Authors Electric

If you want to get ahead, get a hat - I mean, a blog We're all so used to reading and writing blogs now that it's easy to forget that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.  Jane Perrone, writing on The Guardian's blog just 14 years ago , felt the need to explain what they were for the sake of the uninitiated: A weblog is, literally, a "log" of the web - a diary-style site, in which the author (a "blogger") links to other web pages he or she finds interesting using entries posted in reverse chronological order. We Sing, We Dance, We Blog... I'd almost forgotten that blogs used to be called weblogs . When I see that word now, my instinct is to read it as "we blog" rather than "web log", as if it's part of the declension of the verb "to blog". (Iblog, youblog, heblogs, weblog ...) Interesting, too, that Perrone defines the main purpose of a weblog as being to link to other web pages rather than...

Ghosts Electric was the first published anthology I wrote a short story for, and I had my reservations. While I love to read novellas or a two-page story spread in magazines, I never thought it was something I’d be able to successfully master. A collage of promotional images put together by the authors involved with the second anthology I have a short story published in      During my youth, I wrote untold amounts of small stories in notepads and colourfully designed  hardback books and treasured them for many years. But they were just for me. A collection of ideas that one day I hoped would evolve and grow and become a full-length novel. Those stories have never managed to make it out of the dusty drawer – and that’s probably a good thing – but I do finally have the ideas I need to make those novels. And, regardless of age and my state of imagination, the basic premise of writing is that the story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. But, when ...

You don't even have to pack a bag! Though I’m sure most of you will know what I mean by ‘blog tour,’ I’d hate to start my post by making assumptions, so a brief explanation wouldn’t hurt…           Think of an excited author travelling from city to city, bookshop to bookshop, eagerly waiting for readers to bombard them in their droves, desperate for signed copies of said author’s new book. Maybe even have a little conversation too. Well, ditch that image because a blog tour is quite different (although you’ll still have the excitable author).           A blog tour happens via social media – namely blog posts, Facebook and Twitter. Each day of your blog tour a blogger will hold their ‘stop’ on the tour and feature your new release on their blog. It could be a review, author guest post, book extract or giveaway. Or a combination of these things. Usually, the blogger will then share their post ...