Authors Electric

I am currently writing my seventh Sprite Sister title. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about writing a series for children. One chance to make a first impression Your series stands or falls on the strength of your first book. It’s your starting point and everything comes back to that. It defines the characters and their world, and sets up an expectation of what is to come. You have to get it right. If your readers don’t like it, they won’t bother with the second story.  A series relies on the strength of its characters It’s the characters you come back to. What’s going to happen to them next? They are your friends: enjoy them and listen to them. Their voices become familiar. You know what they will say and how they will react, but, like your friends, your characters are not static. They need to grow through the challenges you have set them – and you need to move with them. Continuity Between 2007-2009, I wrote five Sprite ...

There’s nothing that gladdens this author’s heart as much as a letter from an enthusiastic reader. Authors of adult books may keep their readers for years. Genre writers, I suspect, retain loyal readers for decades. But as a children’s author, you capture your reader’s attention for a few years, if you’re lucky. There’s a small window in which your books may be cherished, then your readers are gone, grown and after new stories. But if a child likes your stories, they really like them and your characters become their world. Chris Winn's design for the new e-book My Sprite Sister stories are aimed at girl readers aged 7-11 years. Marketing with social media is difficult with this age group. My readers are too young to tweet or use Facebook (I hope), but they write to me on my website (and I ask them to get their parents’ permission). Mostly they write once or twice, often asking for information for their book project. Sometimes they write to me, on and off, over...

by Sheridan Winn It’s an up and down life, this writing business: feast and famine, highs and lows, and the constant pull between nurturing your creativity and producing what pays the bills. My rights in the Sprite Sister books have been reverted: now there is no Piccadilly Press behind me. I have to navigate my own way. Ahead are the huge, and potentially choppy, waters of digital publishing: few 7-10 year old readers – my market with Sprites – are yet buying e-books. Still, I wouldn’t swap it, this writer’s life, and the freedom of sailing one’s own little boat. My summer has been spent re-editing the first five Sprite Sister titles for publication as e-books for Kindle, along with a second edition of print-on-demand paperbacks. I have found it a relatively restful experience to focus on stories that are already written, and to further refine them. I have also reconnected with the plots – have been able to pick up the thread once again. That itself is useful wi...

Norwich is named as England’s first UNESCO City of Literature ‘Do different’, they say here. There is a stubborn independence in the Norfolk character, born from centuries of invasion by Romans, Danes, Vikings, Angles and Saxons. This low-lying county, once home to Boudicca and the Iceni people, has over one hundred miles of coastline. It is a wild place of heath, flint and big skies. In some parts of Norfolk you can drive for miles without seeing a house. Burnham Overy Staithe And in the middle sits Norwich, the most easterly city in the UK. This former seat of the Saxon Earls of East Anglia became the capital of what was the most populous region in Norman England. By the 14 th century, the walled city of Norwich covered an area bigger than London. With more medieval churches than any city north of the Alps, Norwich became one of Europe’s great seedbeds of religious art and architecture. As Nicholas Pevsner wrote: ‘Norwi...

BITS, BITS, IT’S ALL IN BITS … by Sheridan Winn Here’s the thing. I have a modest body of work – six children’s fantasy titles representing around 325,000 words and several years of my life. Five of these titles have sold over 200,000 hardbacks in Germany, with paperbacks and e-books now following. Fischer Schatzinsel, I love you. These five titles were first published in the UK (thank you, Piccadilly Press) and sales have been satisfactory. I get a lot of readers borrow my books from the libraries and a decent annual fee from Public Lending Right. When the Sprite Sister series launched in 2008, the jackets looked like this:- But this story, The Circle of Power, and the first in the series, has just gone out of print in the UK. Naturally I have asked Piccadilly for the rights back. As The Circle of Power disappeared off the shelves this Spring, I published the sixth title, The Boy With Hawk-like Eyes, as a print-on-demand paperback and as an e-...