Authors Electric

In half an hour you and your family will have to leave your home, probably forever. What are you going to take with you? The good news is you have your car, truck or whatever you normally drive. One vehicle containing your family and the essentials of your life. If you only ride a bike then hitch a lift Oh, I forgot to mention that this is not a holiday. You are fleeing certain death, or worse, at the hands of an evil horde of hungry undead and venomous mutants. The good news is that you and your pals stopped off at the shops on the way home and essential food and drink items are already taken care of. So, I packed all my DIY tools, including the brand new ones I have never used but keep because they will come in handy some day. As Mrs R was busy being a mad scientist out at the laboratory, I was free to load all our clothes into the pickup without having to check what would be suitable for which occasion. My son, being a boy scout, had the forethought to grab our sleeping bags and...

A very brief post from me this month, and a shameless plug for my new release. I have two main interests - writing and karate - and recently found a way to combine them. The novels I have so far punished the world with include an odd mix of drama, tragedy, human failure, sex and violence. It takes me one to two years to complete a book. This year I wanted to try and write something light and fast, giving myself a daily target of at least a thousand words, but I was lacking a subject. While ruminating on a topic for a new writing project, I threw myself into the world of karate which I have inhabited over the past four years. The club I'm a member of has an interesting mix of disciplines - sport karate (fairly traditional but without all the Japanese words), semi-contact sparring with full protective gear, weapons, self-defence, something for everyone who wants to work up a sweat and get rid of some day job aggression. My weapon of choice is the katana or sword. Samurai sword sor...

So, tell me what you want, what you really, really want. As a reader of electric books and the like, what do you really, really want? Why am I asking? Because me and my little publishing house, we give things away. Why would Marble City Publishing do that? To maximise readership for our authors and to reward readers for staying with us. This is nothing new, of course. Mail lists have been a mainstay of marketing ever since Baldrick started pushing Mrs Miggins' pies through letterboxes (ref. Blackadder for non-cognoscenti). Staying in touch with people is essential for a new book release. The virtual cafés of the writing world are abuzz with methods to successfully build a mail list. Independent authors with prodigious output are presenting subscribers with such offerings as starter libraries of free novels. Phrases such as Reader Magnets abound. Online courses are being sold for hundreds of bucks to share the secret sauce of building an author's list. In this mod...