Authors Electric

Last month, The Physic Garden was on a sudden and unexpected - by me, anyway - Kindle Daily Deal in the UK. There’s no point in asking me how it happened because the short answer is, I don't know. The book in question is drastically reduced in price for a single 24 hour period from midnight to midnight. And the books are chosen by Amazon. Let me say right away that I was delighted. I gather some people aren’t when it happens to their books, but you can’t please everyone all the time. I subscribe to the Daily Deal newsletter myself, and I buy a lot of ebooks from the site. The Physic Garden was published in paperback and ebook form, by the excellent Saraband about a year ago. Sales have been steady but not astronomical. Reviews have been good, but not all of them glowing. It’s the kind of novel, I suspect, that you either love to bits or don’t really get at all. It got picked by the Sunday Times for one of their historical novel choices last spring which was very cheering. A...

Cover image, courtesy of Glasgow Museums I wrote this piece for a local (Glasgow) writers’ newsletter, but since I know a great many people who enjoy reading and writing historical fiction, including bloggers and visitors to Authors Electric, it seems worth while reblogging here, with a few tweaks and additions, especially since I’ve just agreed to tackle historical fiction for this year’s eBook festival. I’ve always written a mixture of historical and contemporary fiction and plays. My first degree, from Edinburgh University, was in Mediaeval Studies and then I went on to do a Masters in something called Folk Life Studies, essentially a form of social history. I still love research of all kinds and that can be a curse as well as a blessing for an author. You have to know when to stop. But you also have to know when you need to know more and you have to learn to ‘give yourself permission’ to fictionalise something that may well be an unwieldy collection of miscellaneous facts spi...