Authors Electric

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it! So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I...

I grew up writing fantasy. I say that literally – I wrote my first novel aged 15, and by 18 or so, I was well into a fantasy novel. I remember at about age 10 or 11, finding a paperback of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land on the bookshelf of a family friend; I borrowed it and I was hooked. That and a passage from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in English at primary school gave me a love of everything fantasy and science fiction, and in my teenage years I worked my way through all of Heinlein, Wyndham and most of the Robert Hale yellow-covered hardbacks in the library.  My first short story sale was fantasy. Fairly mainstream fantasy that was ‘normal’ enough for Bella magazine in the early 1990s. Most of my short stories after that ranged from outright horror, through dark fantasy and into science fiction – I have a collection of stories available in Maniac & Other Stories . The lead title story is the one from Bella magazine. It won second prize in their twist ...

There are, apparently, a maximum of only  six degrees of separation  between anyone on the planet and Kevin Bacon – he of the irritating EE adverts:  who says you can’t?  Me, Kevin. I say you can’t. I say it’s enough to put anyone off EE, though the reception in our village is beyond awful anyway. But everybody is connected to everybody. Somehow. However tenuous the link. For instance, I went to school with somebody who was Cliff Richard’s cousin. Allegedly; she wasn’t a close friend so I have no idea if it’s actually true or not. My daughter spent a week sitting opposite Cillian Murphy, aka  Thomas Shelby , as a guest at his wedding. She also had a chat while sheltering from the rain with Suranne Jones, aka  Gentleman Jack . And you’ll hopefully also see her (my daughter, not Suranne Jones) on Netflix next year with  Edward Holcroft  in  The English Game , which would also connect me to author Julian Fellowes, wouldn’t it? My father...

It’s been a long road, this process of converting a novel into an audiobook. So far, it’s taken me over two years to get to this point. Looking back on my AE posts, I started way back in June 2014 , when I met my first narrator. How does one meet a narrator? On ACX – one of the biggest sites/distributors (and yes – you’ve guessed it – part of Amazon. Isn’t everything these days?), it’s a bit like a dating agency. Authors upload samples of scripts and hope to get picked by narrators; narrators upload samples of their work and hope to get picked by authors. Each can search listings of the other, filtered by genre, book type, voice type, gender etc etc. People make approaches and get rejected. Eventually you meet somebody whose voice/story you like the sound/look of, they feel the same way about you and think you can work together. It really is like a dating agency … So way back in 2014, I met Cliff. He was a singer with a great voice and liked my novel, and we signed a contract...

FREE. Something-for-nothing. It’s worth what you pay for it. Cheap-and-cheerful. Race to the bottom. There are lots of opinions about free in the context of free books. Or specifically free ebooks, since free paperbacks don’t make any kind of economic sense; I give away free paperbacks only for review purposes (and very occasionally to friends), since they have a specific unit print cost. But free ebooks cost the author nothing. Except lost revenue, I hear you cry. When I have slaved away over a hot keyboard for many years, why would I want to give away my books for free? How can I make a living, a profit – or just break even – if I’m not earning any money from sales? I used to think the same. More than four years into this self-publishing lark and I was a staunch decrier of free . I’d never given my books away, other than for reviews or as competition prizes or occasional giveaway promotions. I was a firm believer that the readers I wanted to attract were the ones who ...

I blogged about starting out on my audiobook journey  in June 2014. On ACX – Amazon’s audiobook programme which hosts the entire process – I agreed with my narrator that he would deliver the first 15 minutes of my thriller Hamelin’s Child  by the end of July 2014 and the rest of the book by the end of the year. Now “deliver” means to upload the final approved version, after which point we both become bound by the terms of the contract we’ve entered into with ACX. Since my narrator, Marty Smith, is the one doing the work, most of the onus is on me to approve it, and I’m the one who will end up paying a kill-fee at the end of this if I don’t uphold my end of the agreement by approving his work. We cut it fine, with the first 15 minutes uploaded and approved on the last day of July! If we'd missed the deadline, presumably we’d have had to start the contract process again, unless one of us had dropped out at this point. But the reason we were late, was because we’ve both be...

Audiobooks have been around for a long time. I remember listening to them myself on cassette as a child. My own daughter adored (and still has) many books on CD and she used to lie in bed at night and let them talk her to sleep. She always complained that she’d heard the start of one book so many times, she knew it by heart – but she still had no idea how the story ended! More recent developments include audiobook downloads – from Amazon, Apple and doubtless a multitude of other sites. But it’s only in the last month or so that Amazon’s own Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) programme has been opened up to anybody in the UK. For UK-based independent authors, there was firstly the option of ebooks. Many of us then went on to produce paperbacks – either because we had a market for them at conventions and book-signings, or simply because when displayed on Amazon, they make the ebook look cheap! After all, as writers we’ve already invested the time, effort and expense or writing and ...

Book titles either arrive instantly in my head or it takes me forever to tease them out of my subconscious. Sometimes they reflect the actual story; sometimes they suggest a theme or a tone. I’ve used song titles for short stories – The Leaving of Liverpool comes to mind. This was written originally for a competition, the "theme" for which was that stories should have a "strong sense of place", so I wrote about a plot to blow up the Liver Birds and the folk song just seemed to fit (I remember the version done by The Seekers in the 1960s). My YA fantasy Edge of Dreams is about dreaming and how dreams may in fact be other worlds and become just as real as this world. The title for my thriller Hamelin's Child was one of those that arrived fully-formed. This was more of a theme-title, in that the book is about people-trafficking and the sex-trade. I think it's a strong title and it works, especially in context with a book cover that suggests genre. Its ...

In February, it will be two years since I took the plunge into self-publishing, by releasing a collection of previously-print-published short stories onto kindle. It was an experiment – with the concept of epublishing, Amazon’s KDP process and getting to grips with the technical side of formatting and uploading.  Once I’d successfully managed that, I went on and epubbed a thriller and a young adult fantasy novel. Sales have been good – more than I ever expected – and while I do think the kindle bubble has deflated somewhat, there are still opportunities for writers to take control of their careers. Having said that, there hasn’t been a rush of big publishers beating a path to my door and offering me several million for print rights. Not that I expected it – I’ve been on the fringes of the industry for long enough to know how it works. I’ve had big agents and big-6 (or is is 5 now?) editors in the past and I know I can write, but I’m never going to generate sufficient sales f...

I self-published my first thriller Hamelin's Child back in February 2011 - a giant step after many years of "we love it, but we can't sell it" rave rejections from the traditional publishers. Even being long-listed for The Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award didn't seem to make me a marketable proposition.   So I decided to fly solo - but first I needed a cover. My first attempt at cover design was using a lovely graphic by a talented friend of mine that just didn't work as an ebook cover - there wasn't sufficient contrast at the small size you need for amazon and other ebook retailers. But I attracted the attention of a traditional author who introduced me to my current designer JT Lindroos and held my hand through the design process. Thus the cover for Hamelin's Child was born - and I learned a lot in the process. I recently asked JT to design me a cover for the sequel Paying the Piper , which I hope to have out before Christ...