My Life as a Writer

Writing a book isn't the hard part, you have the idea, you let the words flow and then, then the hard work begins.   If you are an independent author, like me, you are everything, writer, publisher, marketing, sales etc.  There is no-one else unless you are lucky enough to have a budget to pay for certain services, you are on your own.  The success of your book is based solely on what you can do to raise its profile, get word out there and with any luck entice the reader to buy.   If you have done the basics to get this far, the plotting out of the idea, the writing of the book, proof reading, formatting and cover design then your on your way, but it doesn't stop there it's time to work on the marketing and promotion of your work.   So as an independent how am I going to do this;  Fellow bloggers  - Reviews and Interviews There are a wealth of talented book bloggers out there who will review your book and work with you.  If...

How do you imagine a writer works? Is it all just about laying out the words on paper from the first to the last? Does a writer simply scribble away, with multiple crossings out until that final moment when the work is willing to be shared? Well the answer is yes, but with a caveat for independent self-publishing authors, when the words are done there is more work to do. I’m a planner, a list person; I have a to-do list almost every day! So it would make sense to me to multi task in order to reduce the time taken to publish once my work is done. Those other non-writing tasks I have to consider are;  Book Cover   Jacket Copy   Dedication   Editing  Proof reading   Layout /structure for publishing formats   Publishing retailers / Exclusivity   Marketing plan   Pricing  Giveaways / Competitions   Reviews  Right now, as I’m about half way through the first draft of ...

The first part of the Poppy Garden story happens in the prologue, here it serves to introduce my two main characters and fix them in a relationship and setting.   It’s almost like a snap shot a moment in time, like looking through a window on someone’s life seeing how it ticks before the story really kicks in.   I don’t want to spend chapter after chapter building a back story before the main event occurs because the main event is why you reading the book, I don’t want readers to get bored waiting for the main event but I also want to create an understanding of how things are before to enable and create an understanding of the impact one event can have. I’ve become quite fond in my work of using flashbacks to illuminate the back story.   I’ve used this technique in my other books to explain a situation at a key point or to signpost something in the future or something in the past that will trigger connections for a reader.   My synopsis however is of...

I have always been obsessed with movies, theatre and other visual media.  As a child I was bullied so I spent a lot of my time alone,  I would loose myself in movies and books, characters became my friends and every chapter my escape.  I think I started writing as soon as I learned to put pen to paper.  I developed a talent for seeing what I was writing happening in my head like watching a movie and that's still the way I approach my writing now. I sit at my computer tapping out the words describing the scene I see in my head and part of that is seeing the actors play out the characters I create.  I always have a dream cast in mind when I write, I know who I  would entrust my characters to. I'm sure if you ask anything author who wanted their book to become a movie, which I would love to happen one day, they would have dream cast in mind.  So now I will tell you how my dream cast starts out for The Poppy Garden, Leading Man -  Nick Robinso...

Follow my blog with Bloglovin I started coming round to the idea of making the Poppy Garden my priority project, after all I was getting a lot of interest from a particular friend who read similar kind of books and she was enthusiastic about what I could possible be doing.  Now as a writer I want people to be excited about my work and here was someone literally jumping up and down in my officer at my day job begging for chapters, so there had to be something to my idea that was worth exploring. To ensure a steady income and as I'm not a top selling author yet I have a day job, so a lot of my writing is done after work and in to the night.  So I took this idea home and sat at my PC, my writing style varies from book to book, but with this one it's proving to be a mix of prepared and organic styles as I like to call them; My Writing Styles Organic writing This to me is sitting at my PC with a blank document and the words just flow, I wrote my first novel this way. ...