Authors Electric

Andy and I are currently binge-watching Netflix. That’s a strange 21 st  century expression –  binge-watching . Watching a series to excess, gorging ourselves, although to be fair, sometimes it’s only an episode a night and we might even a skip a few nights if we are out and about. We’re season 5 now, of apparently 7 seasons and I have no idea where we are going or what might happen. I generally find American and/or digital series boring. Season 1 is OK, but then season 2 is more of the same and it starts to drag as even the writers look like they’ve run out of ideas and lost interest. Plot-lines are regurgitated, strung out for effect until the viewer (well this viewer anyway) doesn’t really care what happens any more, so long as  something  does. It’s a bit like Brexit, really, isn’t it? But this series has the both of us hooked. Every time things settle down, it kicks off in a new direction and we don’t see it coming. There have been several WTF moments,...

Celebrating the joy of Sherlock Holmes with BBC Radio Gloucestershire earlier this year  (Photo: Dominic Cotter) A great way for authors to build readership and to enamour loyal fans is to write series of books about popular characters and settings. It's much easier to sell stories about familiar heroes and heroines than to persuade readers to try new ones.  As the author of the first in a proposed series of seven Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries , I have naturally been happy to learn of easy marketing tactics to sell series: You can offer the first in the series at a reduced price to get the reader sufficiently hooked to buy the rest at full market price. Even better, if you're marketing ebooks (and most indie authors, like me, will make the bulk of their sales in digital form), you can even offer the first in the series for free, because you have no production costs to cover once you've set up the digital file.   Then there are the prequels you can ...

Writing Children’s Fiction  by Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery  (Bloomsbury) ISBN 978 1 408 15687 2 Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery interviewed by Dennis Hamley When, a few month ago, I was asked to interview Yvonne and Linda for Armadillo, the on-line children's book magazine,  about their new book I was both pleased and slightly daunted. Yvonne and    Linda (herself once an AE blogger) are authors of high achievement and real quality - and also very different.  I knew there would be so much in this book and in the space of an 1800 word interview we were only going to scratch the surface.  However, just three days ago, on Wednesday September 11, Julia Jones wrote a superb review of Writing Children's Fiction on Eclectic Electric and, if you haven't yet seen the book itself but want a good taster before tackling this interview, you can't do better than to turn back to it. Don't go to Writing Children's Fiction thinking it's ...