Authors Electric

Most writers realise reviews help sell books. Grief even the courses I teach via WOW have reviews attached to them (and before you ask they are real reviews written by real students). To demonstrate what I mean I pulled a few books from my shelf and discovered many had a review or two on the back cover: The Writers' and Artists' Year Book (a little dated 2010) The Writer's Handbook (again a little dated 2010) The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler The Penguin Guide to Punctuation How to Write a Children's Picture Book Volume 1: Structure by Eve Heidi Bine-Stock So what options do you as an author have for obtaining these reviews? Well you could follow the route traditional publishers have used for decades by sending out review copies and keeping fingers crossed the book is reviewed. You could perhaps offer a give-away as I did via Amazon with my children's picture eBook 'Clever Rabbit....

An earthquake sounds like a jumbo jet landing on the roof. An immense, relentless assault of noise - rattling, rumbling, shivering, cracking, quivering. In the walls, the ceiling, the windows and the ground. It goes on for ever and when it stops the stillness is thick as rock. It was 9 in the morning. We were a group of friends from seismically solid England spending a week in a Palladian villa in Vicenza. Our expectations for the day were nothing more challenging than agreeing which old towns to explore or where to have lunch. But now we were dashing out of our bedrooms and bathrooms, all calling out the same - obvious - question. Was that what I thought it was? Is everyone all right? We had no internet access, no way of pinging the outside world to check. As if it wasn’t clear anyway, for above our heads the heavy iron chandeliers were swinging. All of them, in every room, beat in slow, wide arcs. It took twenty minutes for them to stop. Gradually we got on with our day. In...

I had to be dragged to Twitter by the scruff of my tail. I had a blog - wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t Twitter just a means of wasting time?  I soon saw it was a fantastic move. A couple of days in, my blog visits trebled. If your blog is like your writing salon, until you’re on a network like Twitter you’re talking at a closed door. And blogging aside, Twitter is a terrific tool in its own right. Half your job as a writer is making contacts; on Twitter you can do that without ever going to a meeting, a group or a launch.  So those are the professional platforming reasons to tweet. But Twitter is not a pitching party or a careers fair. It’s not your blog. No one has to follow you, read your tweets or pass on your news. Although you can bumble up uninvited, it’s as easy to buzz people off as it is to make friends.  Here are some things I learned along the way. 1 The 80:20 rule - What do you tweet? Obviously you want to draw attention to your posts or books, ...

The bird that almost didn't fly. You can't get editorial help from a committee or, worse, a multitude. Well - you can - but it stands a good chance of turning your work into a camel. (I know, I know, camels are pretty efficient beasts in their way - but only in certain circumstances.) Some years ago, when I was despairing of finding a publisher for my next undoubtedly mid-list and cross-genre novel, I decided that I would blog it, a chapter at a time. If you want to read it, it's called Bird of Passage and you can find the whole novel, properly published on Amazon Kindle, here if you're in the UK and here if you're in the USA. But definitely not on any blog.          Even then, I was an experienced and well published/produced writer with a good track record. And although I'm always very happy indeed to talk about my writing, what inspires it, how I feel about it, how I work, and so on, I made it clear that I didn't want detailed editorial f...

This is my first post for Authors Electric and I’m really delighted to be part of such an enterprising and exciting group of writers. Writing can be such a solitary path and it feels good to be part of a wider, collaborative endeavour. So how did I get here? How did I become a writer? And more to the point perhaps, a writer who is now e – publishing? My first Kindle publication By way of introduction, I often describe myself as ‘ a writer on the run after twenty five years in prison .’ As you can imagine that raises a fair few eyebrows. Friends often caution against it, saying but people will think you’ve been in prison. Well , I say, they’d be right . I spent the best part of my working life at HMP Low Newton, a women’s prison on the outskirts of Durham City UK, where I worked in varying capacities from teacher to senior manager. I initially took the job on a temporary basis. I didn’t mean to stay that long but somehow the place, or more accurately the women, just grew on me. It ...