Authors Electric

by Sheridan Winn It’s an up and down life, this writing business: feast and famine, highs and lows, and the constant pull between nurturing your creativity and producing what pays the bills. My rights in the Sprite Sister books have been reverted: now there is no Piccadilly Press behind me. I have to navigate my own way. Ahead are the huge, and potentially choppy, waters of digital publishing: few 7-10 year old readers – my market with Sprites – are yet buying e-books. Still, I wouldn’t swap it, this writer’s life, and the freedom of sailing one’s own little boat. My summer has been spent re-editing the first five Sprite Sister titles for publication as e-books for Kindle, along with a second edition of print-on-demand paperbacks. I have found it a relatively restful experience to focus on stories that are already written, and to further refine them. I have also reconnected with the plots – have been able to pick up the thread once again. That itself is useful wi...

by Sheridan Winn ‘What’s it like being a writer?’ ‘Are you disciplined and start at the same time each day?’ ‘Do you listen to music when you write?’ ‘How many words do you write in a day?’ ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ It’s wonderful and awful; no; absolutely not (words have their own rhythm and music interrupts the flow); anything between 50 and 5000; and, I have no idea, they’re just there when I need them, I reply. How does one explain that writing is as excruciating as it is exhilarating? Sometimes, you explain, the words creep along the page, sometimes they tumble out and, sometimes, if you’re really lucky and get ‘in the zone’, they will fly. ‘So what’s your typical day?’ they ask. This is how it often is. 10.00am. Coffee, strong and black, or a large pot of gunpowder and mint tea with some honey; either will guarantee I will need to go to the loo umpteen times in the next hour or so. Necessary preparation Ready to roll...

BITS, BITS, IT’S ALL IN BITS … by Sheridan Winn Here’s the thing. I have a modest body of work – six children’s fantasy titles representing around 325,000 words and several years of my life. Five of these titles have sold over 200,000 hardbacks in Germany, with paperbacks and e-books now following. Fischer Schatzinsel, I love you. These five titles were first published in the UK (thank you, Piccadilly Press) and sales have been satisfactory. I get a lot of readers borrow my books from the libraries and a decent annual fee from Public Lending Right. When the Sprite Sister series launched in 2008, the jackets looked like this:- But this story, The Circle of Power, and the first in the series, has just gone out of print in the UK. Naturally I have asked Piccadilly for the rights back. As The Circle of Power disappeared off the shelves this Spring, I published the sixth title, The Boy With Hawk-like Eyes, as a print-on-demand paperback and as an e-...