Authors Electric

Image Credits:-   Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. One photo from The Writers’ Summer School was taken by me, Allison Symes. Another two were kindly taken by Penny Blackburn at two Open Prose Mic Nights at Swanwick and used with permission. Book cover image is from Bridge House Publishing. AI images avoided. When this post goes live on 18th June 2026, my third flash fiction collection, Seeing The Other Side , should have been published by Bridge House Publishing  via their imprint, Chapeltown Books . The book has been a long time in coming and it is a joy to see it out there.  I’ve long thought what a pity it is you can’t bottle the feeling you have when your book comes out to draw on for encouragement and inspiration during the tougher times of the writing life. I’m busy preparing for launches. The book will have a physical launch, so to speak, at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick in Derbyshire in August. It has been a recent development for th...

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to post, or even dedicate much time to writing. IT issues, both parents ending up in hospital at different times and needing help, coupled with increased work pressures mean I’ve barely written anything for the last six months. Things are settling, though, finally. Parents on the mend, work settled, and have a new laptop all configured with backups restored at last; I got the last few pieces sorted out over the Easter weekend and can now return to scratching that itch I get when I don’t write for a while. On the plus side, I’ve got a notebook full of random jottings I’ve managed to get on paper, and feel sure there’ll be something in there I can use in future work. I’ve not been completely dormant, though. I’m around 10k words from revising the third draft of my Young Adult adventure set in the Middle East. (As a wee side note, my wife has pointed out that my timing is impeccable – I was gearing up to launch a dystopian YA adventure set a few ...

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you have an author newsletter? It took me a while to see their usefulness but I’m glad I have now got on board here. I use the free Mailchimp plan which is enough for my needs. I use my monthly newsletter to share news, writing tips I’ve found useful, links to my on-line stories, my blog, plus I will share the odd giveaway (where I’ll put in some of my stories not found elsewhere). I enjoy putting the newsletter together and think this is crucial to the longer term success of such things, no matter how you define success. I don’t define success by subscriber numbers funnily enough. It will be ages before I would have to upgrade to a paid plan on Mailchimp but what is encouraging is in having a consistently good open rate.  I subscribe to author newsletters too. I love finding out what my favourite writers are up to, which was the key reason to finally decide to have a newsletter myself.  If I ha...

  Yesterday my second full length novel was finally published. It has been a busy and exciting time in the run-up. The writing of the book was finished a long time ago - I long for those days! Now I am in the throes of the far less appealing marketing stage. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could just spend all our time writing, and not worry about getting our books sold and read? Sadly, that is not the way of things. My first book came out during lockdown. I was vaguely aware at the time of something called a book tour – where authors travel from place to place and talk to enthusiastic gatherings about their new release. I was frankly grateful that Covid just made all that getting out there impossible. But how to get my book talked about, seen, bought even? I was fortunate enough to be a part of a writers group who introduced me to the idea of a blog tour. This simple idea relies on recruiting bloggers and book reviewers who are willing to read and review your book on their blogs. I...

  Oh, They have a long list of reasons why the book that's your baby belongs in the casket they've already made. It's too short/long/purple/plain/commercial/literary/off-the-wall/common...or to put it simply: I've spent the past year on a project that had Too-Too all over it before I'd even started. And yet I continued with some trepidation. But, as I continued, I grew more defiant. I also grew more confident that there was a market for my project: seven radical renditions of poems by one lesser-known Roman poet--'inspired-by covers ' instead of conventional translations. I envisioned a book totaling maybe 50 pages, including commentaries that I hoped would be half of the fun. Since nothing like this book exists, it might have a fighting chance if I remembered E. Lynne Harris.   Harris was a bisexual black author who self-published this first book in 1991. Like other authors in those pre-Web days, Harris drove around in a car loaded with copies. But unlike o...

Completed projects often leave me with an enormous void. With writing books, I have found out, it is different.  This time, no dark black hole... I was saved by the M-word. Yep, marketing. I had already started on social media. Now I am working on my prequel to give away as a present when people subscribe to my newsletter. What are your thoughts on that? I like doing the prequel because the questions in the book are things I have often asked myself. How did Wilma land on the tulip fields? How did she survive. I mean she weighed 99 grams when we found her, that is not an awful lot. Or, maybe she was a wild cat and we took her in... I love this part of writing, the 'what if stage'. But then I wake up and realise I need to sign up to mailerlite (tick); transfer my website to another platform - preferably one that is easy to work (tick and loving it, just need to create about 500 thumbnails for the images); get a customised email address (tick), and another day has gone...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Girl-Susan-Price/dp/B08F6RYHJF/ My brothers put me on to Pinterest which, being artists and hooked on visuals, they are scrolling all the time. You probably know it yourself:- a website where people 'pin' images on 'pin-boards'. Some people keep their pins private, their principle purpose being to keep ideas for their kitchen refit or garden make-over in one easily accessible place. But others pin images connected to their hobby, or favourite place or interest, whether that's cooking, classic cars, scuba-diving or whatever and make them public. It's a pictorial blog. Creative types use it to share their latest art-work and writers set up boards for each of their books. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1532756879 A visual image is much more compelling than words, whether written or spoken. Sorry, writers, but it's true. I suppose that's why we try so hard to create a vivid visual image with words. If you want to remember a ...