Authors Electric

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too. I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital. But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.  D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward. You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break. Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for a...

The Wolf's Footprint, Susan Price Years ago, when I wrote The Wolf's Footprint, I took the children being abandoned in a forest from the beginning of Hansel and Gretel and added a pinch of Russian folklore: the idea that if you drink water from an animal's footprint, then you turn into that animal. It's always been popular in schools -- indeed Kate Stilitz turned it into a musical. You can read about that here. It continues to be my best-seller as an Indie book -- in the UK, the US, in Canada, Australia and Europe. If I knew what it was about the book that appeals so much, I'd put it into everything I write. Its popularity decided me to spend 2018 in re-publishing some of my books for the same age-group of eight to ten. Like The Wolf's Footprint, they're a mixture of original story-telling and folklore. The three I managed to get done -- with the help of my illustrator, Andrew -- are:- Odin's Monster Master Thomas Katt and T...

  The wolves come... Friday 13th may be unlucky for some, but not for me. On Friday July 13th I went into London, to Tiverton Primary School in Tottenham , to see the second performance of a musical play based on my book, The Wolf's Footprint. It was an exhaustingly hot day -- and I got lost. I interrupted several people as they were going about their business, to ask the way to Tiverton School and every single one of these randomly selected people was as friendly and helpful as could be. Several pulled out smart-phones and entered the name of the school, so they could show me where it was and guide me on my way. Thanks to them, I found Tiverton in time for the afternoon session. So thank you, kindly people of Haringey and Tottenham and especially those -- you know who you are -- who were stopped by a hot and dishevelled writer asking, "Do you know where Tiverton School is?" At the school I spent the afternoon talking with two great classes ...

Technology. How can you not love it? Space-craft on meteroids - The Ghost Drum in paperback even if it did fall over. And - an even greater achievement as far as I'm concerned - my book, The Ghost Drum , available in paperback again, after years out of print. I knew when I finished it that it was the best book I'd ever written - though now, having re-read them all as I turned them into e-books, I think that its successors, Ghost Song and Ghost Dance, are, in some ways, better. Ghost Song is, I think, more lyrical and poetic, while Ghost Dance is altogether darker, with a more complex story. They were originally published for children but none of the books are particuarly childish. Although they're 'fairy-tales' of a kind, they're based on the often bitter and cynical older stories, which were told by adults to adults, and reflected a kind of magical-realism response to often hard lives. All the books were published in America, as well as the UK....

          And not only available on Amazon , but also on Barnes & Noble's Nook , and on Kobo too, thanks to Draft2Digital , which is a great boon to the self-publisher.           Nice ad, eh? It was put together by my brother, Andrew, from one of his own illustrations for the book. This one:-             At the moment we're battling through the problems of turning The Wolf's Footprint into a paper book, with Createspace. The pictures in the paperback will probably be black and white, because of the expense of colour-printing - but in the e-book they can be as colourful as we like.            I asked the artist who produced the illustrations, Andrew Price, about the size the images needed to be. He said that the images in Wolf's Footprint are 1563 pixels wide by 2500 pixels high. This is a good s...