Authors Electric

Our guest author for January is Sue Purkiss, whose claim to fame is that she's met Arya Stark! Below, she discusses something that gives a lot of indie authors headaches -- covers! Emily's Surprising Voyage In October, I was invited to a book fair in Corsham, with Sharon Tregenza, Jasbinder Bilal, Chris Vick and others. It was good fun - and it gave me some food for thought. I had a number of books on display. I'm not a particularly prolific author, and I'm a bit of a butterfly - my books are all quite different. I've always seen this as a disadvantage, but on this occasion, it turned out to be be a good thing, because there was something for (almost) everyone: Spook School and two similar funny fantasy stories for younger children; Emily's Surprising Voyage , which is a story set on Brunel's ship the SS Great Britain in the 19th century, beautifully illustrated by James De La Rue; Jack Fortune , which is a middle grade historical nove...

I’m very fond of my book about Alfred the Great (and his daughter, Aethelflaed). There, I’ve admitted it. I always feel a bit guilty when children (or grown-ups, for that matter) ask which of my books is my favourite. As if you shouldn’t have favourites among your books, just as you shouldn’t have favourites among your children. But I think if I did have a favourite, Warrior King would be it. Why? I think it’s partly because I became so very intrigued by the character and achievements of this Dark Age king, who believed so strongly in the value of education and the arts; who had a vision of how to unite his people and make them safe; who, although he was, by all accounts, a sensitive soul who was not always in the best of health, still managed to defeat the Viking leader, Guthrum, against all the odds. And when he had Guthrum at his mercy, instead of simply killing him, he instead had him christened and made him his godson. Interesting, eh? Unlike a certain permatanned recent ...

Do you know that feeling, when you’re going through customs and you’ve done nothing wrong and you’re really not smuggling anything at all, but you meet the steely eye of the official and he very much doesn’t smile back at you, and you know you not only look guilty but you feel it as well? Well, that’s how I feel, having had the temerity to ask for a slot on Authors Electric. Because going by your posts, you’re all hundreds of country miles ahead of me when it comes to ebookery. All I’ve done is put one backlist book up, and it took me well over a year to get that done. But when I’d managed it – in the end, despite all the trepidation, without much trouble at all – I felt such a sense of achievement that I wanted to shout about it! It wasn’t – and isn’t – that I expected to sell many copies. It was that this book, which had meant a great deal to me, was no longer consigned to a great black hole, or to the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ (which Carlos Luiz Zafon has created in The Shadow...