Authors Electric

Call me old-fashioned, but I love a good bookmark, and I have a large collection ready for action whenever I need one.  Some of these have been made for me by those too young to read my books yet... I have some that I've treasured since I was very young - I've had these two since I lived in California at the age of 8... I have some handmade ones, such as these two I embroidered when my eyesight was sharper than it is now... Some are souvenirs of bookish events I've enjoyed or at which I've spoken... Bookmarks make great low-budget souvenirs of places that I enjoy visiting as a tourist... So when I decided to produce some swag to promote my growing Sophie Sayers Village Mystery novels (four and counting...), a good bookmark was the obvious choice. But as to the design, I was stumped. I love the gorgeous book cover designs produced for me by the wonderful Rachel Lawston of  Lawston Design , but with three more books to come in the ser...

Debbie Young in Hawkesbury churchyard (Photo: Angela Fitch) In 2010, realising that no matter how hard I worked in my day job, it was leaving me unfulfilled, I made the radical decision to walk away from it without a job to go to. I intended to refocus my life on my writing ambitions . Reading Between the Lines It felt like a miracle when I almost immediately landed a part-time job with a wonderful children's reading charity , Read for Good , which served two purposes for me (apart from giving me an income, that is): It reinforced the importance of books and reading not only for children but for all ages, which in turn validated my ambition to write books myself.  It gave me space to explore different ways in which I could write what I wanted to write - and indeed to discover exactly what that was.  Using commissioned non-fiction projects and experimental short stories as stepping stones, I gradually gained the confidence and competence needed to achieve my ...

I'm also awfully fond of bluebells As a novelist, I like to think I make everything up.  While the standard disclaimer appears on my copyright pages declaring each book a work of fiction, little details creep in from real life.  Snippets and snapshots are dredged up from the ragbag of my memory. Sometimes this is for no apparent reason, such as the recycling bins that appeared in three separate stories in my flash fiction collection, Quick Change . I didn't even notice the repetition until one of my beta readers asked why they kept cropping up. For fear of seeming obsessive, I replaced one bin with a bonfire, which made for a much better story.  Other times I manage to wrestle the reasons from my subconscious after I've finished writing the story, such as the forget-me-not motif that runs throughout my Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series.  The first book in the series In the first novel, Best Murder in Show , Hector, the local bookseller, r...

English author Debbie Young Most authors at some point in their writing lives will come across the advice that there are ONLY SEVEN BASIC PLOTS - or maybe nine, or thirty-six, or various other numbers, depending on whom you consult.  If you're the glass-half-empty type, it's easy to think: "Oh no, how can I ever hope to be original? Someone will have got there before me!" Whereas glass-half-full types like me may think: "Well, Shakespeare just took existing stories and upcycled them into his plays - if it's good enough for Shakespeare, who am I to complain?" Those who can't even see the glass are probably best advised to throw down their pen and take up golf instead. The BEST thing to do is, of course, to take your choice of basic plot and wrap around it your choice your characters, themes, setting, etc etc to produce a final story that only you could write .  How Shall I Write It? Let Me Count the Ways  (Photo by MJS on Unspla...

Seasonal reads by Debbie Young - some novels, some short stories, but all good fun One of the many reasons I love writing contemporary fiction is that it means I don't have to bother much with research. In this respect, I'm in good company, because as my friend T E Shepherd , who writes compelling magical realism novels, told me over the weekend, Philip Pullman says: One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that you can sit at your desk and just make up what you are too lazy to go and find out. This is especially true for me because my current series of cosy mystery novels is set in a little Cotswold village much like the one I've lived in for over a quarter of a century. During that time, I've been a member of countless clubs, served on various committees, founded an annual fun run and a literary festival, and volunteered in the village community shop. There's not much about daily life in Cotswold villages that has passed me by. Having fun in H...

When I started planning the cosy mystery series I'm currently writing, I thought I had a bright idea: I'd make the seven books span the course of the year. What's not to love about writing a book for all seasons, and then some? Whatever the time of year, I'd have a topical book to tout. Summertime for Sophie Sayers Given that my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries are set in a small (fictional) English village (no surprises there), its residents are naturally very conscious of the seasonal changes, and their social calendar dictated by the time of year. That's just how it is in the small (non-fictional) English village in which I've lived for the last 26 years. Here in my real life village, I'm so much more aware of the passage of the seasons than when I lived and worked in and around London. Working in a city centre, I was more likely to spot the season by what was in shop windows , rather than by the appearance (or disappearance) of lambs an...

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 ...