Authors Electric

Once upon a time, Google told you what was popular. I remember in the mid-to-late 1990s, you could type something into Google and the top however-many hits would appear on the page. You could be reasonably sure that what was at the top was actually the most popular link for that search. Back then I was very involved with the British Fantasy Society and my address was the submissions address for several of the publications.  In 1996 or so, if I googled my name, I’d be most of the first page of hits – either as me personally or me with my BFS-hat on. I even wrote a blog about it 10 years ago! I shared the second page with the Debbie Bennett PR agency and somewhere there was a Debbie Bennett racing car driver, which always struck me as a bit crazy.  Jump forwards 10 years and the entire first page of Google is various pages of the Debbie Bennett Funeral Director’s website. This is a UK company with 3 offices in NW England and it has an almost-identical domain name to me – I’m de...

Excuse the blatant attack of self-promo, but stick with me for a minute… I’m excited to share my debut novel, In the Shadows, is now available in audiobook format on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. When I self-published in March the thought of audiobooks didn’t even occur to me. I guess there’s two reasons for this: one, I’ve always assumed it’s something only “big” publishing houses offer, and two, I don’t use audiobooks myself so they escaped my thought process. Tut tut to me. In the last six months I’ve discovered audiobooks are hugely popular, and a few readers asked if this was available immediately after publishing. There are a multitude of people who want this format – be it for health reasons, because they have long commutes or because they take their dogs for long walks. A friend pointed me in the direction of ACX – an indie publishing tool via Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s a very simple, self-serve website. After I uploaded the necessary details about my book, and a...

So, working on the theory that the more platforms a book appears on, the better its chances of getting noticed, I decided that it was time to create an audio version of my novella, Secrets of the Italian Gardener . (It is already available as a paperback, a hardback and an e-book). As promised in an earlier posting on this site, this is my account of the audio-adventure so far. It all starts with ACX Audible, (easy to Google up). This company is owned by Amazon – like so many good things in the new publishing world. Once on the site you tell them your requirements and put up an extract from the book which actors can use as an audition piece. This is the first stroke of genius. The actors can audition for you without any of the embarrassment of face-to-face rejection – you know the scene; the starving thespian gives their all in an empty theatre to a bored director sitting in the darkened auditorium, only to hear the words, “thank you, we’ll be in touch … next!” I did...

A couple of months ago I blogged about hiring Midas PR to garner a few reviews for my novella, “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”, concluding that the resulting reviews added a few more bricks to the wall of the book’s reputation, but were probably not going to result in many direct sales. The next thought was to use the reviews to convince BookBub that they should feature the book in their recommendations. My publisher – the utterly wonderful Clare Christian at RedDoor – made the approach to BookBub in September, but was turned down. In October she tried again, perseverance being the only weapon we authors and publishers ultimately have in our armoury, and they said okay. If we were willing to drop the price of the book to 99 pence in the UK , $1.50 in Canada and 65 rupees in India they would try it out in those three markets for a few days. For that they would charge US$90. On the first morning of the promotion the Canadian version went up from number 1,...

I blogged about starting out on my audiobook journey  in June 2014. On ACX – Amazon’s audiobook programme which hosts the entire process – I agreed with my narrator that he would deliver the first 15 minutes of my thriller Hamelin’s Child  by the end of July 2014 and the rest of the book by the end of the year. Now “deliver” means to upload the final approved version, after which point we both become bound by the terms of the contract we’ve entered into with ACX. Since my narrator, Marty Smith, is the one doing the work, most of the onus is on me to approve it, and I’m the one who will end up paying a kill-fee at the end of this if I don’t uphold my end of the agreement by approving his work. We cut it fine, with the first 15 minutes uploaded and approved on the last day of July! If we'd missed the deadline, presumably we’d have had to start the contract process again, unless one of us had dropped out at this point. But the reason we were late, was because we’ve both be...

The Salt-Stained Book was my first published novel. When, in 2011,  I saw its words on a page, in type, I felt an unexpected rush of emotion. I'll be honest, I cried. The story itself had come easily -- with conviction and delight -- but it had been a long struggle to get it into print. I love books and once the words were there, fixed and ready to read, it felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. An electronic edition came later and was exciting but less profoundly moving. I'd got used to seeing the physical shape of the words away from my own screen. What I hadn't fully experienced was their sound. Yes, of course I'd read it aloud in my mind as I was working. For a brief couple of terms, many years ago, I had the poet, Charles Tomlinson, as my university tutor. He required every undergraduate essay, however nitpickingly abstruse (or, more likely, naively tendentious), to be read to him in his rather large room from the other side of a grand mahogany t...

Audiobooks have been around for a long time. I remember listening to them myself on cassette as a child. My own daughter adored (and still has) many books on CD and she used to lie in bed at night and let them talk her to sleep. She always complained that she’d heard the start of one book so many times, she knew it by heart – but she still had no idea how the story ended! More recent developments include audiobook downloads – from Amazon, Apple and doubtless a multitude of other sites. But it’s only in the last month or so that Amazon’s own Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) programme has been opened up to anybody in the UK. For UK-based independent authors, there was firstly the option of ebooks. Many of us then went on to produce paperbacks – either because we had a market for them at conventions and book-signings, or simply because when displayed on Amazon, they make the ebook look cheap! After all, as writers we’ve already invested the time, effort and expense or writing and ...