Authors Electric

The electrification of “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride” continues apace as the first mini-episodes of the television adaptation go up on YouTube drama channel, http://www.ThisisDRAMA.com    There is also a trailer and a “behind the scenes” film up there, (each of them just a few minutes long and highly digestible). I will attempt to put the trailer up here. So, Steffi is now traditionally published, e-published by her legacy publisher, (Blake), heavily featured on Wattpad and dramatised on YouTube – you have to give the girl credit for perseverance!

On a recent Guardian blog the literary commentator, Robert McCrum, analysed some of the "genres" in the book publishing market. One of the genres he identified was "Ghost Lit". "A surprising number of successful books," he wrote, "(bestselling memoirs especially) are written by ghost writers. But there are also ghosted novels, too. By definition these wraith-like creatures have no names and are known only to their fellow spooks – and the publishers who depend on them." It then occurred to me that “wraith-like creatures”, pretty well sums up the whole experience of being an author. Sitting in a Soho editing suite a couple of weeks ago, watching the rushes from the filming of my novel “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, (freely available on   http://www.wattpad.com  and soon to be Kindled by its original publisher), I was struck first by the changes which the scriptwriters had made to the original story in order to make it work as an episodi...

This week the cameras started rolling at Twickenham Studios on a pilot episode of “Steffi”, a dramatisation of my book, “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, which is destined to be broadcast over the internet and then go on to television through a maze of deals involving a variety of major sponsors and agreements so complex they make your head spin. In fact, I haven’t even tried to understand them, having total faith that the producers at Emerald Films know what they are doing in this “multi-platform” world. The cast are a mixture of established television actors, pop stars and internet stars and the producers have been working on the whole package for a couple of years since first expressing interest in the original book. In that time the print version, published in the traditional way by Blake publishing, has pretty much sold out and there are negotiations under way for them to produce an e-book version. Blake Publishing has always been one of the more fleet-footed, b...