I enjoyed this video interview with Amanda Hocking.  She seems a very likable lady, and down-to-earth despite her huge success with ebooks.   

Snowdrops in my garden. I've been wearing my techie hat today, giving this site a much-needed re-design.  Instead of having all my books for sale in one heap, on one page, I've split them up.  Now all the short stories are together, the two poetry ebooks are together, and Tamsin and Rowan  have dedicated pages.  It's easier for people to find what they're looking for, and I can add character sketches and other relevant bits 'n' bobs. I am also considering shipping the bibliography to HubPages.  There, it can rest in peace while satisfying the zealous administrator aspect of my make-up.  Here, it's a bit pointless maybe?  People might be confused between which material is currently available and which is not.  It always surprises me how long these 'little jobs' can take.  Let me know what you think, anyway.  And if you've any bright ideas for making the site better, please feel free to share them.   

I read an unintentionally funny article in The Guardian (the online edition, as I never buy newspapers or magazines) which claimed ebooks are a fleeting fad.  Real books are published on paper only, apparently, and people won't adapt to not owning collections of yellowing paperbacks.  Who would jettison the pleasure of holding a crumbling, slightly pongy but much-loved novel in favour of a mechanical gadget? There was the assumption that literary fiction requires the traditional paper format, and would only be accepted by its readers if this was adhered to. Genre fiction, on the other hand, was considered far less lofty (even though it outsells lit fic by the shed-load) and therefore it was thought permissible for this to slum-it on ereaders. Remember twelve-track cassette tapes?  Remember those 1" thick tapes on whopping great spools?  People used to say CDs would never replace these, as CDs were too expensive and people who had accumulated big music collections would b

The paperback edition of Tamsin is now available from Amazon.com  and the Amazon UK outlet should be available in a few days. Last night's Riverside Writers meeting was interesting.  One of our members, Elizabeth Gates,  has a BA. Honours in English Language and Literature and an MA in Linguistics.  Since 1985, she has been a practising journalist. She is also an experienced ghostwriter. In 2005, Elizabeth trained as a personal and executive coach with the prestigious coach training school, Coaching Development. Since then she has developed the Lonely Furrow Company, which specialises in writing coaching and communication coaching using transactional analysis, neuro-linguistic programming and accelerated learning techniques. Elizabeth ran a workshop on how to overcome writers block.  She had put a considerable amount of forethought into the workshop, and included a few simple writing exercises, the first of which asked us to write for one minute only and answer the question, &

My two young silver-laced wyandottes, Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith, both laid their first eggs this morning!  The third, smaller, egg in the dish was laid by my older hen, Joyce Grenfell, who is an ISA Brown. You can watch them on this video:   

The paperback cover for "Tamsin" The paperback version of Tamsin (ISBN 9781468092684) is now available from here.   It will be become available on Amazon in around a week's time.  The ebook is already available, of course, and the ebook costs less. It will be interesting to discover which sells the most - the paperback or the ebook.  At this point I suspect it'll be the ebook but time will tell.  Not everyone owns an ereader, obviously.  I don't; I've got Adobe's free ereader on my PC, but I would like a Kindle simply because it saves buying half a rainforest's worth of paper each year.  Plus ereaders are so portable.  You can carry a library with you wherever you go.  When an ereader can double as a laptop (so I can write in Word then store the file for use on a PC-compatible CD), then I'll definitely get one.  Or maybe someone's already invented a gadget like this?  If so, let me know.  I won't even attempt to pretend to be up-to-date o

Yesterday I dropped the prices of all of my ebooks, and overnight I've seen an increase in sales.  One of the highly useful aspects of self-publishing with today's technology is that any author is free to make changes like this at the drop of a hat.  We can experiment to discover for ourselves what works and what doesn't, and adapt accordingly with a few clicks of a computer mouse.  The power is in our hands, rather than with a committee who "know best". Logic dictates that it's better to sell, say, 1,000 ebooks at $1 each than a few books at $6.99.  Logic also dictates that it's better to sell books than to leave them gathering dust on a shelf - hence my foray into self-publishing.  I've been traditionally published in the past, in fiction anthologies and as a non-fiction freelancer.   But could I sell my novels to an agent or publisher?  I was told they're not commercial, or too "occult", or too strange.  Let's let readers dec