Sunday 3 June 2012

The reality of life as a writer


When people imagine the life of a writer they probably think that you sit under a shady tree on a hot summer’s day thinking about your wonderful purple prose and then go home and write a book in a week that tops the bestseller lists and goes onto earn you JK Rowling style riches.



But here’s the reality for most of us -

People will keep asking you when you will get a ‘proper job.’ This happened to me five minutes ago.

You may find yourself eating spaghetti with gravy for Christmas dinner with a duvet wrapped around yourself to keep warm, because you can’t afford to pay the electricity bill. This happened to me.

You will spend most of your time looking at your writing and seesawing between ‘this is brilliant’ and imagining who will play your brilliant characters in a movie (I want Kevin McKidd to play the suicide bomber Doyle in Deid Bastards), to ‘this sucks.’ Most of the time you will be thinking that it sucks. This is currently happening to me.

You’re partner/husband/wife may leave you because you don’t pay them any attention/won’t make dinner/fix that door/you didn’t pay that final demand and you may not notice for days because you’re too busy finishing that last chapter. This will eventually happen to me.

Your cat or dog may start to nibble on your toes because you haven’t fed him for a week and you may be too busy working on that last chapter to notice. I hope this doesn’t happen to me.  

Saturday 19 May 2012

Zombies & Living Cruelty Free is out on Kindle


This is probably not the cover for Deid Bastards.


Sorry, I haven’t posted in a wee while. A few weeks ago, a publisher expressed an interest inmy zombie novel Deid Bastards and I’ve been working away on that trying to perfect it. You know them zombies, they sure keep you busy.

I have a lot planned for them. I'm already the proud owner of www.deidbastards.com where I hope to be bringing you some zombietastic stuff in the near future. So stay tuned. The wecsite is currently under construction.


I’ve also been working hard to promote my book Living Cruelty Free: a guide for anyone who wants to live a more compassionate life and I am delighted to announce that as well as the traditional books, it’s now available on Kindle.

At the moment it's available on Amazon.co.uk, but I hope that will change soon.


Wednesday 4 April 2012

Giving away free books won't sell books

Go on grab some and throw them at me. Writers work for peanuts.

This is an update on my earlier post Could your publisher give your book away free?

I honestly wish I was writing an upbeat post.

One where I would hold up my hands and say, 'I was wrong.' That 'those people at Need2Know sure knew what they were doing giving away e copies of my books, without consulting me.'

But then the royalty cheque came for Bullying - A Parent's Guide and it was puny. Pathetically puny. And I knew that over half of the few sales I did achieve came from the reviews of the book I got on Amazon.

Check out your book on at novelrank if you want to know how it's selling on Amazon. Note - it will only track from the date you start tracking it.

‘How puny was that royalty cheque?’ you will be asking.

Enough for a week's shopping - on a budget - because apparently despite being one of the most downloaded books by Need2Know on their free giveaway site, giving something away free did not translate into sales.

And why would it? If someone gives you something for free, why the heck would you pay for it?

The moral of the story: get it in writing from your publisher than they have to limit book giveaways to prizes and review copies. I know I will, because I believe all writers should be decently compensated for their work.

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