s Coventry was the second largest car manufacturing city in the world. It also led the way with machine tools. Alfr...

Last month, as everyone packed their bags and headed home after another fantastic Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate , I was buzzing. And, as much as I enjoyed the festival, it actually had nothing to do with my feelings of excitement and fear. Sunday 23 July was a big day for me because the third book in my DI Hamilton series, Deadly Friendship, was published. I thought my emotions would be far more contained than they were - not only was this my third book in the series, but, in total, it's the fifth I've published, so I should be used to publication day, right? Wrong! I've realised my nerves build the more I write ... and I'm sure many authors feel this. We're constantly in competition with the last book we've written - if readers loved it, can we match, and even exceed, their expectations? And if they hated it, can we better ourselves and our stories? We all know that we can't please all the people all the time, but gosh,...

Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Fest Over the last few months, there's been something on my mind that's not totally wholesome – crime! No, I'm not about to commit any dastardly deed, I'm talking about crime writing. I know we're Author's Electric, but I hope you'll forgive me for talking about my latest book, a crime thriller published by Bloodhound Books.  I wrote Kill or Die (under a different title) some years ago. I sent it off to a couple of publishers, who rejected it for very different reasons. One said it was too graphic and gory, the other said it wasn't graphic enough for a crime novel. So what did I do? Put it away in a drawer and forgot all about it. A couple of years ago I came across it again, and noticed a handwritten comment on the front page from a reader who had said they liked my style. Encouraged, I read through it again myself, and decided it wasn't too bad. So I re-worked and re-wrote and then eventually sen...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...

Having made several thousand dollars profit last year from a series of Amazon Kindle Select free promotions, and three Bookbub promotions, I had been waiting for a chance this year to combine a 99 cent Bookbub promotion with a Kindle Countdown Deal for my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford. On 24 th March, Bookbub sent The Survival of Thomas Ford out to their thriller subscription list. I combined this with a Kindle Countdown Deal ad which ran on the Kindle Book Review site on 25 March; also, a Kindle Nation Daily Special Sponsored Post Triple Play ad which ran on 26, 27, and 28 March; and a Bargainbooksy ad and mail-out to their thriller subscription list which ran on 27 March. This involved an outlay of $625 for advertising in total, which, although it was a relatively small percentage of the profit made from last year’s promotions, was still the most I had spent on advertising for one promo to date, so there was a degree of nail-biting involved. Soon, though, the s...