Authors Electric

Terry Pratchett used to work on six large computer monitors mounted in a bank in front of him.  Each one had a different screen - Google, 24 hr news, a couple of books in various stages and anything that interested him and was relevant to his work. He loved that inter-action, being connected to a wider world than his small study. Who needs the internet with a view like this from the window? Other writers find they can only work on a computer not connected to the internet.  Best-selling author Margaret Forster was even more extreme, but not unusual, in not working on a computer at all. Pen and paper are still very much in fashion and there are a number of studies that seem to show that writing by hand is not only beneficial, but can be more creative than tapping a keyboard. I don’t think I’m alone in sometimes finding the relentless white noise of social media a burden.  Publishers expect you to blog and tweet and answer emails pretty sharpish. If you self-publish ...

A year ago I was here, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, very close to Alaska, on the islands of Haida Gwaii.  It was a trip that changed my life.  I was supposed to be studying the mythology of the First Nation people here for a new collection of poems, but I began writing a travel memoir instead and it turned out to be one of the most personal books I've ever written. Totems in abandoned villages, photo courtesy of Go HaidaGwaii I was made to face the realities of the growing environmental crisis, as well as the ‘cultural’ and actual genocide committed by the British Colonial government which was begun in the latter part of the 19th century but carried on through the 20th.  It seems horrific that children were still being taken from their families to have their ‘Indian’ identities stamped out of them as late as the eighties and nineties.  The last of the ‘Residential Schools’ only closed in 1996. What I found was a wild landscape of enormous beauty, fr...

As I write this, it’s minus 2̊ C below and snowing outside.  If you live in the north of England, it’s been a long, soggy winter and it’s been hard not to get depressed.  Particularly as the aftermaths of flood and flu have brought work-in-progress almost to a standstill.  I’d hoped to have my Haida Gwaii book out before Christmas - originally to coincide with the Paris Climate Change conference [COP21] - without realising that Nature had other ideas. But this week the book is finally complete, with illustrations, fancy chapter headings and inter-active reference notes, all put together by my in-house book designer and editor at The Book Mill , Neil Ferber.  There have been a few hiccups - having an editor who is also a life partner can be tricky at times!  Suddenly realising that you’ve got to alter chapter 3 at the very last minute because you’d forgotten something doesn’t go down well. And it can be a delicate matter communicating the fact that you don’t...

It isn't just politicians and celebrities who have to think about their image - if you're publishing a book you have to be very conscious of the way it's going to be marketed.  Your cover, front and back - the design and the blurb - are the advertisement for the content and it has to be exactly right, otherwise the reader will feel cheated. My latest book is a travel journal; part memoir, part social history, part adventure - an absolute nightmare to pin down. Finding a cover has been very difficult.  Poor Neil, my designer, has been dragged from photo-shop to photo-shop, figuratively speaking, in an effort to realize the vague image that I had in my mind. Several early sketches were rejected by a daughter in publishing sales, who thought it looked too like a novel. 'The cover has to say what the book's about,' she said sternly.  So I gave Neil another brief and some images of what's in the book and he came up with two covers that I put up on Facebook for...