Authors Electric

Anyone who’s ever chosen a book will be aware of the importance of the cover design and the sales text – otherwise known as blurb. In the indie-book-world where the author takes responsibility for the entire publishing process, the blurb is unlikely to raise the stress level. After all, it’s just words, innit? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has thought that they could do a better job of the blurb on the back of their traditionally published books... well, now I get to try. But the covers? That’s a whole other ball game. The cover of a book is its first and most important sales tool – it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a shop or on an Amazon webpage, a book has to have an eye-catching cover to draw people to ALL the rest of the sales tools – blurb, reviews, chart position... And while I don’t want to state the blindingly obvious, covers don’t have much to do with words, they are visual beasts, with graphics, pictures and logos – and many writers are not comfortable i...

VIRTUAL READERS? Pauline Fisk says I think not I blogged the other month about the ups and downs of being a virtual author. At the time of writing, I had my first e-publication day in mind but now it’s readers I’m worrying about. Anything that creates a barrier between the books we authors write and the people out there reading them is a bad thing. Too often, whilst visiting schools, I’ve found children amazed to discover that an author like me is made of flesh and blood. But how much less real will I seem now that I’m a virtual writer? And with no physical books for them to buy, or bookshops for them to buy in, aren‘t I in danger of thinking of my readers as virtual too? I hope not, because I hate this use of the word virtual. The connections people make online are as real as anything else that happens in their lives. Authors Electric is a virtual group, but it’s a real group too, full of fellow-writers far too alive and kicking...

It's final revision time on my latest novel, Life Form 3 . I've been living at the computer, desperate to spend every moment with it. And yesterday morning I woke up unable to move my right arm. To be truthful, I could move it, but it hurt so much I preferred not to. Reaching for my glasses left me a gasping wreck. Keeping still wasn't much better. I’d felt it nagging the previous day, but never thought it could turn into this. The repetitive strain injury was back. In a way this seems like divine retribution. In my first novel My Memories of a Future Life , I inflicted a cruel case of RSI on a concert pianist. I imagine some deity that sits on the interface between art and life has thought it would be very fine to dump the same fate on me - and right when I need my fingers most. In my defence, I haven’t used the RSI device glibly. Its details didn’t come from comfy googling, they were earned. My RSI journey began when I became a sub-editor in the 1990s, when desktop publis...

          I don't know about you but I strictly adhere to 'sell by dates' on food - or anything else for that matter. If the label tells me that the bag of potatoes has to be used by 20 April then in the bin they go on the 21 April.  My partner keeps telling me that 'sell by dates' are only a guide and I should use my common sense. If the food looks and smells okay then I can still eat it but I don't like to take the risk so throw it out.           I think publishing can be a bit like this. Someone decides that a book is old-fashioned, out-dated and that people won't be interested in reading it anymore. It's too 'gentle', set too long ago, isn't pacey enough. So the book gets remaindered. Or no more are printed once stocks run out. It doesn't matter that the book is very popular, that people still ask for it. It's past its 'sell by date' so in the bin it goes - metaphorically speaking. No matte...

This is going to be my last post for Authors Electric. Not because I don’t like the Blog – I’ve learnt an enormous amount from participating – or the people – all lovely, talented and generous with their time and advice, but simply because I’ve become overloaded with THINGS I HAVE TO DO and some others just have to be abandoned. The truth is, everyone who contributes to this blog is busy. We write, many of us teach or have jobs other than writing and have families and commitments. The simple fact is that although we may think of ourselves as writers, that’s only a part of what we get up to in the average week and my average week seems to have become a bit more complicated of late. Not that I’m complaining. I’m really excited by it all and just occasionally also a bit daunted! I’m currently working on a book for Severn House – another in the Naomi Blake series and I have a new Rina Martin out at the end of May and I’m trying to get to grips with other writing projects tha...

          I've been thinking about names quite a lot recently. A friend asked me why I had called my most recent book The Amber Heart.  (She hasn't read it yet, otherwise she might have guessed!) But if I'm honest, this is a book that has had many different titles over the years, including Noon Ghosts and The Sorrel Horse. I still quite like Noon Ghosts but it didn't 'stick' for some reason although I used the title for a radio play set in Poland instead. One of my previous agents had an aversion to the word 'horse' in any title, so the Sorrel Horse had to go. When I was doing the last major set of rewrites to this novel, I began to see that the piece of jewellery which runs through the story and is central to the plot had to be amber: a heart shaped chunk of this precious resin, set in silver filigree. When I first visited Poland, my Great Aunt Wanda gave me a necklace which she had managed to hang onto throughout the war and beyond...

It’s spring and that means we’re entering the fabulous fun of festival season. It might be a Glastonbury-free summer but the literary world will be steaming full ahead through Hay and beyond. It’s the time when the public get to meet their heroes, and get to find new heroes. When they’re introduced to the whole smorgasbord of literary everythingness to take their pick for what to read in the year ahead. (the musician Jessie Grace at Not the Oxford Literary Festival) So as writers this is a doubly exciting time. It’s where we get to meet our public and to embrace the wonderful people who don’t yet know us and swaddle them in our fabulousness. Aren’t you bursting with anticipation? What’s that? You’re not going to a festival? You haven’t been asked? The sad fact is that if you’re a self-published writer or a spoken word poet festivals don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, how brilliant it is, how many people love your work, what reviewers or anyone else think. If you...