Authors Electric

What writing magazines do you read? I ask because I’ve had  a cull recently (no, not like the badgers, no guns involved, no rotating goal posts). I found I had several writing magazines lying about in the house unread, and no time to read them, and some of them not as interesting or as useful as I once thought, and so it made sense to reconsider what I look for in a journal and subscribe only to those that give me greatest pleasure. Which has made me think a little deeper about what I like about them, and why, and what I learn from them.             I’m down to three – which feels like an achievement. The number may well creep up again as I come across new ones that inspire me. But my three are: Mslexia – I’ve subscribed to Mslexia since I began writing. Not only because it celebrates women’s writing – though that is what drew me in the first place. But also because it is funny, and informative. It assumes...

          If you're reading this blog, it is reasonable to assume: 1) You're a reader or 2) You're a writer (and the second assumption presumes the first). If you like reading, it is also reasonable to assume you have at least one (almost certainly more than one) favorite author, and if you like reading this blog, it is not outside the realm of possibility that that favorite author is an independent author (if not, might I suggest one or more  of these fine writers ?).            Whether your favorite author is an independent writer or a traditionally published New York Times best-selling author, the relationship you have with that author is symbiotic: authors, insofar as their books are available to the public, cannot exist without someone to read their work, and the reader cannot exist without something to read. The unstated myth for many of us, though...

It was back in April that I wrote a blog post for Author’s Electric  on the process of promotion that I undertook ahead of the publication of my new thriller Powder Burn . By September I had a new short story on the blocks and ready to go; called The Sniper, it’s a prequel about the antagonist in my Janac’s Games thrillers . I had a cover, blurb, and an edited and formatted manuscript. What I did not have was time to do any promotion. Since I could not see how things were going to improve any time soon, I was left with a choice of holding back the book indefinitely, or going ahead and publishing with essentially no promotion or marketing. I chose the latter for three reasons: 1. I’m impatient. 2. I thought it would be interesting to see what happens when you just push a book out on the major ebook websites without any marketing support. 3. My eventual plan for the book is to drop the price to zero and run it as a loss-leader for the Janac’s Games series, and so I ...

Sometimes I feel like I don’t quite belong to the horror writing crowd. Sure, I call my work ‘horror’ because it’s the most convenient label for it (‘Speculative fiction’ is a bit of an umbrella term and does tend to get me looks of slight derision) but ‘horror’ is very broad. Almost too broad, as anyone attempting to compare say, H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James and Dean Koontz against one another might find. Any slasher-movie fans reading my work would probably be quite disappointed - there’s no blood, or guts, or… well, horror , really. So I struggle to define it. Then I came across the term ‘fridge horror’. It’s from the marvellous TV Tropes website , where I can spend hours poring over the often hilarious descriptions of character, plot and genre tropes that can be applied to all stories - written or televised - everywhere. It’s kind of nice. It reminds you that, far from it just being you as an author who keeps coming up with ideas that have already been done, there are no new id...

          Someone once said to me, in that withering kind of way, ‘Oh, Sandra Horn Sandra, you do fall in love!’          He didn’t mean I was serial adulterer, perish the thought, but that I tend to have great passions about various things.          It’s true! Discovering an artist, writer, place, piece of music sets me off on a wild-eyed quest to find out more, revisit, bore the pants off anyone who’ll listen to the latest enthusiastic outpourings – have you HEARD Sans-Saens’ Introduction and rondo capriccioso?           Have you READ Alice Oswald, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, etc. etc.           Have you BEEN TO that church in Dorset with windows by Whistler?           Followed by rant rant rant until my listener’...

     I’ve recently been thinking about what constitutes a series in crime fiction. I started to think about this after describing my Dundee books at the recent launch of Missing Believed Dead , and whether I was right in labelling the three Dundee crime books as The Dundee Crime Series.      You see, in my books the police are not the main characters, they are secondary characters. The main characters are either victims, suspects or perpetrators, and they are completely different in each book. So, because my main characters are different in each book, does that make the books standalone crime fiction rather than a series?      Julie, the main character in Night Watcher , disappears into that space all characters go to when we, the writers, are finished with them. Admittedly she appears in Dead Wood as a distant memory, but she’s not there in the flesh.      Kara, my feisty single mother, who...

This week, my little collection of four short stories was published in eBook form by Hearst Magazines UK. They are one of the few mega magazine publishers not to desert the short story, but to carry on publishing quality short fiction, even when other publications were inexplicably consigning their short stories to the scrap heap. My story The Butterfly Bowl - now in the collection A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture - was first published by them years ago. Excuse the interruption, but The Butterfly Bowl is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read! - Sue Price.      Turns out the form wasn’t dead, but only sleeping. Writers loved it and readers too. (And isn't it wonderful that the Nobel Prize judges have recognised it with Alice Munro's award this year?) Readers especially seem to appreciate the short story in eBook form – long enough to start and finish on a bus or train to work, or last thing at night before sleep. And when beautifully, dens...