Authors Electric

Celebrating the joy of Sherlock Holmes with BBC Radio Gloucestershire earlier this year  (Photo: Dominic Cotter) A great way for authors to build readership and to enamour loyal fans is to write series of books about popular characters and settings. It's much easier to sell stories about familiar heroes and heroines than to persuade readers to try new ones.  As the author of the first in a proposed series of seven Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries , I have naturally been happy to learn of easy marketing tactics to sell series: You can offer the first in the series at a reduced price to get the reader sufficiently hooked to buy the rest at full market price. Even better, if you're marketing ebooks (and most indie authors, like me, will make the bulk of their sales in digital form), you can even offer the first in the series for free, because you have no production costs to cover once you've set up the digital file.   Then there are the prequels you can ...

When I was a kid, my mother complained to one of my teachers that I read the same books over and over again. “Just as long as she’s reading,” said the teacher, with a smile. There were, of course several reasons why this happened. Firstly, we didn’t have that many books at home, so the choice was limited. My father’s books were all in Polish, and as I didn’t speak the language I didn’t find out until many years later that Sienkiewicz was a terrific writer. The book most people have heard of is Quo Vadis , which was made into a film. It’s available free on the Kindle. Secondly, I’d often enjoyed a book so much that I wanted to repeat the experience, get that same glow of visiting a favourite haunt once more. I think I practically knew The Chronicles ofNarnia and the Silver Brumby books off by heart. And thirdly, by the time I was ten I’d read all the ones that interested me in the junior library. A couple of years later I managed to persuade the librarians to let me have a ticke...

A couple of weeks ago I had the great fortune to be pointed in the direction of a free online Introduction to Forensics course at Strathclyde University (many thanks to Chris Longmuir). Without hesitation I enrolled and proceeded to develop a thin veneer of forensics knowledge, having noticed my deficit when recently starting to write a murder mystery. If someone in your street today tried to commit the perfect murder they would surely fail. In the old days only Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Columbo and Miss Marple had the honed detective intellect to deduce motive, method, perpetrator, weapon and time of event from the few scant clues. Nowadays, thanks to the proliferation of modern entertainment media, we are all experts. True crime documentaries, CSI, Criminal Minds, Dexter, Sherlock and other TV programmes contribute to the societal knowledge of methods of murder, criminal profiling and forensics. We congratulate ourselves on having already identified the killer b...

T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse..... Pic courtesy of office.microsoft.com Yes, I know Christmas is behind us now, but this old poem by Clement Clarke Moore was probably the poem that first made me want to write – and that was donkey's years ago. I remember how those words fired my imagination. I pictured a Victorian household, with snow on the ground, stockings hanging from the mantle-piece, and the delicious aroma of Christmas pudding and mince pies wafting through the house etc etc. As a child I remember wondering how I could get that imaginary world in my head actually down on paper. Well the writing didn't really start until years later. But whenever I hear that poem it reminds me of how it inspired me to want to write - and how wonderful the imagination is. Pic courtesy of office.microsoft.com Only, last night, the line: not a creature was stirring, not even a mo...