Authors Electric

Jamal Edwards, an extremely cool young music and on-line television entrepreneur, who is starring in the dramatisation of my novel, The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride , has just signed with Virgin to produce a digital business title, which will be released in six separate downloadable levels by Virgin Digital. In each level the reader works through a different stage of setting up a business. There are crunch decision points where you have to choose which path you’ll take, which might lead you to success, but might also lead you to ruin.  I’m pretty convinced that Jamal is one of the coolest men on the planet, (apart from anything else, I am reliably informed that his mother is the “Killer Queen” in “We Will Rock You”), and if he is moving into electric books that makes the rest of us equally cool by association. Faber, meanwhile, have designed an eye-catching cover for a new edition of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar and the complaints have started to fly. Literary folk who...

This month the folk at Wattpad turned their attention to promoting “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”, which had been pulling in a few readers on its own but was lagging a long way behind its prequel, (“The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”, which has now had comfortably over 300,000 hits). As well as putting Steffi on their “featured” page, which is pretty much like getting onto the front table at Waterstones, they also suggested we put up a contest, asking Wattpad readers to give one good reason why they would like to become famous overnight, and one good reason why they would not. The contest is running for another couple of months but we have already had several hundred entries, all of which show a commendable grasp on the advantages and disadvantages of instant fame. This month also saw a preview of the finished television pilot for Steffi from Emerald Films, which is going up on the internet in February with all the attendant social media hoo-ha. The film is ...

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...

Since Wattpad is proving to be such a fruitful source of readers, (hits for The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer are now heading towards a quarter of a million after about four months), I am now in the process of putting up a new book, one chapter at a time, (serialisation worked for Dickens after all ...) The Secrets of the Italian Gardener is set inside the palace of a dictator about to be overthrown in the Arab Spring. The story is told by a ghostwriter who, while inside the palace writing a book for the dictator, meets a wise, elderly Italian gardener who gradually unravels the story of who really holds the power and wealth in the world. He literally discovers "where the bodies are buried". As the rebels draw closer to breaching the palace walls the ghostwriter is also struggling with his own breaking heart and an overwhelming burden of guilt. The inspiration for the story comes from the times I have spent during my ghostwriting career amongs...

I have now had my book “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer” up on Wattpad for around three months, so I thought it might be useful to scrutinise the figures. The ultimate aim of any writer is to have their work read and www.wattpad.com allows you to see actual reader numbers, chapter by chapter, (and provides a new addiction just as time consuming for an author as the compulsive checking of the Sunday Times and Amazon bestseller lists). Maggie de Beer is divided into eighteen chapters and more than 150,000 individual chapters have currently been opened by readers. When Wattpad acted as gatekeepers and put the book on the first page of their “Featured” list, (a bit like being on the front table at Waterstones), the total was rising by over 6,000 hits a day, which means that around 250 people were reading a chapter of the book every hour of the day somewhere in the world. After a while the book slipped to page two of their Featured list and the rate of hits instantly h...