Authors Electric

I’ve got my grumpy head on this month as I lament the lost art of communicating. Or rather the fact that with so many different methods of communication available it is so often impossible to speak to a real person and resolve a simple issue. great image from an article about bad communication! https://wiselancer.net/lack-of-communication-and-improvement/   Let’s rewind, my story started last week when I made an offer to drive a friend to a seaside town, over an hour away so she could visit her son. The car park we found uses an app to make payments, no coins or simple tap of a card here, that would be far too easy. I downloaded the app successfully but we figured out we would take a proper look on our way out when we knew how long in hours and minutes we had actually stayed. After all there was no indication when the transaction had to happen. In fact, the signage was extremely vague with no step by step guide. Before we left I entered all the details of our stay and tr...

Don't panic, I'm not author David Wailing's auto... so far autos haven't been invented (or so he assures me), which is probably just as well because I'd be a rather scatter-brained one. However, I'm delighted to bring you this interview with the man himself, author of the fascinating  Auto series of books set in London in 2022, when everyone has a digital personal assistant app known as an auto that handles all their online business and social activities... you know you want one! David Wailing (not an auto) Hello David, thank you for joining us today. H ow many books have you written/published? And which is your favourite to date? DW: In total I’ve written nine novels, not counting a few that were started then abandoned. But only five of them have been published as eBooks. The others remain safely incarcerated in the attic like deranged family members we prefer not to discuss. As for my favourite, right now I think the book I haven’t started wri...

In between bouts of editing the Sterkarms, I've been having a look at Kindle Kids' Book Creator. I'm interested because I'm hoping to publish some picture books, with my brothers as illustrators. Brother Adam's chapati chasing tiger So, what does the Kindle Kids' Book Creator offer? It allows you to import art work in jpeg, tif or png format (it says here. The only one of them I know anything about is jpeg.) It recommends, however, that you save your book as 'a multi-paged PDF file,' with the cover included as the first page, and upload it like that - which is what my brothers and I will be doing. The part that really interests me, though, is the 'text pop-ups.' Since the text will probably be embedded in the art-work, and might be viewed on the small screen of a mobile phone, it will be quite hard to read. Kindle Kids allows you to programme in a 'text Brother Andrew's goat-bothering troll pop-up'  - ...

A few of years ago I wrote two picture book stories 'Where It's Always Winter' and 'The Perfect Christmas Tree.' As the titles suggest they both have a festive or seasonal link. Once I'd completed them I sent to various publishers who I believed (because I'd researched their previously published titles) might be interested in them. Again and again they were rejected, which is something you sort of get used to as a professional writer. However a couple of the publishers didn't send me the standard rejection letter. They told me they'd enjoyed the stories but were withdrawing from seasonal books so weren't in a position to take. This is where my journey into becoming a publisher started. MadMoment Media Ltd was set up and with a very limited budget we had these two picture stories (plus a few others I'd received good feedback on) into apps for the iPhone and iPad. This meant a steep learning curve and a fair few hours spent i...

Telling stories round the fire, out in the wilderness, holding back the night ... That's pretty much where it all started, I guess, at the beginning of the human era. And one of the great joys of childhood is still being told a story. Being read to. The theatre company, White Rabbit , tries to recreate that joy for grownups. In an evening performance called Are You Sitting Comfortably? the actors (Bernadette Russell and Gareth Brierley) read aloud stories written by local writers, on a set theme, in a tea party setting. (This was in the Byre Theatre in St Andrews but they go all over.) I loved what Gareth did with my story! It needed to be read by a male voice, but Gareth does a crooked smile like no one on earth, and he just lit the tale up. It was an exhilarating, slightly atavistic evening. At the end each writer was given a booklet of their story, tied up with red ribbon - AND an invitation to submit their tale to Ether Books to be made into an app. So "Dissident...

At present, the UK riots are still uppermost in my mind. So many of them happened in my city, and they started off in what's just down the road and around a few corners from us - Tottenham. And oh, the rubbish they stole... TVs? phones? jeans? trainers? And for junk like that they destroyed people's livelihoods and homes? This materialistic, vacuous and celebrity-focussed culture has a hell of a lot to answer for. It must change. It has to. The emotional deprivation was real - most notably the absence of any family or community involvement. Illiteracy seems to have played a major part too - the statistics are horrifying. This morning I received the Arabic editions of two of the little books I did with Franklin Watts some time ago. It was unexpected, and I was thrilled. My much longer books have been translated into German, Japanese and Danish, but seeing these short illustrated books in Arabic was quite fascinating. They're quite rude and funny stories, too. Collectively,...