Writers’ Pieces @ the First Edinburgh eBook Festival

 Copyright and sharing 

 Published as part of the Edinburgh eBook Festival and distributed for free. Please pass this on to anyone you think would be interested. This is a gift from each and every one of the authors to you the reader.  We hope you will enjoy it. We hope it will give you pause for thought and teach you something more about the ‘business’ of writing and help you understand that ‘being a writer’ is far more than a career choice.

While you are free to distribute this publication as you like, please remember that copyright for each ‘piece’ is retained by the author whom you should approach directly if you wish to quote from or otherwise use a portion of their work.  Details of each writer are given at the back of the publication.

Introduction

From 11th August to 27th August 2012 the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival took place. It was a new idea and a new way of delivering a festival – virtually and online. 

www.edebookfest.co.uk  offered over 100 separate featured events and showcased nearly 50 ‘indie’ writers and writers as publishers – for whom we have invented the term indieWAP.  There were short stories, poems, polemical pieces, reviews and humour and we showcased a number of writers active in the new growing movement of ‘indie’ publishing. It is a  movement that is growing away from gatekeeper mediation and aims for a more direct relationship between writer and reader.  We hoped to offer near enough something for everyone.  We acknowledged from the start that we could only show the tip of the iceberg of the talent that is out there. However, you have to start somewhere if you are to start at all. So we did. We started here.

One of the backbones of the festival was the Writers’ Pieces.  The festival had a deliberately Scottish flavour at times and for the uninitiated a ‘piece’ is a sandwich in Scotland. So we offered twelve ‘indie’ writers the opportunity to share their ‘piece’ or indeed have their say, reflecting on their personal experience in publishing, indie and otherwise.  This yielded such a strong body of work that we have decided to epublish it here and distribute it for free to anyone interested enough to download it.

This is one of the joys of epublishing. It is cheap and it is quick to do. And you can publish work that otherwise would never see the light of day. Which may find a readership beyond the mainstream and the high street. Readers who are interested in something a bit out of the ordinary.  After all, who would publish 12 writers’ thoughts about the publishing industry?  Unless they were ‘celebrity’ or ‘acclaimed’ writers. Or there was money to be made from it some way. But we stand for the ordinary experience. Our primary motivator is not making money. It’s about raising awareness and changing relationships.

That said, many of the writers here have won awards and have had long careers in traditional publishing.  On the surface few of them seem to have much in common with each other. Except- the common theme running through each piece – they have a personal experience to relate. A personal relationship between writer and publisher which was mediated and to some degree unsatisfactory.  A relationship which made them want to take the ‘means of production’ into their own hands again and find a commonality with a readership in a less mediated way.

We hope, through these ‘pieces’ to show you that writers are not (and do not consider themselves) in competition with each other in a mediated marketplace. They are individual people who want to build and develop relationships of communicative interaction with readers – people just like (and not just like) you.  Most of all we hope the shared ‘pieces’ make you think and that these thoughts give you some enjoyment and reading pleasure.

Cally Phillips (Festival Director)

 JAN NEEDLE

First things first. I’m not a Scot, and I’ve only been to Edinburgh once (it rained) and through it twice, driving from Manchester to Aberdeen to work on a trawler. When I drove through heading north it was raining, when I drove through heading south I was so exhausted I did not even notice the city, although I remember that the sun was shining. I was so tired, in fact, that I only made it as far back south as Cumbria, where I pulled into a wood a half-mile from the motorway and slept for eight and a half hours slumped in the front seat.

However, I did live in Glasgow for three years, and one of my many sons is now at university there, studying ‘something scientific’. He won’t tell me what it is because he says I wouldn’t understand it, let alone be able to spell it, which is almost certainly correct. When I asked him if the science bit meant he’d be able to get a job at the end of it he merely laughed. I have five children, all of them improbably well qualified. Only the daughter has a job. That’s not what made me a bit of a leftie git, however – that came much, much earlier. It’s probably on a data base somewhere. My sons will probably never get a job.

