Authors Electric

  No Artificial Intelligence Was Used In the Creating of These Books. Just Saying...  Hauntings Overheard in a Graveyard Nightcomers In a week's time, it's Hallowe'en. The night before All Saints' Day, when all the bogles, ghouls, boggarts, ghosts, night-walkers, bargeists, phantom ladies of many colours, not to mention the long-leggety beasties, come out for a big celebration before the Christmas season begins. Because, famously, at Christmas the bird of dawning kicks up a tiresome racket all night long and no spirit dares stir abroad, no fairy takes and no witch hath power to charm. So the Supernatural Community has to get all its jollies before then.  Hallowe'en, seemingly, is the office Christmas party for the undead. M. R. James (wikimedia) But remember: Ghosts aren't just for Christmas. I've always been ready for a ghost story at any time of the year. The great M. R. James wrote a particuarly chilling one, The Wailing Well , set on Midsummer Day, in br...

A friend, asked  me about covers for ebooks recently.  She didn't think she would make back, in sales, the cost of paying for a cover to be designed, and she didn't feel capable of creating one herself. So, what to do? I pointed her in the direction of CreateSpace and its free 'Cover Creator.' CreateSpace is the Amazon company which enables you to publish in paperback. You download a template, into which you load your 'interior files' or the text of your book. Then a cover has to be designed, which will wrap around the paperback book - so it has to have a front and back, and a spine. The thickness of the spine depends on the word-number of your book. Paperback cover of 'Ghost Dance' With my first POD paperbacks, the Ghost World series, I got my brother to take his Kindle cover designs and turn them into paperback covers, following the formula which Amazon provides. But I felt that I couldn't go on pestering my brother. When I turned ...

In my teens I went through a phase of reading horror stories – remember those collections of short stories published by Pan with gruesome illustrations of bloody eyeballs and worse on the covers? Me and my friends passed copies around ourselves, comparing notes and shuddering over the most grisly. Finally it all got too much: one story eventually gave me such bad dreams that I stopped reading them, and moved on from horror to the much more sophisticated ghost story genre. Being able to create a delicious thrill which makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck is very much harder than horror as it doesn’t rely on the cheap trick of buckets of blood and gore to achieve its aim. It's a more subtle and challenging skill, and one which many writers fail to achieve - but those stories that do succeed you will always remember, even though you may forget the writer’s name. Recently I read a story on my Kindle, ‘Overheard in a Graveyard’ which I’d read many yea...