Authors Electric

You might not think there's much connection, but after a fortnight of minding my grandchildren for the Easter holidays, I'm not so sure.  They are 6 and 2, so right in the thick of the target area for children's books and TV programmes.  Early mornings were a hazy memory of Miffy, Peppa Pig, My Little Pony, and Horrid Henry, with occasional excursions into the Dumping Ground and/or the curiously spotty world of Mr Tumble. Evenings were a time for bed-night stories on similar lines. They all seem to have one thing in common, something that makes doing a bit of shopping in the local supermarket a risky enterprise - Merchandising!   When faced with tearful little faces at the check-out, who can resist £1.50 for two my little ponies complete with mirror, comb and hair-dryer (each one no bigger than my finger nail and lost down the car seat within minutes!)? The Horrid Henry books have their own web-shop offering Horrid Henry T-shirts, games, Apps, stickers, toys, p...

Last year, at about this time, I took the exciting Strictly Come Dancing Bowl Of Nibbles Game out from under the bed and blew the dust off its box. So now, in the interests of balance, I've had a rummage in the wardrobe, and now we can all play X-Factor Clock Golf (TM) . Hours of fun for the whole family. The rules are very simple: Play proceeds right to left, except when there's an odd number of players, when the first player to have a go missed is the last player who started. Take a card from the pile and throw the dice twice to determine the order of rounds. Popstar Cards are wild. Watch X-Factor carefully. Score 2 points each time Gary Barlow wears a V-neck pullover without a shirt. Score 5 points each time someone on your sofa says "Nicole who?" Score 5 points each time someone on your sofa says "That Tulisa's really tall, isn't she!" Score a bonus 10 points every time you look at Tulisa and can't rid yourself of an image she w...

A writer, yesterday All jobs have their good points and bad points, and writing is no exception. You just have to learn to live with the frustrations. However, there are some things that, try as I might, I just can't muster the good grace or inner calm to let slide, but about which I can do n-o-t-h-i-n-g... For instance: Brain Donor Book Reviews. I don't mean internet trolls, exactly, I mean stuff that's just plain thoughtless and pointless. We all like, and need (even crave!) people to comment on our work, but not when they say "I loved this book" and then give it one star. 'Cos it's the star people notice. Or when they say how much they hated every word of every sentence, because you gave one of the characters a green jumper on page 139. Or when a middle aged person gets sniffy about a children's book being childish. It's! A! Children's! Book! The worst of it is that these things are indelible. Even if you, very nicely and very pol...

Some punks, deriding mainstream publishing           There's been a lot on TV and radio recently about punk rock. Not sure why, probably some anniversary - the media do love their anniversaries, bless 'em. I was never a punk myself, I was far too weedy and straight-laced, but I can't help feeling a certain nostalgia for an era when anyone could simply shout at a microphone, stick two fingers up at the establishment and call themselves a musician... Hang on...           Does that ring a bell with anyone? Might there be parallels between the punk movement of the 1970s and the self-publishing movement of the, err, what would we be, the '10s? Both were kicked off from an unexpected direction. Both caught on in a way which makes wildfire look like a 20W lightbulb. Both initially had their svengalis and their fringe pundits. Both were looked down upon by the press and the critics, apart ...

Me at a school Talking to classrooms full of schoolkids is part and parcel of being a children's writer these days. I've no idea how this came about - in my day, the very concept of an author coming into school would have seemed bizarre. Anyway, a lot of children's writers visit a lot of classrooms. For me, it's a joy. Truly. I should think 90% or more of visits to schools absolutely make my day, gladden my heart and restore my faith in humanity. School visits make it worthwhile putting up with all the practical, emotional and financial rigours that the jobbing writer endures. As the end of the school year rapidly approaches, here are my personal thoughts on the subject, as distilled from loads and loads of schlepping around the country and trying to hold 10-year-olds spellbound for 45 minutes... It does get easier . When I started going to schools, I wasn't terribly good at the whole keeping-'em-spellbound stuff. Er, OK, to be brutally honest, I bomb...

Meet the future DON'T FORGET THE WORLD BOOK NIGHT GIVEAWAY! SCROLL DOWN!           With World Book Night just behind us, we've all been celebrating the published word in all its glory. But in a few years' time, I reckon, what bricks and mortar bookshops that remain will all be little kiosks: you'll go in, search and order using a touchscreen (which will be swamped by adverts put there in the last dying gasps of the legacy publishing system), then have a coffee while the nice lady behind the counter prints off a paperback on the Espresso Book Machine out the back, or transmits an ebook to your tablet PC. If chains exist at all, they'll be chains of franchises run by the online booksellers.           I think I'm havin' one of me mystic blasts here. I'll stick a tea towel on my head and dangle a couple of shower curtain rings from my ears. Let us gaze into the crystal ball (well, the goldfish ...

Don't you flash your close-ups at me, matey       I wasn't sure what to blog about this month.       After a quick and slightly upsetting look at my sales, I thought I might talk about the unpredictable nature of bookselling. After all, hits always, always come out of the blue. Aside from exhaustive efforts to boost word-of-mouth, and/or saturation media coverage, there's nothing anyone can do, for certain, to sell a title. If there was, the nation's publishers would never have printed an unsuccessful word... [insert raised eyebrow here]...       No, that's a total downer.       I thought maybe I should talk about the way the new Kindle, the little 'un, seems to be taking the mickey with its screensavers. All those close-ups of pens and typewriter keys and printing blocks. It's as if the cheeky whatsit is sitting there saying "ha ha, look at all this old tech, you don't need them...

