Authors Electric

Before my next brother was born and we were allotted a prefab, we lived with my mother’s family in an old stone-built house with three stories and a basement. It’s still there, now called Wealden College, a centre for psychotherapies. At the time we lived there, the family comprised my Great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and my mother’s siblings; three aunties and four uncles.   After the birth of my brother we still went to the old house every day. It was a magnet for all its nestlings, long after they’d flown to places of their own and it was near the local primary school so all the children had their mid-day meals at Nan’s and were collected from there after school. There were too many of us to eat at the table at weekends, so the children sat along the big old sofa in the window bay to have their fish and chips (from the shop across the road). Toast was made over the open fire, with long brass forks. White bread from the local baker – we were lucky if we managed to b...

Just Published by The Book Mill No biographer should write anything for love - biographies are expensive to write and they promote the work and life of someone else, taking time and effort away from your own writing.  But, I've just spent two years of what little life I might have left writing about someone else, spending money on air fares, train tickets and hotel rooms which I will probably never get back.  I reckon I've probably spent the best part of £10,000, if you add in the permission fees and the printing costs.  Does that shock you? When I was approached by the Trustees of the Norman Nicholson literary estate, they (and I) hoped that the book would be funded by one of the big publishers.  Norman was one of the Faber poets and had been published as a prose author by Robert Hale and Penguin.  But publishing has changed massively in the last five years and there's been a seismic shift in attitude to literary biography. Unless there is some kind of m...

Like many writers, I made up a random name for my publishing website when I self-published my first ebook, Done & Dusted .  It all started in a slow, meandering way when I discovered that The Guardian were going to make a book out of their Saturday magazine Space Solves advice columns . The copyright to my contributions was mine but they had the right to republish as well. I made enquiries as to whether I'd be getting paid. The answer was vague. I hopped up and down a bit in that old, pre-ebook, smallfry-being-ignored-author way that used to be all too common and got my then-agent onto it and all that. It didn't matter in the end, the book was cancelled. But by then I had thought well, if they're going to, so can I. I learnt, by trial and (much) error how to format and, for less than a tenner, bought a Mr Site easy peasy build your own website kit . This included a built-in shop which linked to PayPal and sent customers their ebook automatically, plus a domain na...