Authors Electric

Over the weekend I took several train journeys and everyone around me had their heads bowed in reverence over their phone. It happens everywhere – on a train, a bus, even in a restaurant. Are they doomscrolling, catching up with social media gossip, maybe reading the news, answering work emails, sending cheeky texts to loved ones, playing a game, or checking their connection is running on time? Of course, they could be reading something more substantial – although reading a novel on a small phone screen is very taxing on the eyes. It’s far easier to read on a Kindle, because that is what it was designed for, but I much prefer a REAL book. In many ways I'm advertising the book in my hand and long for conversations with strangers about my choice of reading material. "Is that any good?" "Have you read their other novels?"  "Such a great storyteller."  "I cried at the end and the story has never left me"  Anecdotally I heard once that erotic ...

I don't usually read one book after another, because I'm a slow reader, and I usually prefer to digest and contemplate one book at a time. However, I am currently emerging from a mini Reading Binge. This has come about because, like a lot of people, I buy far more e-books than I can actually read at that moment, assuming they'd always be there in a period of book famine which rarely happens as I live in a house very amply stocked with real print books. However, I've been doing Early-to-Bed-with-a-Kindle stuff in the last few months of extended convalescence from ankle surgery, and Kindles are so much easier to manage physically, although irritating in other ways. And so it was that I discovered books I'd never read, among them one by friend and fellow author, Adele Geras. I'd first met Adele at a Scattered Authors conference aeons ago, and found her rather terrifyingly impressive, but in all the intervening years, I'd never read her work, until lo! there ...

My desk is an old dining table. It has been with my husband longer than I have. He didn’t acquire it by choice. Years before I met him his mother found it by a skip. She delivered it to Dave ‘in case he’d find it useful’. He didn’t, because he didn’t need two dining tables. So he put it in the box room. Then I moved in. I was a private scribbler, a manic creative. The box room became my study and the table my playground, with a computer and a litter of notes. Short stories, a tinkered-with novel, naive submissions. Gradually commissions happened. My prose left the house as printouts and disks and returned as proofs and then real books. The table and I had become serious. It was not a lovely beast. Not just because of the haloes from hot mugs, the cigarette burns and the grooves from children’s scribbles. I’ve never seen wood that looked so like Formica. I sanded and painted the top, in a paler tone of the smoky lilac on the walls. The table’s legs were neither substantial nor retro spi...

I was recently reading a book by Paul Mckenna entitled I Can Make You Rich . He includes a quote from Sol Kurzner  (billionaire hotelier), which says  "you've got to be totally in love with what you do because you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it." Thankfully I love writing but I'm not a marketer, hence reading Paul McKenna's book. Until reading this book I was trying to sell a product, my eBooks. But apparently I should have been looking at it from a different angle. This being people buy something because of the benefit owning that item has. This got me thinking about my eBooks and why someone would purchase them. My first response was, "well they're to be read by children and adults for entertainment." Although this is true this is not what the book described as a benefit. So I did a little research and discovered there have been many studies into the relationship between fostering the habit of reading in ch...

When I first started writing professionally in the mid 1990's I produced non-fiction features for magazines. I still write non-fiction; in fact I had a title published last year, this being The Greatest Guide To Green Living . Research has therefore always been part of the writing process for me. Although I know the subjects I write about there are always new things to learn. So when researching for non-fiction I know what I need to know and research until I fill that knowledge gap. But when it comes to researching for my fiction I have discovered a weakness. I love researching. I mean, I really enjoy the process of learning new things, getting side tracked and discovering something completely unexpected. Take for example my latest early readers eBook Maras and The Fairy Rings ( Amazon.co.uk - Amazon.com ). I've always been interested in the natural world and had often wondered what produces the dark circles in the grass on our local playing field. Imagine my...

Self publishing for the Kindle is easy – you just follow the instructions in Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing guide and let the Mobi Pocket Creator do the work for you. Trouble is, if you download the Amazon Kindle previewer and test your ebook on it you'll find that clicking one of the buttons gives the worrying result: Missing NCX file Judging by many of the ebooks I read, not all publishers and indie authors realise what this is or that their book would be better if it had one. NCX stands for Navigational Control for XML application and the NCX file creates the little marks called 'nav points' that you sometimes see on the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. If they are there, you can skip backwards and forwards along the bar between nav points using the 5 way controller. Without them, readers can only navigate through the book using the page forward and back keys, the search facility or, if the publisher has provided one, with the interactive table of content...

I've had over 20 books traditionally published, so when I decided earlier this year to self-publish some of my books as eBooks, it came as a bit of a shock and an enjoyable challenge to take on tasks I'd not had to do before. One of these tasks was to design the front covers of my planned eBooks. As with my previous book ( Anansi The Trickster Spider ) I decided to create the cover for 'Maras and the Fairy Rings' using one of my own photographs. This meant I had the exact image I wanted. It also dealt with any copyright issues I might have had if I'd used an image created by another photographer. It also greatly reduced costs. Knowing what I wanted I planned the steps I needed to take. The first was to collect sticks from the back garden, rummage through drawers for a ball of string, cut the sticks to size and create a fairy wand. The trickiest step was creating the star however the wrapping of the string was very therapeutic. The next step was to wait for a day wh...

