Authors Electric

I’ve just released my second Nail Your Novel book. I’ve been promising it for about four years, but finally buckled down, sorted out my scrappy notes and made a plan.  It started as a general book about the craft, drawn from my experiences writing and critiquing. Soon, though, it was so enormous that I had to split it. And then I split it again. Anyway, the first subject that naturally came to mind was characters, and so I’m proud to present Nail Your Novel’s new brother: Bring Characters to Life .  So today I want to talk about characters, but not necessarily the ones in our books. I want to talk about us: the general character of writers. As with all professions, there are predilections and quirks that mean we suit our jobs. But they can also work against us. Writer instinct #1: Passive characters Hands up if you’ve been told off for writing passive main characters. It’s an occupational hazard. Passive main characters are people who run ...

According to a post on Problogger, my Undercover Soundtrack series might doom me to deepest obscurity because of new Google search algorithms. In a post titled Why Blogs that allow Guest Posts Will BePenalised in 2013 , Problogger explains that the term ‘guest’ and the use of multiple links are now likely to make Google bots condemn my content as spam.   In the Undercover Soundtrack, I host writers who use music as part of their creative process ( here’s a recent post that explains ). It’s guests galore.  Don't say 'guest' Problogger says: ‘Stop using the words “guest post,” “guest blog” etc. Oh dear. What other noun do I use to introduce a post that’s not by me? ‘Guest’ is perfect. Like ‘said’ in dialogue, it does its job and doesn’t get in the way. Anything else is absurd. Bad to link And what of the other major SEO clanger, links? They’re not all bad, says Problogger, as there’s a difference between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ links.  Her...

This time last year I sent a tweet that said ‘after so long ghostwriting, this book’s for me’. I was preparing to self-publish my first novel. In the sunny land of tweets, I was keeping up a front of jolly emancipation. Behind the scenes, all was frantic. I’d done a last edit that turned drastic. I was pleased with it but my first advance reader bawled me out for my robust treatment of reincarnation. Although we’re now great friends, this was not reassuring. I had no clue how to market the book, but if I aimed at the wrong readers there’d be hate mail. I was blogging about it here and there, attempting to sketch my multilayered story in a thumbnail. Each time it sounded like a different book. And as for a back cover blurb? I was totally failing to write one that grasped the novel satisfactorily. But flap copy was a detail because I had no front cover. I was designing roughs and hated the way they were going. Even if I was going to use a designer (which in the end I didn’...