Authors Electric

“We’ve set up a blog tour for you,” my publishers, RedDoor, announced. “It’ll run for about a fortnight around publication date.” “What exactly do I have to do?” I enquired, assuming I would have to write something for each blog, or do an interview – as is the pattern with PR tours. “Nothing. They will all review the book on their designated days.” It seemed hard to believe that anything could actually be that easy for an author. No one ever makes our lives easy – or at least that is sometimes how it seems. But the reality was even better than that. Not only did they all review the book enthusiastically, most of them tweeted about it and re-tweeted one another’s tweets and then set up competitions for people who might want to win their copies, which resulted in more re-tweets and so the cycle continued. It was like a word-of-mouth campaign on steroids, sending the book rocketing back up the Amazon charts. RedDoor then produced a poster of juicy quotes ...

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...

One of the most annoying things when you are setting out on the self-publishing path is trying to find out exactly what other authors are earning in order to prepare your expectations. Authors are traditionally evasive about their earnings, either out of modesty or embarrassment, so it is almost impossible for a newcomer to get a true idea of what rewards are likely to lie in store. So, in the hope of encouraging others towards greater transparency, I thought I would share some actual figures for my novella, “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”, which went up on Amazon about six months ago as part of their “White Glove Service”, in conjunction with United Agents, one of the biggest and most successful literary agencies in London. After a month or so the money started to dribble in at about £50 a month, but much of that was from purchases which I had made of POD copies that I could hand out for promotional purposes. The reviews started to build up on various blogs, writers’ w...

Whenever authors get together we can be heard complaining about those who we work alongside. We complain that our agents never return our calls; our publishers never promote our books and the booksellers then refuse to display them with the prominence we are convinced they deserve. Digital publishing has called our bluff on the first two because we can now publish and promote our own stuff, so we have no one to blame but ourselves if things don’t go as well as they did in our dreams. Now a young author called Daisy White has gone one step further and is running pop-up bookshops, not just to sell her own books but also those of other participating authors. Any author who thought they could do better than Waterstones now has a chance to put their money where their mouth is and back Daisy White’s “Booktique”. Currently Daisy can be found in Tunsgate Square Shopping Centre in Guildford, nestling up amongst blue-chip names like Barbour and Heals. She will be there until January 12th. Du...

          I was invited to take tea with Mrs Mubarak at her husband’s palace in Cairo, just before the Arab Spring broke through and toppled his regime, bringing hope to a city which seemed darkened by storm clouds of popular resentment.           Inside the palace Mrs Mubarak, who is half Welsh, half Egyptian, was a gracious hostess and white coated waiters dispensed cakes which she assured me were home made. The tranquillity inside the gilded salon was reminiscent of our own Queen’s garden tea parties – where they also provide excellent cakes – completely insulated from the boiling stew of hatred festering in the hot, over populated streets outside the heavily guarded walls of the palace. It was that contrast, which I had experienced in similar palaces all over the world, that made me start writing “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”.           ...

There have been rumblings recently of “mysterious and secret” deals being done between Amazon and some of the biggest and brightest literary agents. They are calling it their “White Glove” service, and from the point of view of authors whose agents love their books but are unable to persuade traditional publishers to take them on, it’s a brilliant innovation.           Last year I wrote a novel, Secrets of the Italian Gardener , set inside the palace of a dictator about to be overthrown in the Arab Spring. The narrator is a ghostwriter who, while inside the palace writing a book for the dictator, meets a wise, elderly Italian gardener who gradually unravels the story of who really holds the power and wealth in the world. He literally discovers "where the bodies are buried". As the rebels draw closer to breaching the palace walls the ghost is also struggling with his own breaking heart. I have spent much of my ghost...