Authors Electric

I’m in quite a few writerly groups on Facebook, of varying degrees of ability and professionalism. Some – like Authors Electric’s own former blogger Wendy Jones – runs an excellent group Women Writers, Editors, Agents and Publishers . This is a highly-moderated pro group for women only and full of useful advice and networking; I highly recommend it to any women involved in the literary world.  Other groups are less professional and often have little-to-zero moderation, resulting in a large number of members of dubious reputation or ability. Sadly, newer writers join – all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of enthusiasm to write their book and are often sucked into offline chats almost immediately: How do I start my book? Is this a good opening line? Should I do x or y?  Let’s chat about that. Kindly DM me.  And you just know that the newbie is going to drown in shady promises of instant fame and fortune. These incredibly generous offers of help come from people who are a...

Anansi - by Lynne Garner It's that time when I look at my previous years sales and try to discover any patterns in said sales. Now as it's also my turn to write a blog post I decided to share some of my 2014 results with you. For the purposes of this blog I've looked at sales from September to December 2014 of my ebooks Anansi the Trickster Spider volume one and volume two  plus the physical book which contains both volumes . The reason it's not the entire year is I didn't upload these books onto Smashwords or create a physical version via CreateSpace until September. Firstly I looked at the sales of these titles as ebooks only. As you can see the Amazon sales dwarf sales from Smashwords. I also noted that on Smashwords my sales were 11%  of the total number of the free sample downloads (which is much higher than I anticipated).       However results become a little more interesting when I add the sales of the physical book. As you can ...

One of the advantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. One of the disadvantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. If you have an e-book to sell then the obvious place to go and tout your wares is Amazon. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing has an easy upload platform, good opportunities for testing the product before finally clicking Publish, global storefronts and facilities for tweaking the book page via Amazon Author Central. Happy days. Amazon even offers a couple of promotional schemes if you give them 90 days exclusivity and join KDP Select. Up to 5 days of Free Book Promotion (would you want to do that? Debate is never-ending on the subject) or the Kindle Countdown which gives a time-based promotional discount for your title. Why does Amazon offer these benefits in return for exclusivity? Because other channels do sell e-books. If yo...

Hello. I'm thrilled to be here amongst so many fantastic UK authors who are also embracing digital publishing. For my first post I've been asked to say a little about me. I began publishing at the beginning of 2010 when ebooks were very much an American affair. US Amazon Kindle was well underway but ebooks were mostly PDF documents sold from websites. They were packaged with funny, box-like, mock 3D real-book images, and usually advertised with lots of scrolling, bright red, writing with a massive "one time offer" only deal of £50.00, or even more, at the bottom. I was trying to make ends meet, as you do when you've got an agent but no publishing deal and a very sick partner, working at home for a TV script transcription company. My only other regular work was as a household tips columnist in The Guardian Saturday magazine. I was asked to transcribe an interview with Tay Zonday for a programme about the future of the media. When his song Chocolate Rain w...

Hello, this is my first post here and I'm thrilled to be part of this wonderful group of E-book writers. I'm making this post an introduction but I promise not to go on too much about myself in future posts. If you haven't come across me before I'm Hywela Lyn - my real first two names.  I was born and lived most of my life in Wales.  Hywela is Welsh but no-one ever called me that - so I thought it would be nice to combine those two names and use them as my pen-name. I've been writing for as long as I can remember and had several short stories published in UK magazines over the years, but it's only since about 2008 that I've decided to concentrate on  novels. My writing space overlooks lush Welsh countryside - and the paddocks where my two horses peacefully graze... ...in my dreams!(When I win the lottery or make the international best seller lists!:) ) In fact, I live in a small English village, too far away from my beloved Wales, and m...

I once read a book by Gwyn Thomas called The World Cannot Hear You. I can’t f o r the life of me remember much about it (except that I loved it), but the title has always lurked in my mind. I t seemed to me to epitomise the writer’s (or writers’) tragedy. You write, or read, these wonderful books, somebody reads them, or maybe not, and then they are gone. I used to drone on about Gerald Kersh, whom I thought was fantastic. Nobody else had ever heard of him, which I bitterly resented, more on his behalf than my own. Before and during World WarII he was enormous. And now…? But sometimes, out of the blue, things get jogged. My phone rang not so long ago , and I was asked to take part in a Radio 4 programme about the writers considered to be in the van of the “new realism” in children’s books. My Mate Shofiq was mentioned, and Albes on and the Germans. Good God, I thought - I wrote them! And suddenly remembered being rung up by the headmaster of a school in Peckham to cancel my invitatio...

I decided a while ago that I’d like to try out the Kindle Singles market. It seemed a wonderful idea to be able to publish short stories, flash fiction and novellas for people to sample like a newspaper or magazine. So I put together a small collection of short stories. The title story Three is an unpublished story about three characters in three parts - too long for most short fiction outlets - and I included two others which had either been published in anthologies or broadcast on Radio 4. Three stories. My partner and I put them all together in one file as required and, with all the experience gathered from e-publishing our previous non-fiction book, A Passionate Sisterhood,  we uploaded the file onto Kindle. And that’s where our problems started. Somehow between the computer and Kindle site, the file became corrupted and two (rather crucial) lines were missing from one of the stories. The culprit turned out to be a long (double hyphen) dash inserted by Word in plac...