Authors Electric

This month I've gone retro. I’ve been playing with print. Yes, I know that on this blog we are brilliantly electric. But it’s a year since I released my novel, My Memories of a Future Life , and I thought I'd celebrate. On a whim, I created a special, limited print edition of the book to be given away as a prize. It wasn’t premeditated. As with most of my ideas, it was a side-effect of something more purposeful. As part of the anniversary celebration I ran a twist on my blog series TheUndercover Soundtrack . Usually, authors write about using music in their creative process, but I flipped the concept and hosted two musicians who make work inspired by novels ( here and here ). So there I was, footling with PagePlus, creating an adapted logo. I swiped the cursor over a thumbnail of the Future Life cover and it flashed into negative, like a premonition. The blood piano and ethereal sky became copper-green and thunder. In a book that looks at reincarnation the wrong ...

Cover Design by Rob Tysall   Fear. Fear. A fanatical devotion to the.... no, fear again. I'm not a complete e-publishing newbie. Last November, the Coventry Writers' group, to which I belong, ventured into e-publishing with our Coventry Tales . It was a rewarding and educational experience and the sales, while not amazing, have not been bad. Nor am I a stranger to conventional publishing (or whatever it's OK to call it now... I can never remember). I've had two books for adults and one for YA published that way and I have another series commissioned, this time for younger readers. So I'm not a complete beginner, though I'm relatively inexperienced in comparison with many of  my esteemed co-contributors on this blog (I'm learning lots from them). And I now have a book ready for e-release. Well, almost ready. It's been revised to within a jot and tittle of its life. It's been edited and proofed. I've hired a professional designer and pho...

Cover art by Matt Zanetti  You know that question somebody always asks you, sooner or later, when you're a writer?  The one that makes you want to shriek and run away instead of smiling politely, which is what you always do? The 'where do you get your ideas from?' question. Because let's face it, ideas are almost never the problem. Time, personal space, money, application and luck may be problems. But not ideas. Well, this is an attempt to answer that - but only about one particular project. Because in the case of  my new novel, Bird of Passage , now available on Kindle, even I'm not sure where I got my ideas from! This book  has been a very long time in the writing - probably the longest of anything I've ever written, if you count the time from the smallest germ of an idea to the finished book. In fact, I can remember that first little bit  of inspiration. When I was twelve years old, we moved from Leeds to the West o...