Authors Electric

I've just been tagged in a Blog Hop meme by Susie Kelly via Victoria Corby called The Next Big Thing - French Twist. A Q&A about current work in progress. It looks great  and I want to participate, I will participate. But it's a long time since I wrote about writing. Problem is, it's a long time since I wrote at all despite all recent good intentions. I have 3 WIPs to complete, selecting one to revisit will, I'm sure, help in the mission to get back to writing. It brings it all back, in a good way, as to what it's all about. My happiest writing times were the pre-publishing hoo ha years of creative writing classes, mostly short stories, a bit of poetry. No pressure beyond getting the words right enough to read out loud, listening to others and entering a few competitions. Like many of those who were to become my friends on the courses, I dreamt of one day being able to write what I wanted to write, publish how I wanted to publish - .....oh hang on? So what...

One of the excitements of ebooks is that rather than having to fathom Amazon's sometimes bizarre rankings system, or trying to get figures out of your publisher (!), you know exactly how many books you sell, every day, every hour, every minute. You can go to your dashboard on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, wherever and see how it's all coming along. Or not. As I am responsible for publishing other authors as well, I have to keep a tight rein on records of sale for the monthly royalty payouts. This has always been an enjoyable exercise because month after month sales figures have been on the rise. Of course this had to fluctuate sooner or later, and in the past couple of months I have seen the first of the 'dips' across the board, especially with US sales. Thankfully there were reasons. On a couple of days with no US Amazon sales at all (major panic) it turned out there had been a technical glitch at Amazon HQ. General elections and natural disasters also took their t...

Like many writers, I made up a random name for my publishing website when I self-published my first ebook, Done & Dusted .  It all started in a slow, meandering way when I discovered that The Guardian were going to make a book out of their Saturday magazine Space Solves advice columns . The copyright to my contributions was mine but they had the right to republish as well. I made enquiries as to whether I'd be getting paid. The answer was vague. I hopped up and down a bit in that old, pre-ebook, smallfry-being-ignored-author way that used to be all too common and got my then-agent onto it and all that. It didn't matter in the end, the book was cancelled. But by then I had thought well, if they're going to, so can I. I learnt, by trial and (much) error how to format and, for less than a tenner, bought a Mr Site easy peasy build your own website kit . This included a built-in shop which linked to PayPal and sent customers their ebook automatically, plus a domain na...