Authors Electric

You know that feeling of finding some coins down the back of the sofa? I was clearing out a drawer recently and came across an unused £10 National Book Token from ages ago... so long ago, in fact, that it had expired. "Ah well," I thought, "it was obviously a gift at the time, so easy come easy go..." and then I discovered that you can actually renew one of these tokens if it has expired. So I sent the details online to National Book Tokens, along with a photo of my expired card, and they emailed me a replacement. I could probably have spent this online too, but decided to enter into the spirit of olde-worlde book shopping and buy my gift-book from a local independent bookseller. I also decided it should be non-fiction, and so I chose the wonderful Arcturus Books in Totnes. Turned out I pretty much wanted to buy everything in the shop, but my token (being rather devalued over the 15 years or so it spent in my drawer) would only buy one book. In the end, I allowed th...

  That’s it! I’m done with Zoom. A murrain on it! Bad cess to it! I’ve always had an edgy relationship with it, beginning in lockdown when our choir went online. We had to mute everybody because the time-lag turned the singing into an unpleasing sound-swill, so each of us could only sing at our machines alone. Not a choir by any measure. I gave up on it after one or two sessions because it made me so sad – all those dear faces in some other place I couldn’t reach. It felt like a bereavement.   Worse was to come, with workshops about poetry. Group chats in which I was largely ignored. Looking hard at the image of myself on camera, I began to see why anyone who didn’t know me might have been expecting Nurse, hovering just out of sight, ready to wheel me off to the third bathchair on the right. I know from the mad-looking picture on my City smartcard, taken by a woman sitting down while I was standing up, that the up-the-nose shot really wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence...

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you have an author newsletter? It took me a while to see their usefulness but I’m glad I have now got on board here. I use the free Mailchimp plan which is enough for my needs. I use my monthly newsletter to share news, writing tips I’ve found useful, links to my on-line stories, my blog, plus I will share the odd giveaway (where I’ll put in some of my stories not found elsewhere). I enjoy putting the newsletter together and think this is crucial to the longer term success of such things, no matter how you define success. I don’t define success by subscriber numbers funnily enough. It will be ages before I would have to upgrade to a paid plan on Mailchimp but what is encouraging is in having a consistently good open rate.  I subscribe to author newsletters too. I love finding out what my favourite writers are up to, which was the key reason to finally decide to have a newsletter myself.  If I ha...

What sort of transport is there going to be in your book? How is your hero/heroine going to effect an escape when the odds are stacked against them? There are so many things to consider, and being both believable and original can be a tough call. The genre and the age-group are the most important things to consider at the outset. Children are the easiest, as suspending disbelief comes naturally during play. Adults are a bit harder. I’ve divided things into categories, to make things easier for me as well as everyone else! So I’m taking the UK and the US as standard here, and then I’ll deal with the rest of the world. Many categories overlap, as the entertainment industry has borrowed from a multitude of sources. I’ve excluded transport which is regarded as more of a sport, such as skating, hang-gliding, wind-surfing, scuba-diving, etc., although they may be relevant when you’re trying to find a way of getting someone out of a sticky situation. Ordinary everyday Underground or subwa...

Tomfoolishness and poverty prevented me for too long from having anyone edit my work. After all, I reasoned, what could one do that I couldn't? I went through every page no less than fifty times, then ran the last through Premium ProWriting Aid. I had beta readers too. And I had won a Stoker Award, along with some glowing reviews. But I'd entered the Zone of the Big-Time Boohoo, readier by the day to rant until the cows came home against agents and trad publishing. Or, worse, to  beg hourly on Facebook for more reviews and sales. My work, I believed, had been good enough--but good enough no longer cuts it. Last year I reviewed my quandary in a colder light. I'd been around for decades: first as a horror writer, then as the author of mysteries too quirky and short for the  gatekeepers' taste. And, as an older writer, I may have grown set in my ways--likely more than a few of them bad. I had to reinvent myself, to do something dramatically different. It had to be bigger a...

  Scrolling through my phone this morning I saw the quote that inspired this blog. Not realising it at the time I got up and went to do something else at which point what I wanted to write was fully formed but there was no way I could find the exact quote I wanted to use. So instead of a few pithy words I am ambling through this long introduction, which is a little ironic as I want to write about how the small things in life are the ones that can bring joy. This is especially true when it comes to evaluating success. I don’t make a living out of my writing. I’m not sure if I even cover the costs on some of my books, nor am I well known for what I do. I can’t say therefore if being in the best seller list would make me any happier than I am. Initially I suspect there would be a moment of euphoria, a sense of achievement at having finally been validated by the rest of the world. But how long would that last? In the event, this is a question I will never have to answer. What I do ...

( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/books/publisher-authors-equity.html ) I t's no secret that I am a publisher. And, after seven years as an indie publisher, I am changing my business model to be an author services model. So, you can self-publish, anyone can with some minor computer savvy, but you can also do it with my help. The difference between what I was doing and what I am now doing is that, before, I was an "indie," meaning that I took a book on spec, and did quite a bit of work to create the book in the various formats, and hoped it would sell, and, if it did sell, split the profits with the authors. The authors tended to give me their book, and then waited for it to sell. Now, (if I choose to take a book) I ask for a fee for my services, and the author gets the same services from me, but keeps all the profits, should they occur. This change means two things for the author who wants to work with me: >They must pay for the services I used to do for free and ...