Let’s start again. So I’m not a Scot, that is established. My maternal grandfather was, however, and went south as a young man to work in Portsmouth Dockyard. He was not a ‘dockyard matie’ though – he was a cut above. He drove cranes on ‘coal island’ and smoked Weights, not Woodbines, as befitted his station. He was a very proud man, drank a pint of senna pod tea before bedtime every night (as regular as clockwork), and fathered two sons and three daughters, one of whom became my mother. His pride was such that when my mother fell pregnant with my sister at the age of 19, he took her and her intended to court to prevent them getting hitched. My father was a rather feckless chap, who drove a motor bike and wasn’t good at keeping jobs. After the wedding – sanctioned by the magistrates – they drove to Bala in North Wales in the midst of January snows. The marriage lasted, as did the parental animosity. His last motorbike was a Lambretta 125 that I gave him when my provisional ran out. I hated motorbikes, but at eighteen, as a reporter on the Portsmouth Evening News, I could afford one. My father, being feckless, had been without for years.

The other thing Edinburgh gave me was the desire to be a writer. That was because the man who wrote the greatest novel in the language (and I’ll fight anyone who disagrees) was an Edinburghian (if that’s the word). I first had Treasure Island read to me by my ma – a constant out-loud reader of the classics, although she never could pronounce Dartagnan – and by the time I was about eleven knew tons of it by heart. I’d also read it in French and German, started it in Welsh, and decided Robert Newton was the finest actor in the land. His John Silver, for me, is still the only one who ever achieved the magic Stevenson did in the writing – to portray a murderous, filthy thug as a man impossible not to fall in love with.

Two other factoids clinched it for me. When I discovered that a sleeping RLS – wrapped up in brown paper so that nobody would know – had once been abandoned on a shelf in an Edinburgh bar by his nanny, who had been forbidden to take the baby from the house because of her slight drinks problem, and when I discovered that Robert Newton was such a famous lush that extreme drunkenness in his native Cornwall was generally known as being ‘as pissed as a Newton’. I had to be a writer, too, and as a journalist, was inevitably well on the way to being a drinker. Thank you Barbara Castle. You saved my life when you brought in the breathalyser. Fond of liquor I may be, but I have never, ever driven above the limit. Weird, innit?

So I became a writer thanks (let’s say) to Edinburgh and her sickly brown-paper-wrapped son. I also have a desperate love of lighthouses, so thanks to his family for that, and believe passionately that it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, although I’ve never tried a donkey. But although my early fiction writing was for adults, by the time I was thirtyish I’d headed into children’s lit in rather a big way. And Treasure Island, and Blind Pew, and Israel Hands, and the mighty shadow of Long John, Barbecue, that evil bastard charmer Silver who Stevenson loved so much he had to let him get away, hung there in the background like a shadow. One day, I knew, I had to revisit it. To try and understand.

First though, was a need to look at kid-books through my own rather jaundiced eyes. I was a slum kid who went to grammar school (I did terribly in the entrance exam but made them laugh like drains at the interview when I told them – trying and failing to follow parental instructions – that I wanted to be a barrister) and much as I loved the current children’s writers like Richmal Crompton and Arthur Ransome and Aubrey de Selincourt, I did increasingly feel the need to read about scruffy prats like me and my mates. I also wanted to read about children who weren’t always saved at the last moment by their elders. I knew enough kids in Landport to know that most weren’t going to get saved at all.

First up was Albeson and the Germans which is set in Portsmouth and is extremely similar in parts to my own life there. It was highly praised and highly denigrated by whichever side of the social realism divide the critics were. This was followed by My Mate Shofiq  set in Oldham, because I’d moved north at the age of twenty, and loved it immediately and irrevocably. This book was runner up for the Guardian award, and caused me years of pain and pleasure. Some people called it racist, because I insisted on calling a spade a spade (reverse irony there, you’ll notice), while many Asians hailed it (and still do) as a long-awaited breakthrough. Needle, it seemed, was to be a name of controversy. And it’s never really changed.

However, another characteristic of my personality came out next, which has done its best to keep me poor. Everybody with half a brain knows that successful writers write either in genres, or – ideally – the same book over and over again with different names. As my reputation began to grow as a controversial realist I wrote a long naval historical book called A Fine Boy for Killing, and followed it up with an absurd children’s comic romp called The Size Spies. Then another serious, then short stories, then a picture book. Bloody hell, a flibbertigibbet. I even co-wrote an academic study of Bertolt Brecht. (Compare the crime of robbing a bank with the crime of founding a bank. Discuss.)

