Authors Electric

Spending time on social networking sites can take too much time from writing, so I try to keep it to a minimum.  It’s fine spending hours on Twitter and Blogger and Facebook promoting your work, but if you do too much of it, quite soon there won’t be any work to promote!  But I've recently found a new distraction that might just prove to be useful. Pinterest is one of the names that’s been coming up a lot recently and I’ve been ignoring it.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I took a look at a couple of authors who were using Pinterest and was intrigued and very impressed.  Linda Gillard uses it to promote her work and so does another Electric Author Catherine Czerkawska.   Catherine's boards are particularly stunning! I’ve been trying to find new ways to promote my recent novel The Sun’s Companion and it suddenly seemed to make sense to share all the images that were around me when I wrote it and which illustrate the story perfectly.  It’s set i...

I wrote my first novel when I was 17 and it was a dreadful, Gothic affair - a blend of Wuthering Heights and Emmerdale, complete with estranged parents, child abuse, strange goings-on in barns, and unrequited love, interspersed with boring conversations about art and life.  I cheerfully sent my masterpiece to a publisher I chose at random in a book shop, and waited for fame to come calling. What should have been my author pic! I received (what I know now was) a lovely letter praising aspects of the novel and suggesting amendments.  If I was to re-write, the editor said, they might just be willing to look at it again. All I saw was rejection - I hurled it into the bottom of the wardrobe and wept.  I knew so little about how the publishing industry worked, or what you were supposed to do, I didn’t even consider sending it to another publisher and I knew nothing about agents. In my twenties I wrote 2 more novels - one, a thriller, set in the middle east where I was l...