Authors Electric

Real book, real author! We writers spend so much of our time chatting and promoting ourselves online, it's easy to forget there is a real world out there, one of real people and real bookshops. This was very much in my mind a couple of weekends ago when I was up in Scotland for a festival in my home town which was great fun and a marvellous opportunity to connect with friends old and new.  Since I had a few hours 'spare' between checking out of my friendly air bnb and catching my flight home from Edinburgh airport, I thought I should build on my face-to-face experiences with a bit of salesmanship of the door-to-door kind.  In good company in the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey My latest book, In the Blink of an Eye , is set mainly in Fife and Edinburgh, by the way,so  a call to B&M bookshops was on the cards; especially niche outlets where I thought the book would sit well and some of whom I, or publishers Linen Press, had already contacte...

So many reference books ... Those of us who write historical fiction will be well aware that there are various ways of setting about it. There’s no single right or wrong way and the volume of research needed will vary not just according to how well you know the period, how immersed you are in a particular time and place, but will also depend upon the kind of fiction you’re writing, and reader expectations too. One reader’s unacceptable anachronism may well be excused by another reader who is happy to focus on the story rather than the detail. Most writers know their readers, know what they want and I’m not about to argue with that. Personally speaking, I do masses of research. In fact I have to persuade myself to stop, give myself permission to get on with the writing, because there’s a part of me that enjoys the research too much, especially going back to primary sources: letters, contemporary accounts, old documents of the kind where you have to ‘get your eye in’ even to read t...

Ali Bacon's debut novel Well does it? Until recently I hadn’t even considered it.  When A Kettle of Fish was published in late 2012, I already had a healthy online presence. Using my ‘platform’ to sell my wares, I could also call in online favours to shout about my new e-book without spending a penny. But two years on, while reluctant to conjure up images of deceased equines, that’s pretty much what I feel I’m dealing with. Surely my online audience and real-time contacts have by now either bought it or decided against?  Yes, I think it’s time to find a new audience by doing some advertising. Will it pay? Maybe I should have consulted my blogging associates first, but having woken up one day with a sudden desire to go for it, here’s what I’ve done so far. The first thing I considered was a listing with one of the increasing number of e-book marketing services. With these your book is  emailed out to readers who have usually indicated a genre or set of genres th...

120 years ago a new writer ‘burst onto the literary scene. He had, of course, spent the obligatory 10+ years honing his craft before his ‘overnight’ success. Birthplace It was 1894. The height of  the Victorian era and the cult of celebrity was very similar to what it is today. The only difference was the means of dissemination. Instead of ‘social’ media, the popular media of 1894 was the periodical (if you were middle /upper class) and the monthly, weekly or ‘penny dreadful’ magazines  (if you were middle/lower class). The distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘fiction’ was still being thrashed out (in said periodicals and magazines) and genre fiction was pretty much still an ‘out there’ concept. Our man fell foul of this many a time and oft.  Especially with his ‘historical fiction’ writing. There was a split between those of the ‘old’ order who still believed that literature was essentially the province of the ‘educated’ and those of the ‘new’ order who be...