Authors Electric

So far, 100 Aker Wood looks like being the winner. I wonder if Piglet would take a lodger? It may be true that you can always escape into a good book ... but supposing you really could, quite literally get away from it all and go live in the fantasy land of your choice?  I was thinking about this the other day ... Narnia was the first to spring to mind. I like animals, and the idea of being able to chat to them definitely had appeal. Until I remembered that the Talking Animals tend to come across as an elite minority who refer rather snootily to the 'Dumb Beasts' .... some rather unpleasant echoes there put me off that particular destination.  OK, so how about Middle Earth instead then? More particularly the Shire ... like hobbits I enjoy eating, and the idea of all those meals and of listening to Bilbo telling tall tales definitely added to the attraction. But knowing my luck, I'd probably end up with a hole which was constructed below the water table and so was...

I love short stories - bite-size confections, entire books distilled down into tiny, perfectly formed delicious delights ... looking along my shelves I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised to see just how many collections of short stories I have acquired over the years. Plenty of them are anthologies with multiple authors. I first came across this sort of collection while at school, where excerpts and short stories were gathered into text books which were read aloud during a lesson and then discussed. I couldn't bear listening to the stumbling, monotone reading of my classmates so used to stuff my fingers in my ears and race through several more stories while the current one was being murdered. They were good stories too, and I took note of the writers, and looked them up afterwards in the library - and in this way I was introduced to Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Saki and many other authors whose work I love, but might never otherwise have stumbled acros...

Kathleen Jones It's Easter Sunday and if the weather isn't cooperating with the holiday weekend then you're probably curled up in front of your television or computer watching a movie or on the sofa reading a book. Films in particular are a good way of keeping the younger members of the family amused on a rainy day. Everyone knows that films usually have a compelling storyline - particularly children’s films. Not surprising, as they have to keep those itchy little bottoms firmly on a seat in front of the screen. Recently Pixar revealed a few secrets about their formula. It’s a list of 22 rules for storytelling, which you can look at by clicking on this link . One of the items, a plot blue-print,  has become known as The Story Spine, which consists of a number of steps. Once upon a time there was . . . Every day . . . One day . . . Because of that . . . Because of that . . . Until finally . . .  And ever since that day . . . It’s the age-old fairy tale formula, the...

One of the drawbacks of Indie authorship is that you're a one-man (or in my case a one-woman) band. You have to do what would normally involve an office full of people in traditional publishing all on your own. You are author, editor, proof-reader, publisher, printer and publicist. It can be exhausting and is one of the main reasons cited by authors for dropping out of the cyber-publishing sphere. It's also very hard for one person - a minnow in a very large lake - to make much of a splash. So, when Australian author, musician and book designer Jessica Bell came up with the idea of some of us banding together to publish a Box Set of novels, it was the kind of intriguing experiment I couldn't refuse. 3D cover by Jessica Bell There are seven of us.  It might have been more, but some authors decided that they didn't want to commit their work to a group project and risk losing individual sales.  So we became 'The Magnificent Seven'. We're all members ...

          In my previous post 'Self-publishing V's Traditional Publishing' it was highlighted that most of the blog posts on this site are written from the writers point of view.           Well let's be honest they would be, we're all writers. It was suggested that perhaps a blog post about what the eBook revolution has done for the reader might be of interest. So as I'm running behind schedule on my personal book project (so don't have anything to share about that at the moment) and my other possible project I'm not allowed to talk about, I found I didn't have anything to write about. So I decided to put my readers hat on and talk about what the eBook revolution has done for me the reader.           So here goes: One:  It's meant I can download books, often for very little outlay therefore saving me money. Two: I can pack an entir...

Episode Two: The Great Age of Print. I’m currently wearing too many hats, spreading myself too thin and working to a deadline that may well kill me (whoever said hard work doesn’t kill may, I’m starting to think, be wrong) I have 16 books to get through to print/ebook production by 16 th Feb and another 16 by 16th March. Like I said, I’m a bit overworked. And so I came to write my Feb blog thinking  *%%^**& (apologies for the cliché).  But luckily, being brought up on a diet of Blue Peter, I  discovered one I almost made earlier. It is, horror of horrors a ‘first draft’ (not sure blog posts should really have ‘drafts’ but you may well care to differ once you’ve read this! Though I would like to ‘polish’ it or ‘amend’ it or just make it GOOD in some way, (by cutting it to half the length?) I really don’t have time so sorry folks, you’ll just have to mine the nuggets yourself. The title promises much. Can I deliver? I doubt it.  But can I just start by ...

In October 2011 I published my first eBook, Anansi TheTrickster Spider (Volume One) . I quickly (in publishing terms) followed this with Anansi The Trickster Spider (Volume Two) in April 2012. As this was an experiment I decided to check sales on a daily basis, which I've done for the last two years. Now I'm not one for numbers but there are a couple of things I've been able to surmise from these numbers and I wanted to share them with you. One: Neither volume tends sell over the weekend but sales do increase slightly on a Thursday and Friday. Two: I used to use social media especially Twitter on a daily basis as a marketing tool. However during the summer of 2012 I didn't have time to tweet and discovered sales didn't drop. Three: In a bid to boost sales we had a website built ( AnansiSpider ) in the last quarter of 2012. It contains free PDF downloads that are aimed at parents, organisers of after school clubs and educators. Although sales ha...

Watchdogs. As any fule kno, whippets are far more reliable timekeepers than any clock yet devised ...           I've written for horsey and dog magazines for many years now and as well as teaching me (amongst other things) how to write to length, I've also had to meet Deadlines.           I'm pretty good at them actually - and the tighter they are the better. I grumble, but rather than sinking beneath the pressure, I rise like a bird to meet it. I'm used to editors ringing me up and asking for an article on a certain subject and then apologetically saying that they need it in a hurry. I've had a few commissioned books come my way like that too.           No problem: I work best when under pressure.        Admittedly, it has caused a certain amount of domestic friction in the past, when I'...

I don’t usually study the business section in my local newspaper, but a recent report on one of the big publishers, I won’t name any names, caught my eye. What the report said was – the publisher “reported increased operating profits during the final quarter. Despite a 2% year-on-year fall in volume, the publisher said margins had been boosted by the lower relative cost of publishing ebooks in the new digital environment. In turn, the increased proportion of online sales led to a reduced rate of returns.” The report went on to say “ebook sales continued to show increased market share in the UK, growing 58% year-on-year during the four months to the end of December.” Hang on a minute though. I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with various publishers and they all sing to the same tune when you confront them with the lesser costs of digital publishing. Not so, they say. There is no saving. There is still the editing, the proofing, the marketing, and the publicity (what publicity? I think...