Authors Electric

I'm now going to admit something. I used to be a publishing snob. By this I mean I used to believe if you couldn't get a publishing deal then there must be something wrong with your writing. My reasoning behind this was: One: When I sent in my first non-fiction book proposal it was accepted. When I sent in my first fiction title (a picture book) although the publisher didn't take it I was asked to write something else for them. So if I could achieve this then surely anyone else who could write would be offered a book deal. Two: I'd read some self-published work and it was awful. There were either huge holes in the plot, I didn't bond with the characters, there was spelling, grammatical errors etc. etc. This obviously backed up my first reason for my belief. However as time went on my views changed. I began to realise there are a hundred and one reasons why a publisher will turn down a book and a large percentage of the reasons have nothing to d...

Every now and again I get an email from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) team. Usually these are bringing my attention to some discrepancy or other in one of the 11 books I have published with KDP, often requiring swift remedial action. A recent one required me to check the HTML coding that I had used on my book description pages, and to do it in less than 24 hours. They were about to change the way the website presented the HTML, and if I didn’t get it sorted… well, quite frankly, my book pages would look crap… or words to that effect. So when I see these emails pop into my inbox I open them with some trepidation. Whatever I was expecting from the one that arrived a couple of days before the end of October, it wasn’t this… “ We are considering including your book: Il disertore in an upcoming promotion in the Amazon.it Kindle Book Store .” Promotion? In the Amazon.it store? I read on with a churning stomach. I’ve written previously on the joys of Indie-pub transl...

My writing has appeared in a lot of different places, including some other languages; my first novel was translated into Dutch, Japanese and German, back in the day when I brought out my fiction through traditional publishing houses. The Defector, in German After embarking on my indie or self-publishing project, Amazon started opening Kindle websites in places other than the US and the UK – and one of them was Germany. Ah ha, I thought, I have German editions of both my first two novels, I wonder if I can self-publish them as eBooks? I was lucky (although it didn’t feel like it at the time) that the German publisher, Delius Klasing had already taken the books out of print. I have a rule to always get a rights reversion letter when this happens – if you’ve not seen one, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s a letter that confirms that the publisher of your book is no longer publishing your book, and that they accept that as a consequence of a clause (that shou...

I thought I’d open my account here at Author’s Electric by saying thank you - it’s great to be invited to join the roster – and by giving you a little background on how I came to be dreaming of electric books...  I left home after college with a rucksack, an old SLR camera and a notebook, along with a vague plan to write a book about hitch-hiking around the world. I spent three years on the road but somehow (it’s a long story) got waylaid into a professional sailing career, and all those carefully kept notes and travel diaries quickly fell into the awkward limbo of not being recent enough to be contemporary, while being too recent to be social history. So I started to think about a novel instead... and I had an idea. Action thriller  The Defector grew out of that idea - a game of the Prisoner's Dilemma played for life and death. In 1996 it was finished and first published in the UK by Random House. In the meantime, I'd published the first three of five technical sailing bo...