Fun though. Never let anyone tell you that writing isn’t fun. Over the years I’ve done novels, picture books, radio and stage plays, soap operas (Brookside, no less!), The Bill, a few songs here and there. Happy is the man, as the man once said, who can make a living out of his hobby.

And still have time to sail his boats and play his music and see his friends. Since I dipped my toe in the waters of ebook production a few months ago the fun has expanded exponentially. I made a lot of friends in ‘real’ publishing (more than forty published books, for Godsake) and I got involved with a lot of organisations I wouldn’t trust to take a kid across a road.

Treasure Island. A case in point. A few years ago I finally set out on a book called Silver and Blood – Return to Treasure Island. Not a sequel, I’d seen a few too many of them, and not an attempt to improve on Long John Silver, the un-improveable. Oh, the alarums and excursions! Oh the publishing deals torn up! Oh the blood and snot all down the walls! And shortly after I’d put it up on Kindle – out comes another version, by the former poet laureate Andrew Motion. The title? Silver – A Return to Treasure Island.

Well! What larks, Pip old chap! Ebook publishing has opened up a whole new area of joy, and I can’t get enough of it!

 CALLY PHILLIPS

‘You’ll have said your piece?’ There’s a quaint (?) saying attributed to Edinburgh folk which is ‘you’ll have had your tea.’ The story goes: that they invite you over for a meal and then don’t feed you, giving this phrase as a ‘reason’ and the implication being that they are much less friendly and accommodating than they at first suggest.  (I personally think it was invented by Glaswegians as an insult and for those of you not aware of the fierce rivalry been the Burgh and weegee’s we’ll just say that I grew up in Edinburgh and leave it at that!)

As a writer whose academic skillsets include qualifications in discursive analysis and moral philosophy, I like to think about the various implications of such phrases (it’s what I do in my spare time, honest) and as a writer I also love to ‘play’ with words and twist concepts. It’s what I do and part of who I am.

So in my title, what I’m suggesting to you is that the fact that only I get to ‘say my piece’ here suggests this is much more of a monologue than a conversation!  Is that a bad thing?

As dramatist in residence for DGAA in the early noughties (were they/we really so naughty?) I latched onto the monologue form for a number of reasons: it was cheap (I had no performance budget to speak of), it offered a good ‘start point’ for character development – the writer only has to worry about one character ‘voice’, and it gave new writers a way to get things down on paper quickly and ‘share’ their thoughts.  I ran a number of successful monologue competitions where winning entries were performed on stage by students of RSAMD and a jolly good time was had by all. But more than that, a lot of aspiring dramatic writers learned a lot about the guts of dramatic form.  From a monologue you can develop a duologue  – just add another person, another point of view (and in drama it does help if you have several points of view to give that ‘tension’ more frequently referred to as ‘conflict’ which it is said is so vital in a play.)  It’s also a useful skill for a prose writer because writing monologues helps get you into the mind of the character. And can kickstart the process of writing effective dialogue.

And here’s where we make an interesting observation – there are always two perspectives in monologue.  Even that most simple of forms is not isolated.  There’s the character (not real) and their stated opinion. There is also the writer (probably real) who ‘plays’ with the character’s stated opinion or position. The writer it is who gives the audience that extra dimension – the conflict/tension – the drama. In monologue form that’s best represented as ‘what is behind what the character is telling you?’  Does the character LIE? Are they a reliable narrator? What are they concealing that even they don’t know about? Even in a monologue one is playing about with the notion of ‘realities’ and the dichotomies between internal and external identities (of writer and character.) Long before you add the audience into the equation.

So you see, there is so much complexity even in a one person ‘speech’ that I can’t possibly have time here to engage in a duologue with an imagined ‘you’ or a discursive dialogue with a ‘real’ you (even if in the virtual world this would be possible.) So. This ‘piece’ is my ‘monologue.’ It’s up to you to work out what I mean by what I say. I will try to say what I mean. The rest is up to you. It is a communicative relationship between writer and reader and you have to step up to the plate as well as me.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. There is so much complexity even in simplicity. At the core of my dramatic (and prose) writing I aim to take the complexities which puzzle me in and about the world and render them more simple.  And then present them fictionally or dramatically as a communicative act between writer and reader. Which is almost as bizarre a relationship as that between a writer and a character. Different realities.  Similar relationships?

