Authors Electric

Faithful followers of Electric Authors may remember that I talked a year or two ago about my novella “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”.  To recap; I launched it on Amazon through their White Glove service, with the help of United Agents. That sold a good few copies via Kindle and print-on-demand - and garnered some good Amazon reviews. I then produced a hardback edition through Red Door Publishing, with the aim of getting non-Amazon reviews, with the help of Midas PR. When Red Door suggested that the time might be right for a paperback, I realised that we had managed to collect quite a few good endorsements from these previous two incarnations and it might indeed be worth producing something for the bookshops. Red Door commissioned a redesign of the cover and we included flaps back and front so that we could smother them with lavish third-party praise and on July 4 th the paperback will be making its way out into the world, supported by PR from Bookolle...

Following Sandra’s Horn’s post last week, “That Selling Thing”, I thought it might be useful to consider whether good reviews actually sell books. A few months ago I blogged here about producing a hardback of my novella, Secrets of the Italian Gardener through Red Door Publishing, and hiring Midas PR to send copies out to the traditional book reviewing marketplace in the same way they would send a new book from one of the traditional publishers – a copy of the book plus a press release. The book had received plenty of reviews on Amazon but I know that it needs to get “out there” more. Midas, who are probably the biggest and most successful PR consultancy in the publishing business, did exactly as they were asked and then there was the sort of silence that you would expect to happen while the reviewers read the book, wrote their reviews and their editors considered whether to run them. A couple of months later a nice review appeared in the Daily Mail Literar...

One of the greatest by-products of the electronic publishing revolution is being able to keep developing and refining a book after its initial birth. The traditional publishing business model loaded most of the pressure onto publication day, with a possible second chance of breathing marketing life into the project when the paperback came out a year later. If your book didn’t float on at least one of those launch days then it would almost certainly sink beneath the surface within a matter of weeks. Copies might possibly be washed up onto the shores of a few libraries and Oxfam shops over the coming years, and not much else unless it became caught up in a freak rights storm in Hollywood or as a foreign translation. Now, however, we have more chances to get things right, more ways to keep a book alive while we try to work out the best way to alert potential readers to its existence and to tell them why they would enjoy it. In other parts of the electronic jungle, such a...

A couple of months ago I wrote about the hiring of Midas PR to launch “Chances”,  the erotic memoir which I had ghosted for an anonymous European lady who was going under the names of Penny. Last week the mighty Midas machine picked up speed and I found myself writing articles and doing a succession of interviews to promote the book, culminating in an encounter with Claudia Winkleman on her late night Radio2 arts show. Whenever I mentioned to anyone that I was going to be meeting Miss Winkleman I always received the same response - “Oh, I love Claudia Winkleman”. It didn’t seem to matter what age or gender the person was, or whether they were likely to be fans of reality shows like “Strictly” or cultural offerings like “Film 2015”, her puppyish glamour had somehow worked on all of them. It appears the woman is fast-tracking towards being a national treasure. What, I wondered, could be the secret of this magical spell she was casting over the nation? Listening to s...