Authors Electric

My writing has appeared in a lot of different places, including some other languages; my first novel was translated into Dutch, Japanese and German, back in the day when I brought out my fiction through traditional publishing houses. The Defector, in German After embarking on my indie or self-publishing project, Amazon started opening Kindle websites in places other than the US and the UK – and one of them was Germany. Ah ha, I thought, I have German editions of both my first two novels, I wonder if I can self-publish them as eBooks? I was lucky (although it didn’t feel like it at the time) that the German publisher, Delius Klasing had already taken the books out of print. I have a rule to always get a rights reversion letter when this happens – if you’ve not seen one, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin. It’s a letter that confirms that the publisher of your book is no longer publishing your book, and that they accept that as a consequence of a clause (that shou...

I thought I’d open my account here at Author’s Electric by saying thank you - it’s great to be invited to join the roster – and by giving you a little background on how I came to be dreaming of electric books...  I left home after college with a rucksack, an old SLR camera and a notebook, along with a vague plan to write a book about hitch-hiking around the world. I spent three years on the road but somehow (it’s a long story) got waylaid into a professional sailing career, and all those carefully kept notes and travel diaries quickly fell into the awkward limbo of not being recent enough to be contemporary, while being too recent to be social history. So I started to think about a novel instead... and I had an idea. Action thriller  The Defector grew out of that idea - a game of the Prisoner's Dilemma played for life and death. In 1996 it was finished and first published in the UK by Random House. In the meantime, I'd published the first three of five technical sailing bo...