For me, the study of philosophy is the taking of seemingly simple ideas and delving around in their complexities (not for the uninitiated or easily distracted) whereas discursive analysis involves looks into the possible ‘meanings’ of communication, playing around and ‘twisting’ them. And for me these two disciplines come together in my creative writing – I aim to make the complex simple (perhaps entertaining though still thought provoking, maybe even challenging) and to offer ‘meanings’ for a communicative act – my fiction.  Through fiction I try to explore in a more ‘user friendly’ way things that I think are interesting and important in the human condition.  It’s hard. It doesn’t always work. It’s the balancing of a tightrope between the author as God and the postmodernist view that one is ‘only as good as one’s reader.’

I recognise that when writing fiction (or drama) I ‘say my piece.’ Which is then open to interpretation (or misinterpretation) by a reader or an audience. Philosophers have this neat little argument called ‘between good and yellow.’  (suggesting they are not the same sort of thing. Think about it.)

A year ago, I thought I’d burned out my desire to communicate. 20 years of being an independent spirit in an industry (because yes, writing is an industry) which prefers to create their own mavericks, shrink wrapped and ready made, had seen me become jaded and cynical and desperate to ‘retire.’ I should make it clear here if I have had a ‘career’ (the word for me means running out of control down a grassy hill) in a conventional sense it has been a career of creative retirement.  I am to retirement what others are to serial monogamy.  I first ‘retired’ from the academic life aged 21 when no one would fund me to do a PhD on Anarchism (It was the 1980’s!) and then ‘retired’ from acting (my back up plan – yes, I know!) shortly after graduating from Drama School, aged 25 when I realised I was a) never going to know what to do with my hands and b) hated sitting around waiting to be allowed to work.  It started a trend.

I ‘retired’ from producing short films in 2001 because they hadn’t invented YouTube or the technology to make it a viable ‘career’ for an independent with no money and there weren’t enough gigabites in a computer for my designs. Instead of ‘inventing’ You Tube which someone else did in 2005, I went for a double ‘retirement’. I ‘retired’ from screenwriting (and to this day I don’t think anyone has noticed) because I was fed up with the meetings and the way that you got paid for work that never got finished and the work that did get produced was always a pale reflection of what you had written in the first place. And I ‘retired’ from mainstream theatre when I decided instead to focus on ‘flexible’ theatre and Boalian methodology. There was no going back from that one. I’ve written/directed/facilitated over 10 stage pieces since but I’ve never written a ‘proper’ play since 2004 and the world is none the worse for that!  Chasing Waves (2004) was my swansong and it’s hardly ‘mainstream.’ Reflecting on its follow up Powerplay, I realised that the world might never be ready for a stageplay which used ice-hockey as a metaphor for the social ‘rules of engagment’ and would be best staged on an ice rink! Time to exit stage left while I still held the concept of exit and stage left as dramatic possibilities.

It had, I now realise, all been building up to a complete creative ‘retirement’ aged 50 and I’m nearly at that auspicious age. But it’s not going to happen. Why? Epublishing.  The rise of the ebook has changed my life. Literally. It now impacts upon my daily life and has given me a new lease of creative inspiration and communicative freedom and ‘consumes’ a good chunk of my working ‘day.’  [And leading up to the festival has, I have to be honest, taken over my life!] Epublishing offer me the independence I’ve been looking for all along. I can take the means of production into my own hands completely. I’m happy to sink or swim that way. It came along at a time when I had embarked upon my ‘semi-retirement’ plan of setting up a wee publishing venture to produce limited editions of my writing.  (Old writers never stop writing they just shuffle the ‘ouevre’ more often) And then I became aware of ebooks.  Good for the planet. Good for the independent minded. Good for me. And hopefully good for you. I now have a 10 year plan and no intention of ‘retiring’ again till I’m 60.

