Authors Electric

When I first flirted with the idea of publishing, I was told that I needed an online presence - beginning with a blog. Well, that was easy - I'd begun a blog when I first went travelling, not for any literary reason but simply to keep in touch with friends and family at home. So extending that to write about writing wasn't so hard. Then - that wasn't enough. I needed a website. So I set about teaching myself HTML, wrote my own website and, with a click of the mouse, it was live. It's a bit amateur, I know, but I can amend it myself, which feels important to me. ( www.jocarroll.co.uk ) Then - that wasn't enough. I had to be on Twitter. That was where all the fun was, where people could set up a chatty platform and leap from there into promoting books. So I joined Twitter, spent some time getting my head round it, and it was, for a while, fun. Though I've no idea if it sold any books. Then - that wasn't enough. I had join to Facebook. I'd res...

You may not have seen me around much recently. That’s because I’ve been burning the midnight oil, designing and building a new website which has to go online before the 21st of this month. Why the rush? My son changed his old Dreamweaver website to Joomla round about three months ago, and I’d heard him describing it, otherwise I wouldn’t have known Joomla existed. He made this change because Joomla websites are responsive, eg they adjust to fit any size of screen, even mobile phone screens, whereas his old Dreamweaver site was a static one which did not adjust. I made a mental note to look into this because my site was a Dreamweaver one as well. When I have a spare moment, I thought, I might consider this. So, once again, why the rush into this unknown territory of Joomla? The reason, or maybe I should say bombshell, arrived at the beginning of April when I spotted in one of my forums that Google intended to change their algorithms on the 21st April. The new algorithms wou...

I'm on Facebook, lurking in a writers' group, reading a few posts and making the occasional comment. I spot something interesting and I read further. It's a comment by a member of the group I don't know well and it sounds interesting - he makes a valid point and I like the way he says it. His name is Joe Bloggs Author, so I click on it to see who he is.  He has a cat as his header picture at the top of his page. Cute. Or maybe it's a picture of his wife and kids - whatever. We're not friends on Facebook, so if I message him to say hello, what kind of stuff do you write? it won't end up in his main message box and he'll probably never see it. So I click on the ABOUT link to find out a bit more. Hey, he's an author and I have nothing lined up to read next - maybe his book is worth checking out? But ... nothing. No link to Amazon, no link to a website or blog. Not even an email. I could google him, but Joe Bloggs is a common name. I could hunt on ...

Drum roll please... After months of planning, designing, drawing, scanning, you get the picture, my new website is now live. It's been designed to support my two collections of Anansi stories (volume one Amazon UK - Amazon US and volume two Amazon UK - Amazon US ). www.anansi-spider.com   It's aimed at parents, guardians, teachers and after school organisers who wish to share my Anansi stories during story time then enjoy activities based on the stories afterwards. At the moment it contains exclusive FREE to download colouring sheets, finger puppets and puppets based on the many animal characters. Over the next few months I plan to add word searches, cross word puzzles, information sheets, quizzes and craft makes etc.  So please do visit, download and enjoy. If you know anyone who might be interested in some free activities for the kids please do share my website details.    Lynne Garner Visit me on: An Awfully Big Blog Adventure  -...

Does my bum look big on this? And do you really care? How much information do you really need - or want - about an author? When I was much younger, if I'd just finished a really good book, all I really wanted to know was whether the author had written any more, so a list of titles was all I wanted. Sometimes though, reluctant to put the book down, I'd read the bit of bumph about the author found at the front of the book in paperbacks, and on the dustjacket if it was a hardback still in possession of one. Occasionally it offered tantalising little snippets of information: my Narnia books informed me that the young Clive had lived in Belfast (where I was living at the time, instantly making me feel there was a special bond between us) and had decided to write the sort of books which he would have liked to read when he was young. I learned that Gillian Baxter, who wrote some brilliant pony stories, had written - and got published - her first novel when she was fifteen; there'...