Look out for my STONKING new picture book and tell your CHUMS to SKIDADDLE down to your local bookshop and get one! (Well, there’s three words I’m not sure I’ve ever used before – strange I should do so now – can you guess what they are?
Category > Publishing!
The Biggest Problem in Publishing
I just read a blog thingy over at the Guardian that included this lovely paragraph: “…the single biggest (but rarely acknowledged) problem in publishing today: most of the biggest firms are dominated by cynics and fools. The people in control care nothing for the quality of the product and will always put short-term gain before long-term [...]
How A Book Cover Changes
For my new book in September I’m working with a publisher I haven’t worked with before. It’s been really refreshing to see how my editor there has responded to my thoughts about the front cover. The process started off with my editor sending me a first version of a possible cover. It looked like this: [...]
Witchfinder: The Complete Saga…
Hi guys! Well, I’ve just completed the latest draft of the last Witchfinder book. There’ll be a few changes in the next month or so when I come to look at the book again with my brilliant editor Jasmine, but the central plot will remain the same: what happens to Jake Harker and his friends, the eventual fate [...]
The Silly Monster Book!
Long-time readers of this blog may remember that way back in May last year I attempted to rescue the authors from their hideous monster captors. It was a complete and utter disaster (possibly because I tried to rescue them using rhyming couplets, never a good idea). Ever since then, the monsters have been out for [...]
Patience
I like to think of myself as a patient person. But I expect patience is one of those things like driving, where we all think we’re above average, but we can’t possibly all be above average, can we? In the last 12 months I’ve had to learn that patience is a huge part of being [...]
Excitement and Anticipation
When I first started out as an author, I made the decision to self publish my first book. I did so before really exploring the traditional publishing route properly. If I had persevered, my first series might have eventually been published by a major publisher … but I doubt it. The story in The Forging [...]
Klung!
That was the sound of my jaw hitting the cave floor, when I read the first line of Furnace: Death Sentence by Alexander Gordon Smith. By the time I was at the bottom of page one I’d forgotten that my mouth was still open, and it was only when I finished the book that I [...]
Free Books!
I don’t know why, but I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently asking for free books – some from the type of organisations that contact authors on a regular basis, but increasingly from children asking me to send them a signed copy. Without wishing to sound harsh, my response is always in several parts: [...]
Bwah ha. BWHA HA HA HA!
Ahem! Er, sorry about that, but I’m rather excited. Here’s an interview with me by Tracy Baines for her blog, Tall Tales & Short Stories. Tracy’s brilliant blog is a great information source for aspiring and up-and-coming authors. I’ve done my best to pass on a bit of whatever wisdom I’ve managed to hang onto [...]
