Authors Electric

Solid books, Krakow style Like most authors of e-books, I also publish in print. Well to be precise, in the case of A Kettle of Fish , I had a publisher for the e-book but published the paperback copy myself using a POD (Print on Demand) publisher Feedaread . My AE colleagues will know all about the different options for going into print so this is just a rough guide for anyone else who is interested in how we get our books - the solid kind - out to our readers.  POD costs more per copy (around £5.70 for me) than asking a local printer to do a print run,  but the advantage is the author needn't fork out the money up front. If you can cope with the fairly basic mechanics of uploading a Word file and cover image to the POD website, the only start-up costs are cover design, usually £200- £300 although there are cheaper options. (And if you have e-published, that part might already be in hand with just some tweaking required for print quality images). Feedaread asks the auth...

Hoglet self-annointing This picture received the most feedback I've always been a little dubious about social media and doubted if it can actually reach the people you need it to reach. Well at the end of last month (Sept 2014) Facebook proved to me that if you put up the right content it can work. Unfortunately the right content I put onto a Facebook page had nothing to do with my writing, but it did prove to me the possible power of social media. So much so that I wanted to share it with you. Anyone who knows me knows I run a not-for-profit hedgehog rescue from my back garden. At the beginning of September I started to care for a litter of four very small hoglets. I've been charting their progress by taking photographs and posting them onto the hedgehogs Facebook page . I uploaded a small album of images showing the hoglets reaction to new food (they started to self-annoint). I didn't think these images were anything different to similar ones I'd put up before....

Cover illo for the 25th Anny edition of The Suiting 8/2013. I had a date with a model last night. I can’t talk about her, but I can tell you this: the road to hell is truly paved with the best dimensions. Then again, years ago, I found the road to heaven’s gate in a cross-country move. Act 1             Time: the middle-Eighties, when we still sent letters.             I set out from San Francisco, where a strayed loin is the quickest way to get from Pant A to Pant B. Destination: New York City, the heart of the publishing action.  I arrived with fire in the belly—and more in need of a fresh start than any hundred writers.              Why? In the previous decade I’d sent out thousands of queries. Though I now had something wild and fresh, a query recognized as mine would call to mind yesterday’s...

There’s been a great deal of discussion lately about how writers, (and publishers), can market their books in the same way as mass-market commercial products, all of it leading to disappointment as inevitably as the purchase of a lottery ticket. Most recently there has been the “sock-puppetry” controversy, the most startling element of which is that major publishers have been revealed to be writing glowing Amazon reviews for their own books under false names; (a) is this really surprising? and (b) is this really what publishers mean when they tell authors that their “marketing skills” are one of the reasons why they can do a better job of publishing than we can? I’m wondering if it would be helpful to put forward an analogy for writing that looks less like the marketing plans of Mr. Heinz, Mr. Coca Cola or Mr. Simon Cowell. Imagine that instead of deciding to write a book you decided to create a garden. You might have visited a few stately gardens, either in the flesh or i...

Reluctantly, I am back to the marketing theme. Recently, my publisher had to close down (much to her regret) and so, with lots of help from her during the transition, I’m now a fully fledged Indie. And one of the first things I noticed when I saw all my books listed in the KDP sales charts was that one of them has regularly been selling over three times more copies than its nearest rival in the list. This could, of course, mean that it’s so brilliant that the rest are dross in comparison. But, until its nomination for the Booker proves me wrong, I know objectively that it’s no better or worse than they are. I should quickly add that I’m not talking of sales levels that would enable me to buy Mustique. But I do like the idea that some hundreds of people are actually reading my stuff. So I need to find out why that particular title is getting the attention and try to deflect some of it onto the others. And to do that I need to understand marketing strategies. But I don’t. Under...

          It’s boom time in the world of self-publishing but in the vast majority of cases the creation of any book is a team effort, not a solitary one, however much some of us might wish to the contrary.           Traditionally writers have recruited valuable team members by persuading an established publishing house to join in the creative endeavour, providing financial backing, editorial, design and marketing assistance all in one package.           If self publishing writers want to gain the support of a similarly experienced team they either have to call in a lot of favours, or they have to hire the necessary editors, designers and publicists themselves. The flaw in the argument there, of course, is that without the “financial” contribution of a publisher, not many writers can afford to do that. The result can then be the badly edited texts ...