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...

By the time I write my next Authors Electric blog my latest novel “What Lies Around Us” will be out, so at the time of writing I am watching as the publisher, (Red Door) and PR company, (Emma Finnigan), build up a head of steam. The book has started to exist in the on-line world. If you google the title it comes up for sale in any number of different outlets, even though it is not out officially until June 13 th . The cover art pops up at the click of a button and advance copies have gone out to book bloggers, reviewers and all the rest. What Lies Around Us by Andrew Crofts Early reviews have started to appear on Goodreads already, so I am able to start extracting the juiciest phrases for the website, (and below) - and for future use on paperbacks etc. I love this moment in the process when anticipation and optimism are high, before the backlash arrives. Comments on Goodreads “The ultimate summer thriller” “Insights into the p...

As Captain Jack Sparrow says in Pirates of the Caribbean , ‘It’s a funny old world, innit?’ And isn’t it strange how much can change in just a couple of weeks? After all my worries and fears charted in last months’ blog – about readers’ expectation of that tricky second novel, of whether I’d finish everything I needed to in good time for publication day, whether I’d manage to have any sort of launch – everything seemed somehow to come together. Very suddenly. Or, perhaps I should say, just in time, despite my tendency to do everything at the last minute (...like this blog. Less than 12 hours until I’m due to post it. But it has been a busy week – or three.) To backtrack... My second children’s novel,  The King’s Man , was due to be launched on 26th May – a date chosen for one very good, and another less sensible, reason. The former – because it was the Saturday at the start of the UK spring bank holiday weekend, and therefore the school half-term holiday through...