Authors Electric

Announcement: The Sterkarm Handshake is on offer at $1-99 all day on the 24/06/18 at Early Bird Books. Since the US is some hours ahead of us, there might still be time to grab a copy. Meanwhile, on I go with the work of publishing my back-list. Elfgift and ElfKing by Susan Price ElfKing would have been out sooner if I could have tracked down a better image for the cover. I tried using another wikimedia image from the Sutton Hoo hoard... the famous 'man between wolves' from the purse-lid. The original is infilled with scarlet enamel and some think it represents the god Odin (who is a character in ElfKing.) Trouble was, the rounded shape of the jewel just didn't work with the rectangle of the cover. No matter how I enlarged it, or moved it or the lettering about, the rounded shape just looked wrong. Besides, my brother said the man 'had a silly face.' So I used another image, one taken from a helmet plate. The book contains a couple of characters...

Is everyone else super-person? I can only speak for myself, but I’m struggling to fit everything in. There’s stuff I have to do, like basic cooking and eating and cleaning and having a shower. I know it’s tedious but it’s necessary and takes, let’s say, an hour and a half each day. And sometimes I have to go to the market for fruit and vegetables, or nip round the corner to the supermarket for milk and bread and coffee - another half an hour. If I’m to stay healthy, I need regular exercise - my exercise of choice is walking in the open air. If the weather is kind I can stride beside the canal, breath sweet air and hear the birds sing. That’s another hour. (If the weather is rubbish, I go for a swim - by the time I’ve gone to the pool, changed, swum, showered, changed again, and walked home, there’s not much change out of an hour and a half).  Then, I’m told I need to practise mindfulness - given the sensory soup of walking, and then the bombardment of useful and usele...

Last month , I went on one of my rants about the bias against self-published books and challenged some common stereotypes many people have about self-published writers. The most common stereotype, however, needs more than a couple of paragraphs in a single blog post to disprove. Most people assume that if a book is self-published, it is because the work was not good enough to be picked up by a traditional or indie publisher. There are a few reasons, however, that a perfectly good book doesn't find a publisher: Most publishers require agents, but today, many agents won't take you on unless you can show proof of your own marketability. The work, while well-written and entertaining, may be too experimental for a publisher or agent to risk investing in. The market you are shooting for ( especially sci-fi or fantasy ) may be near glutted already, so publishers may be unwilling to throw money into such a large pool. Conversely, the audience may be so small that the publisher h...

Not long ago I wrote here about opting for fiction rather than non-fiction in my latest book, but recent events have made me wonder if I achieved what I set out to do, since I’m delighted that In the Blink of an Eye is listed for the People’s Book Prize but a bit disconcerted to find it in the non-fiction category! I daresay the competition may have its own reasons or its own criteria and I guess it’s too late to ask for a ‘reassignment’. Nor is the book so far from the facts for the classification to worry me unduly, although it does feel odd to be alongside (and up against?) books like Understanding BRCA or Rock and Pop on British TV which I am sure are entirely laudable in their respective ways.  A trip to an indie bookshop on Saturday which had lots of genre fiction also made me wonder again about where my book lies in the scheme of things. I couldn’t help feeling it looked more at home in the biography section than next to Robert Harris, Karen Maitland and Sim...

This summer, I've been preparing my Echorium trilogy for the print on demand editions, following the reversion (for the third time) of print rights for the award-winning first title in the series SONG QUEST, which has been pretty much in print since its first publication in 1999. Here are the previous three editions: Element Books 1999 Chicken House 2001 Catnip 2012 Note the recurring ship-and-mermaid theme? Well, both the ship and mermaids are definitely part of the story - although I also have male 'merlee' in my books (I've always struggled with the idea of mermaids perpetuating the species without any males around... how does that work?) Three different publishers can't be wrong, so my covers would obviously need: Mermaid(s). Sea... and why not go underwater for a change? I also wanted my covers to suggest the series' epic fantasy element, and apparently that comes down to having one of three things: - sword - shield - dragon. Drag...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pleasures and pains of handing one’s work over to someone else. I’ve enjoyed writing for performance ever since I was a child. We lived in a cul-de-sac   then, and the blind end had a street lamp over it which made the perfect evening performance space.   I can’t remember much about the scripts, although one play involved costumes made of raffia knotted round string to make ‘hula hula skirts.’ I wrote and directed them and carried on doing that through school, devising my own versions of My Fair Lady, Snow White, and a something Shakespearean with someone playing a recorder, for which I wrote the music. I can’t write music. When the hapless player asked me what key it was in, I said, ‘C’ because it didn’t have sharps or flats (what?) She gave me a funny look. Maybe I had/have a control-freak streak, but I knew how I wanted the parts to be played, my words to be spoken. I've gone on doing it intermittently ever since. Writing f...

Just back from Cyprus so a very short blog from me this month, but returned to  the fabulous news that  Winter Down s has won the Arnold Bennett Book prize! Shocked and awed!  I suspect there is no easy way to graciously accept any award because if other people are anything like me they don’t dare think about the possibility that they might actually be in the running.  I was not able to accept the award in person as Peter and I were on holiday in Cyprus – but I was asked if somebody could be there on my behalf ‘just in  case’ and the wonderful Misha Herwin stepped up for me. Setting  Winter Downs  in the year 1940 has meant a huge amount of research but also a huge amount of fun, and I hope people gain as much enjoyment in reading this book it as I did in writing. Winning this prize has set something of a precedent for my sleuth Bunch Courtney and Inspector Wilbur Wright! It will make the writing of the second,  In her Defence , tha...