Authors Electric

  Image by  Vinzent Weinbeer  from  Pixabay I’m a great fan of audio books. I’ve been a member of Audible since a month long stay in hospital at the end of 2018 and I’ve had a story on the go ever since. Listening to stories on long car journeys goes back even further. When the boys were small, we borrowed story cassettes from the local library for our trips up and down the A1 visiting family. We were particularly fond of the Diamond Brother books by Anthony Horowitz. Then progressed to his Alex Rider stories (at the same time as we made the technological leap from cassettes to CDs) which made the miles fly by. When my son was home from university at Christmas, we watched series 1 and 2 of the new TV adaptation. I only had a vague recollection of the storyline even though the general plot is the same one I heard years ago. “Can’t you remember that bit?” my now grown-up son asks almost indignantly. He has the advantage that he has also read the books. I am dis...

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 ...