Authors Electric

Funnily enough, my post this month is along the same sort of lines as Hywela's a few days ago: the highways and byeways you can find yourself travelling down in the name of research. I'm currently writing a story set in 1893. It's another in my 'Swallowcliffe Hall' series, set in a large country house, but for the first time featuring one of the aristocrats rather than a servant as my main character: Eugenie Vye, the elder daughter, who for one reason and another has arrived at the grand old age of twenty-two with no husband on the horizon. If she can't attract an eligible suitor by the end of the season, she may be shipped off to India to try her chances there. (Completely coincidentally, I see a book by Anne de Courcy has just been published on that very subject, 'The Fishing Fleet' - note to self to request it from the London Library.) It's been fascinating looking at the house from the other side of the green baize door, and I've had t...

Oh dear. This month has rolled around particularly quickly and I find myself with half a day to write a blog post and not much of a clue how to fill it. I suppose I should have prepared for this eventuality, but like the frivolous grasshopper rather than the industrious ant, I've spent the time hopping about on holiday (Santorini and Ireland, since you ask), filling the hours with chat, wine and light reading rather than writing and opinion-forming. These are the topics I've been mulling over so far. First, I thought I could write about the London Library: the unexpected gems one can find when browsing its shelves, the atmosphere of intense academic study (extreme reading, you might call it), the charmingly old-fashioned comments in the visitors' book deploring mobile phones and welcoming a mouse which occasionally appears in the reading room, the way one feels so satisfyingly intellectual after a visit - but I don't really have the ...

What will you be doing tomorrow? Will you be tuning in to watch the flotilla sailing up the Thames, throwing a street party with your neighbours, or pulling the duvet over your head and wishing you were in Alicante or Argentina or anywhere else that isn't festooned in red, white and blue? I've been thinking about patriotism and nostalgia a lot recently because my historical trilogy, 'Swallowcliffe Hall', is centred on an English country house at three pivotal moments in British history: 1890, 1914 and 1939. Also because I've leapt on the 'Downton Abbey' bandwagon with alacrity (although the series was published in print way before the TV programme appeared). Part of the reason why the books are selling here and in America, I'm sure, is because people love looking back to an era when life seemed well-ordered and certain, and everyone knew their place. We view country-house life like one big security blanket: a safe little microcosm compared ...

I've been thinking about this question a lot recently - mainly since giving my younger son a Kindle for Christmas. (OK, I'm a slow thinker.) Up until then, pretty much the only two books he'd read for pleasure were  Hurricane Hamish:Calypso Cricketer and Hurricane Hamish:The Cricket World Cup, by Mark Jefferson, which he polished off at the age of ten . Nothing else seemed to compare to those two. Twelve years later and post-Kindle, however, he has been devouring books almost continuously. The screen seems to have turned books into a pleasure, rather than a chore which he associated with his parents' generation. Recently I was talking to the boyfriend of a young cousin, just back from a tour of duty with the RAF in Afghanistan, who said the same thing: he never used to like reading but now he loads up his Kindle before he goes and finds it passes the time brilliantly. (It's also easy to carry in a uniform pocket and resistant to sand and glare.) Schoo...

spar First off, I have to say I'm by no means a marketing expert. I'm still not comfortable with Twitter, despite having bought Nicola Morgan's wonderful guide, 'Tweet Right' and read at least the first five pages. And I'm never entirely sure whether my promotional activities are worth the time I've spent on them (apart from one example I'll come to later), because unless there's an instant leap in sales, it's hard to know what's worked and why. But, caveats aside, here's an account of my first hesitant steps into the marketing maelstrom.  Experienced marketers may dismiss my efforts with a lite larff (as Nigel Molesworth sa) but fellow novices may find something of use, or perhaps one idea that will spark off another. Apologies in advance if they seem hopelessly basic. As I mentioned in a previous post, my main and most profitable ploy has been to leapfrog on the back of an existing media phenomenon, Downton Abbey. Be...