This is that seven-year project. The cover's done, but the book isn't (a-hem)... Here's a shot of me at Shakespeare's Birthplace. For no reason whatsoever. At the moment, I'm working on a couple of projects, one of which is something I've been trying to get right for about seven years now. Seven. Years. It's getting there. Slowly. In ye olden days I would, by now - a few months off having the manuscript completed - be hopping about nervously trying to get a publisher interested, frantically bugging my poor agent to send the first chapters out to anyone who'll listen, and feeling crushed and heartbroken when phrases like 'not for us' or 'perhaps with some extensive editing' started turning up in emails. But this is not ye olden days. Not only do I not really anticipate a mainstream publisher offering me a contract ever again, pace the current state of the industry, but I'm not sure I'll ever seriously think about tout...

My ebook of sample chapters  Attention all parents! It struck me the other day that there's a simple answer to the constant parental dilemma What Books To Buy To Get The Kids Reading. Sure, you could stick with what's in Sainsbury's, or Waterstones, or the review sections of the Sunday papers, but don't forget that these are all required by law to feature only children's books which have a name you've already heard of on the cover. There's a far better alternative: yes, the good ol' Kindle! Give your kid a Kindle, or download the Kindle app for their iPod or smartphone, and let them loose in the wonderful world of SAMPLES. They can try the first chapters of dozens, hundreds, thousands of books, and all for free. Even the pickiest of readers is certain to find something they like! Since I've had a Kindle, I've definitely widened the range of stuff I read, all because I can download a couple of chapters at the press of a button. N...

Here's a true story. A couple of years ago, it had been arranged for me to do a talk and a signing session at a bookshop situated in the middle of a very large and very busy shopping mall (I can tell this story now 'cos the shop - and indeed the mall - are no longer there). A pretty big deal for me - I'd never done a bookshop signing before. Some classes from nearby schools were going to be bussed in, and the local press would be there. The day of the event dawned after a night in which I was sleepless with excitement. To cut a very long story short, I arrived at the bookshop with seconds to spare (the train was late, and my station-to-shop map was rubbish), and dripping wet (the rain had started belting down seconds after I left home). Holy moley, I thought, what a journey, at least I got here in one piece, and I am at least on time. Phew. I went into the bookshop. Hello, I'm Simon Cheshire. The staff gave me a funny look. Who? Umm... I'm Simon Cheshire? The ...

"WHSmith, why hast thou forsaken me?" There is a truth universally acknowledged: s uccess in the arts has nothing to do with your actual work, or its quality, or how many hours a day you spend networking, but is neatly expressed via the formula Sales =  f + b 2 where 'f' is Your Fame and 'b' is Blind Luck. This is, as I'm sure you know, a law so entrenched it makes gravity look optional. And, of course, it isn't news. There are ancient scrolls discovered in underwater caves beneath jurassic sediment which contain fresher information.  So why bring it up now, and make writers everywhere weep quietly into their el cheapo wine? Because this is the time of year when I always read a number of blogs and articles expressing this truth as if it was some kind of sudden, horrific revelation. I blame Christmas. Writers everywhere watch the bills pile up, and their bank balance empty faster than the Greek economy, and then they switch on Radio 4 as a ...

The freedom we Kindle authors enjoy, simply in terms of content, packaging and so on, is something writers haven't had for many, many years. Not since the 17th and 18th century, when self-publication was common, have us scribblers had such control over our own work. The only reason Virginia Woolf became one of the giants of modernism in the 1920s was because she ran the printing presses and thus could write whatever she darn well liked! (For more on this, see my latest ebook " You've Got To Read This ". There, I'm not too proud for a shamelessly self-serving plug..!) So perhaps it's this feeling of control which makes me such a cat on the proverbial heated metal roof, when it comes to sales figures. Amazon makes it very easy for us to check how a title is selling. Or not selling. A couple of clicks into your account, and there it is: a table setting out every sale this month, so far. They make it too easy. Too tempting. There I am, sitting at the keyboard, get...

One of the things which seems to characterise this whole DIY publishing revolution is the attitude gap between writers and publishers. Mainstream publishers need to be able to all but guarantee the market for a book before they publish it. Entirely sensible. They can't afford to do otherwise. But writers don't. We write something. We publish it. We let the market decide. We can't afford to do otherwise! Which way is best? That's for time and market analysts to tell. In the meantime, I'm just grateful that the whole DIY publishing revolution is here to prove one point: I was right n' they were wrong, ha ha, in yer face etc etc. Some years ago, I wrote a book for 8-12 year olds called "Pants On Fire". I was very pleased with it, but publishers weren't. They said the main character was too unlikeable, and it wouldn't sell. I kept nagging my poor agent to find it a home, because I couldn't understand that point of view. Plenty of books ha...

From the minute I started on this DIY publishing thingummy, I've broken Rule No.1. Well, Rule No.1 according to every self-publishing website I've ever come across, namely: never, ever get your kids to design your covers - if you can't do it yourself, pay a professional. I ignored that advice for two reasons: 1) I'm OK at designs, but I can't do artwork (unless it's stick people, and there are only so many books that'll suit having stick people on the front); 2) I can't possibly afford to hire an artist. No, actually, three reasons: 3) I genuinely worried about doing the jackets, but then I took a walk around Waterstones. Now, I know this is going to sound harsh, but I thought to myself "half these book covers are just identical to other book covers, a lot of them tell me nothing whatsoever about the book, many of them look like the work of five minutes, and if I can't reach a similar standard myself I have no business calling myself a creative ...