Authors Electric

A couple of months ago I blogged here about my experience of signing up with 'aggregator' Ingram Spark, recommended by the Alliance of Independent Authors. Then, a few weeks ago I received an invitation to a presentation at Ingram headquarters in Milton Keynes and a tour of their printing works at Lightning Source.  Always curious to know the path from my uploaded manuscript to the printed page I happily accepted, even though it meant a 5am start from the Lake District.  Neil, as the Book Mill editor, came with me to investigate the techie side of things. We weren’t disappointed.  Andy Bromley, their ‘front man’ for indie authors, gave a fascinating presentation into Ingram’s history and its plans for the future. Ingram was established in 1964 by John Ingram as a private company.  They started out in logistics, moved into digital content and publishing and are now going into Robotic technology.   In 1997 they acquired Lightning Source as a Print On Dema...

(Warning: this post contains explicit content which some people may find shocking.) Tackling sensitive issues in a novel is difficult - yet, if we're to write about the full spectrum of human life then we are going to have to take one on at some point in our writing careers.  Personally, I don't believe that the novel is the right medium to conduct a crusade - political or social.  Virginia Woolf said that we should never write fiction that encouraged one to 'write a cheque' or 'join a society',  but that doesn't mean that we can't address political or social issues. Dickens revealed the horrors of the Victorian underworld, and Catherine Cookson wrote about 20th century prejudices against illegitimacy, class and colour - there are dozens more examples.  I have never, in my life, ever set out to write 'about' an 'issue' in anything but a feature article or media documentary.  But my latest novel, The Centauress, tackles the very d...

OK, so I admit - sometimes a writer's life is not at all bad!  Most people would call it a holiday, but it goes down in the accounts as research. On the quayside  of Rovinj with the 'centro storico' in the background. Settings are very important - Catherine Cookson always said that she chose characters and an environment and the whole novel came out of the conflict between the two. One writer I know deliberately thinks of the most romantic destinations she can and then sets her new book in one of them - a great excuse to go off for a month or so to soak up the atmosphere.  I set my latest novel in Istria, Croatia for very different reasons (honest!)   I wanted a location that hadn't been overused and wouldn't be all that familiar to the reader, and I wanted somewhere with a troubled, but reasonably safe, atmosphere.  There had to be an undertow of unease from past events, to echo what is happening in the lives of the two main characters.  Croatia has...