Authors Electric

"I know. Just what we need; another Christmas story," I joked to my cousin, Broadway satirist, lyricist and playwright Gerard Alessandrini on the phone the other day about my latest holiday offerings. "You can never have too many Christmas stories," he reassured me. Good ones that is, but you can't have the best without putting up with some of the worst. Christmas and the holidays take a beating every year as we endeavour to survive being inundated with canned mercantile sentimentality.  Cousin Gerard, like my four grown daughters, however, keeps his eyes on the brightest ornaments on the tree--   albeit with tongue planted in cheek. Gerard and I grew in an extended family that celebrated the holidays as joyfully as circumstances would allow. Our festivities included transcontinental reunions and week-long Italian feasts-- that included Christmas Eve crab cioppino in San Francisco and Maine lobster in Boston in days gone by. The feasting is more fictional thes...

The fifth anniversary of the ‘worst day in the worst week of my life’ is rapidly approaching. Next month’s blog will be posted the day after the anniversary, but because I prefer not to mark the date itself, I thought I would write about it now instead. Some sort of advance catharsis perhaps, so by the day itself I can be a little further on the way to ‘moving on’. Moving on is a process that has been accelerating over the past three to four years, thankfully, so now it’s relatively rare that I think, let alone speak, about it all. For the first couple of years my conversation, particularly with my immediate family, but also with good friends, was liberally punctuated with the acronyms BF and AF – ‘before the fire’ and ‘after the fire’. Kolo the Cat in happier times Yes, I’ve lived a pretty charmed life so far. This ‘worst day/week of my life’ was caused by just a fire. A housefire in which no one died or was badly hurt – not even our cat, who was caught up in the suffocating...

Doug Mildew Mr Adams! Come in, Mr Adams! Rick! Ricardo! Or how about, “the Richmeister”! ’Cos that’s what this book is gonna make you, my friend. Y’know, rich? Ah. Okay. You get it. You writers never miss a trick. Ritchie, have a cigar. Or maybe you’d prefer a carrot? Ha ha, just kidding. No, the other box. Those ones are kind of… mine. What can I say? You came to my rescue. “Animal stories!” I hear the market scream. “Won’t someone give us animal stories?!” And then along hops you , with your wonderful, genius, delightful, um, piece of… ah, here it is – ‘Watership Down’. And what do I find? It’s just busting with rabbits at the seams! You know what you are, Mr Richard Adams? A saviour. An honest-to-mercy lucky rabbit’s foot saviour. Because kids love bunnies, don’t they? Boy, do they love the cute fluffy bunnies. And you’ve got floppy ears coming out your… ears. I’ve got just one or two comments. Firstly. It’s a teensy bit long. You know, for this reading age gr...

In previous posts I have talked about how I've tried to increase my eBook sales by following the steps in an eBook called How To Make A Killing On Kindle . Reading this book prompted me to look for other tools Amazon provide. I'd noticed readers could add images below a books front cover. Unfortunately because the 'look inside' button only brings up the copyright info for my picture books potential customers are unable to view any of the pages. I therefore decided it might be a good idea to use this facility. So I signed in, found The Best Rabbit  and clicked on 'share your own customer images.' Followed the simple instructions and added three images from the book. Now, when a potential buyer finds this picture eBook they see additional images under the cover. If interested they simply click on the thumbnail and a larger image comes up.    Amazon has also given the facility to allow text to be added. So when a potential buyer hovers over the...

I am currently writing my seventh Sprite Sister title. Here are some of the things I’ve learned about writing a series for children. One chance to make a first impression Your series stands or falls on the strength of your first book. It’s your starting point and everything comes back to that. It defines the characters and their world, and sets up an expectation of what is to come. You have to get it right. If your readers don’t like it, they won’t bother with the second story.  A series relies on the strength of its characters It’s the characters you come back to. What’s going to happen to them next? They are your friends: enjoy them and listen to them. Their voices become familiar. You know what they will say and how they will react, but, like your friends, your characters are not static. They need to grow through the challenges you have set them – and you need to move with them. Continuity Between 2007-2009, I wrote five Sprite ...

A writer, yesterday All jobs have their good points and bad points, and writing is no exception. You just have to learn to live with the frustrations. However, there are some things that, try as I might, I just can't muster the good grace or inner calm to let slide, but about which I can do n-o-t-h-i-n-g... For instance: Brain Donor Book Reviews. I don't mean internet trolls, exactly, I mean stuff that's just plain thoughtless and pointless. We all like, and need (even crave!) people to comment on our work, but not when they say "I loved this book" and then give it one star. 'Cos it's the star people notice. Or when they say how much they hated every word of every sentence, because you gave one of the characters a green jumper on page 139. Or when a middle aged person gets sniffy about a children's book being childish. It's! A! Children's! Book! The worst of it is that these things are indelible. Even if you, very nicely and very pol...

A word from our founder today. Our usual blogger, Rosalie Warren , has suffered a family bereavement, and can't post today.  So, instead, here's Authors Electric's onlie begetter, Katherine Roberts ... Those of you who have been with this blog from its early days might remember me… later comers to the party won’t, because I’ve relinquished the reins since then and others have very ably taken them up to ride the electric horse onwards across pastures new. But I thought this might be a good time to explain why I am still with you in e-spirit, if not in e-body. Originally, Susan Price and I set this place up as a joint blog to promote our backlists, which we were both in the process of converting to Kindle to rescue our out-of-print work from oblivion. A few others in our Scattered Authors group for children’s books were doing the same, but there weren’t very many of us. So we made an important early decision to open the blog up to adult authors with Kindle projects –...