Authors Electric

     My book, The Wolf's Footprint, has had quite a history. The Wolf's Footprint, original cover: Parkin It was first written, long ago, as a 300 word picture book text, for a conventional publisher. To be honest, I forget which one, I've worked with so many.      The editor who asked for it was enthusiastic - but picture books are always a hard sell. They're expensive to produce as paper books, and have to be pre-sold to a large market to make them viable. This means producing a book where both story and illustrations appeal to either Europe or the US as well as the UK. In the end, The Wolf's Footprint didn't make it as a picture-book.      Some time later, Hodder asked for a short story that would appeal to young children. So I expanded The Wolf's Footprint, and turned it into a longer story for rather older children. Hodder accepted it, found an artist, and produced a rather attractive book, (see above) with excellent i...

Andrew's cover for 'Christopher Uptake'        One of the problems of self-publishing is: What about the cover?  (As Mark Chisnell was saying only the other day...)      Some writers are talented enough to do their own; or ask past publishers for permission to use the covers from their published editions.      I wasn’t talented enough, and didn’t want to go cap-in-hand to publishers.  Anyway, if I'm honest, I didn’t like many of my old covers.       Luckily, both my brothers are artists, and as my Twitter name is @priceclan, you might guess that I’m all for keeping things in the family.       Let me introduce the older of my brothers, Andrew.  I have eight self-published books on sale so far, and he has done the covers for them all.  So I asked him to tell us about how he learned his art. Andrew at the Price Clan Christmas Do  ...