It’s a funny thing, releasing a novel. You think you’ve made everything up, then someone informs you that it’s not as fictional as you’d hoped. And moreover, you got it wrong. Th e other day I had an email to say that the fusty village where I’d set the action in My Me mories of a Future Life was not spelled Vellonoweth but Vellanoweth. ‘No it’s not,’ I replied, thinking my correspondent had a cheek. ‘I made it up.’ ‘It’s near Penzance,’ he said. Oh dear. It was. I honestly had no idea the place existed. My Vellonoweth, with an o, was inspired by a stand-out surname I spotted in a magazine. It embodied everything I needed for my setting - a fusty, sleepy hell full of dreary people. If I used a real town I couldn’t take it to the stifling depths I needed. But it turns out there is a real Vellanoweth. So I may have some apologisi ng to do. Here it is. 1 I’m sorry I gave you a terrible amateur dramatics society, which was performing a musical they’d written themselves abo...

          Years ago, back in the 1980s, I opened a bookshop. It was in an Essex village - far too small (according to Publisher Association guidelines) to support a general bookshop selling new, non-specialist titles. But that was the village where I liked to do my shopping and it didn't have a bookshop so, if I wanted to buy books at the same time as I shopped for food, china, newspapers, furnishing fabrics, saddlery (yes there were all those shops in the same short high street) someone need to open a bookshop and, as a young mother, I decided that that someone might as well be me.            As well as books my shop sold greeting cards and local artists' paintings: acted as the box office for the operatic society and after a while began to dabble in local interest publishing. I didn't get rich but I didn't go bust either and after about ten years, I was able to sell the shop on to a frie...

Writing teachers in classes and books often claim that there are only five/seven/nine/pick-a-number of unique plots and that everything else is just a variation on a theme. Take West Side Story as a rather famous example of the re-telling of Romeo and Juliet . Dissect these and we have a classic romance in boy meets girl, they fall in love, overcome obstacles and live happily ever after. Except they don’t, of course, which makes the latter one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. But the “happy ending” in both cases is the hope for the future – that the warring Montagues/Capulets and Jets/Sharks will overcome their differences. Retelling old stories is nothing new. Ever since the Bible, we’ve been reinventing different ways of saying the same thing. Even before the written word, we were sitting around campfires listening to stories that had been handed down through generations. Stories that told us who we were, where we’d come from and how to survive. The Brothers Grimm brought us ...

Hello and thank you to the team for inviting me to contribute to the Kindle Authors UK site. My name’s Deborah Durbin and I’m a Kindle Author. In fact I’m also a traditional published author of 11 non-fiction books, ghost writer of three other books and my day job is that of a journalist and columnist for various glossy magazines and national newspapers. I discovered the Kindle almost two years ago when I decided to buy four Kindle readers for Christmas presents for some members of my family and decided to keep one for myself – that particular family member didn’t really deserve it anyway:) and it was shortly after using the Kindle that I received an email from Amazon telling me that I too could publish my words on to Kindle for the world to see. Having had a great deal of success with non-fiction books, I didn’t have quite the same amount of success with my fictional work – I’d manage to get to the part where you secure an agent, but after that, I couldn’t quite get that all elusiv...

One of the things which seems to characterise this whole DIY publishing revolution is the attitude gap between writers and publishers. Mainstream publishers need to be able to all but guarantee the market for a book before they publish it. Entirely sensible. They can't afford to do otherwise. But writers don't. We write something. We publish it. We let the market decide. We can't afford to do otherwise! Which way is best? That's for time and market analysts to tell. In the meantime, I'm just grateful that the whole DIY publishing revolution is here to prove one point: I was right n' they were wrong, ha ha, in yer face etc etc. Some years ago, I wrote a book for 8-12 year olds called "Pants On Fire". I was very pleased with it, but publishers weren't. They said the main character was too unlikeable, and it wouldn't sell. I kept nagging my poor agent to find it a home, because I couldn't understand that point of view. Plenty of books ha...

From the minute I started on this DIY publishing thingummy, I've broken Rule No.1. Well, Rule No.1 according to every self-publishing website I've ever come across, namely: never, ever get your kids to design your covers - if you can't do it yourself, pay a professional. I ignored that advice for two reasons: 1) I'm OK at designs, but I can't do artwork (unless it's stick people, and there are only so many books that'll suit having stick people on the front); 2) I can't possibly afford to hire an artist. No, actually, three reasons: 3) I genuinely worried about doing the jackets, but then I took a walk around Waterstones. Now, I know this is going to sound harsh, but I thought to myself "half these book covers are just identical to other book covers, a lot of them tell me nothing whatsoever about the book, many of them look like the work of five minutes, and if I can't reach a similar standard myself I have no business calling myself a creative ...

Before I begin I'll admit I feel a bit of a fraud as I've still not managed to publish a book on Kindle. This time last month I was all set to launch my new book. However things never go to plan and I am in the process of totally re-structuring the book before it goes to my proofreader. In the middle of restructuring the book I remembered I had two magazines features to write, some one-to-one coaching to do and a front cover to design. Obviously when having a book traditionally published the publisher or packagers take care of cover design. I may get a chance to see a few mock-ups, perhaps ever say which cover I prefer but I've never had to design one. I have taught kitchen and produce design but with cover design I was working outside of my comfort zone. I therefore started where I would suggest my student's start, by researching covers with similar titles. I'll be honest that wasn't much help. They either looked dated, I knew there was no way I could achiev...