The accidental blogger – post at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

A couple of years ago I hadn’t heard of blogging, in fact my main thoughts about it was how ugly it was as a word. Then I started writing on a WordPress thingy and rather liked it. Now I blog like a woman with three arms, I’ve launched books because of blogs – and all in all I couldn’t do without them. It looks like a grand plan, especially in these days of platform-building and online presence, but really it’s all been haphazard happenstance … more at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books.

If you blog, how did you start? Why did you start? Do you find it easy, hard? How does it fit into your writing life?

Living the stuff of novels… the ghostwriter’s lot

Flying planes, beating up drug barons, underwater fighting… Today I’m at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books, musing about the curious business of ghostwriting, and pretending to have lived someone else’s life of high adventure…

I made you up. Honest. Red-faced guest post at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books

That dingy, dowdy town in My Memories of a Future Life? Nowhere that really existed was horrid enough so I made it up. I gave it a name that loosely rhymed with ‘Hell-on-earth’. And do you know what? A friend has emailed me to say Vellonoweth, give or take an o, really exists.

So today I’m red-faced at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books, grovelling. Do come along and save me from the residents’ pitchforks.

How to write the right blurb for your novel – guest post at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

Ooh, a TARDIS. Because a novel is like one, which you realise when you have to condense its loveliness into a 150-word blurb. From the inside, it’s enormous, labyrinthine. From the outside – a virtual bookshelf, a description to a prospective agent or publisher, or a casual chat at a dinner party – it’s got to look manageable.

Today, at Do Authors Dream of Electric Books, I’m explaining how I squeezed my novel’s multiple dimensions into a convenient, transportable box.

My experiment in ESP… guest post at Kindle Authors UK

I’m guesting today at Kindle Authors UK, a group of professional authors who are bringing out indie projects on the Kindle. We’re from a wide sweep of genres, sometimes trying new pieces outside our established brand, sometimes republishing works that have fallen out of print, sometimes bringing out the novels that agents have battled for but found too difficult to place.

This is such an exciting time in publishing and together we’re hoping to raise the profile of indie authors and show everyone what we can do! Do hop over – and in the meantime I’m preparing a proper writing post for tomorrow.

My Memories of a Future Life: a novel in 4 novellas: first episode, 30 August