Authors Electric

(from left to right) Orna Ross, me and Katie Fforde at the first Hawkesbury Upton Literature Festival in April 2015 (Photo by Clint Randall) Writing on the penultimate day of 2017, I can't NOT think about where this year has taken me and what next year will bring.  Don't worry - I'm not going to be banging on about New Years' Resolutions . I love new beginnings and seize every opportunity for one - new school terms (I have a school-age daughter), solstices, equinoxes, birthdays, etc. But I was cured of an addiction to Resolutions a couple of years ago by my friend and mentor, the author and creativism teacher Orna Ross (you may also know her as the founder and director of the Alliance of Independent Authors ). Orna Ross made me realise that New Years' Resolutions generally focus on the negative: things to give up or bad habits to reform. Her recommendation is to state Creative Intentions instead - a more positive, constructive system which focuses on the ...

It's 3 years now since the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) first stormed the closed doors of the London Book Fair and since then the dust has begun to settle.  Although there still seems to be some bewilderment at the change, authors are now firmly a part of one of the biggest book events in Europe.  It seems incredible that it was ever otherwise.  How can you have books without authors? It's as though the mainstream publishing industry has got into the habit of regarding us at best as inconvenient amateurs, at worst just the chicken that lays the egg. Just one of the halls at Olympia. This year, for the first time, I was able to go along and I had the most incredible experience.  Held at Olympia, the Fair is absolutely vast.  So big that I got lost on a regular basis, despite having a map, and on Day One I had three attempts to find the right exit before being escorted out by a burly bloke in a Book Fair T-shirt.  All the major publishers (an...

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 ...

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...

I hadn’t done a public reading in ten years, not since I was invited to read out my short story, Bringing Something Back, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2002. That had been fifteen minutes standing at a microphone in a tent called a Yurt. Including expenses, £155 for fifteen minutes “work”. Not bad, I had thought then. The wine had been free that day too, of course. Even a fish and chip supper paid for by Ron Turnbull, then-editor of Edinburgh Review. And here I was, ten years later, on Friday 28 th September 2012, due to attend a meeting of the Alliance of Independent Authors in Inverness, where I had been invited to do a wee reading from my novel, The Survival of Thomas Ford. 7.30pm at the Glen Mhor Hotel. I Googled it. Nice old building, slate roof, not bad stonework. I hadn’t been there for many years.                         ...