Authors Electric

Happy New Year everyone. My goodness, January has started off well! I just came back from an invigorating run, my juice fast has left me pounds lighter and with a glowing complexion and my royalty statement hit six figures for the first time. Life is perfect!   It’s OK! You can keep reading. I made all that up for a laugh. I broke into a trot last Wednesday when I realised I’d forgotten to put the bins out, but apart from that, life remains much the same. I ate a lot of satsumas over Christmas, but they were accompanied by mince pies and Christmas puddings and selection boxes and suchlike. I’m still waiting for the royalty statement, but I don’t suppose I can retire just yet.   Last year, I took the plunge and booked myself on to a series of events all over the county. At each one, I met lovely people and learned how to dress my table and present my books. Height, interest and texture are all important and so is your pitch. It’s no good sitting glumly behind a stack of untou...

Picture the scene. A middle aged woman sits in her brand new garden studio gazing at a blank laptop screen. It’s 1 st January 2022 and she has just become a full time writer. No more safety nets of extra income, no boss, no pension, no certainties. She is working on her third novel and is in the grip of writer’s block. One of her largest freelance clients has had an internal restructure and has stopped sending her work.   Gentle reader, that woman was me. I am still in said garden studio but I am now surrounded with the trappings of a travelling wordsmith. A new trolley sits under the window with two boxes atop it. I am the proud owner of two large glass bowls full of sweeties, three boxes of assorted merch, a light box, a pile of business cards, an illuminated sign giving potential purchasers payment options, three miniature Christmas trees, several strings of fairy lights and some book stands.   I hadn’t been a full time writer for very long before the chill wind of reali...

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that I became a full time writer on 1 st January this year. It was terrifying and wonderful all at once. The minute I did it, my biggest client had an internal change around and stopped sending me work. “Never fear!” said I, looking for new and creative ways to encourage a few pennies to roll into my account. “I shall diversify!” Ten and a half months since I took my leap, I’ve got a whole new selection of writing services to offer. I critique and polish other writers’ MSs. I give informal one to one workshops on marketing and social media (more formal workshops planned for next year). I have booked myself into craft fairs and events all over Suffolk, beginning in Kesgrave in March where I learned that people don’t necessarily realise that the person selling the books is the one that wrote them and ending with a mini Christmas market in my own village on 17 th December. Since I started, I’ve sold 126 books, added to my following on all t...

It’s rare that I’m ever in both at the same time. Usually I’m in the wrong place at the right time, or very occasionally the reverse. Once, I missed an entire day of appointments because I’d convinced myself it was yesterday. Or tomorrow. I can’t remember which to be honest, but I know I did a lot of apologising! But rarely do the planets align in my favour …   I received an email from a library in North East Manchester a month or so back. Completely out of the blue – would I be interested in running a science-fiction writing workshop?  Well, yes, of course , says I, never one to turn down an opportunity. I mean how hard can it be? I’ve done enough talks and readings and the odd panel about writing; I’m sure I can run a workshop. On science-fiction? OK, I’ve never written much sf – though I grew up in the genre writing world, I’ve always been more of a fantasy writer, but some of my short stories have veered into sf territory and as a teenager, my reading fodder from a...

Nemma Wollenfang, me & David Varley So we’ve all organised something sometime, haven’t we? From big business events to a Macmillan cake sale or coffee morning, I’m sure almost everybody reading this has at some point got off their backsides and thought  hey, why don’t we all … And because nobody  else  will do it, we do it ourselves. And what happens? The event went well, I expect. Maybe people turned up, maybe they didn’t. You probably raised money – you probably spent money. People came, people thanked you, people complained. That’s the thing. That old cliché  You can’t please all of the people all of the time  is so true. There are some people you simply can’t please any of the time and you wonder why they even came if they hate the idea so much. Maybe they have issues of their own, or maybe they just like to think they could do it all better/faster/more efficiently. In which case, why on earth don’t they? So my local writers’ group rece...

Somehow I have got myself involved in organising a writers' event in the real world. This is the kind of thing I never quite mean to do, because I know from experience that there will be a lot of work in it for very little, if any, reward. But on this occasion deciding to organise a writers' event was the lesser of the evils. The original idea someone suggested to me was that I, and another writer who lives locally, should have a stall at the local summer fair and sell our books from it in aid of charity. So I came up with the idea of an actual writers' event as a way of minimising the risk attached to the occasion. At least we will be under cover, protected from the extremes of weather that often occur in Edinburgh in June, and (probably) not surrounded by the smell of burgers cooking on a barbecue, and the unpleasant noise of people complaining. I hate the local summer fair, which takes place every other year in our part of Edinburgh, with such a passion that I am no...