It’s funny that as someone who has always felt ‘ahead of my time’ creatively it seems that I’m destined to be a ‘late bloomer.’ In the last year since I’ve actively engaged with the epublishing ‘revolution’ I have learned a lot, ‘virtually’ met a lot of fellow professionals, set up an ebook review site and now, an ebook festival. Oh, and published seven ebooks. (Twelve if you count the No Labels ‘episodes.’) And I have  a huge ‘slate’ awaiting publication.  Back catalogue and new writing.  I was always described as havin a ‘prolific’ output and I have found again the joy of being a workaholic. But this time I’m completely my own boss. Truly independent. But this does not mean isolationist.  Even a monologue has more than one perspective, remember.

In conclusion then, I have to refute the ‘you’ll have had your tea’ mentality (attributed to the good people of Edinburgh, and possibly in another context to the traditional publishing industry)  and instead affirm that I believe writing is a collaborative, communicative ‘meal’ which reader and writer can share without mediation if only they can find each other. Epublishing has given me the space and freedom to ‘say my piece,’ but more than that, the freedom and the means to ‘share my piece’ with you. The internet is making it easier for disparate people to connect and form communities.  Digital publishing can do the same for writers and readers. If we let it.

Can you ‘say your piece and have it?’ do you think? Let’s see. The future is in our own hands.  I find that exciting.  I’ve been inspired by many revolutionaries in my life, I never thought I would become a virtual one! And rumours of my ‘retirement’ appear to be vastly exaggerated.

 PETER TARNOFSKY

I have nothing against old-fashioned, conventional publishing. Many of my favourite books have been published conventionally – the money divided between the shop, the publisher and the agent, with a few pennies left over for the author.

Three books

When I finished my first book, Benny Baker, I duly wrote synopses and letters and printed double-spaced sheets of three chapters or one chapter or five thousand words. And I enclosed stamped-addressed envelopes and waited two months to receive a single-paragraph form-letter expressing general regret and wishing luck.

This book was inspired by a dream (no, really, come back) of people in scuba gear diving into dough to mix a loaf the size of the bakery. I got out of bed to write it down and then spent odd hours over many months trying to convince it into book form. The tricky part was working out why anyone would want so much bread and figuring out how he’d stop the birds from pecking it. I thought it was fresh and original and quirky and fun. The editor I paid to look it over thought it had “strong humour” and “boy and girl appeal”. The agents and publishers kept their views to themselves.

I tried the same approach with my second book, Timestand, with predictably similar results. It’s a boy-with-superhero-powers story but with a hero who doesn’t know what he’s doing, plenty of bickering, some collapsing furniture and a lot of destruction at the climax.

But when I took Timestand  to local schools, the children wrote things like “jam packed with lots of action, excitement and crafty surprises” and “I found the book really funny” and “it is one of the best books I read because it is something different: nothing like the typical boys’ book with a teenage spy trying and succeeding in dangerous missions”.

Cynics will say that the kids were just happy to have a different lesson, to have a fresh person to look at rather than the same teacher droning away. I say that those cynics weren’t there. I say that children that age don’t write like that unless they mean it.

I didn’t realise that I wanted to write ten short stories until I saw a banana balanced precariously on a car dashboard. Each story started with a fairly everyday situation and each spiralled out of its protagonist’s control. Right from the start, I didn’t want it to be about the ending, I didn’t want the stories to seem like shaggy-dog tales with a “ta-dah!” punchline. So I gave away all the endings up front. The anthology is called They All Die At The End

The stories are dark without being bleak (mostly) and frequently unexpectedly funny. They are often uncomfortably close to plausible. And one of the stories has Santa Claus.

But, according to the publishing industry, no one buys short stories. Even a publishing house whose publishing director said “the short story form is better suited to the demands of modern life than the novel” could only tell me that “most publishers and agents struggle to make a commercial success of short stories in the UK… wish you all the best…”. And an American agency told me that “the market here isn’t especially favorable [sic] towards [short stories]”.

This is not a rant, it is a brief history of my writing career.

Literary agents and publishers don’t owe me anything – nor should they. Why should they take the time and trouble to write detailed feedback to soothe the battered ego of the rejected writer? I wouldn’t expect them to. I only ever hope that at least a page or two will be read and considered, even if only briefly. And I would rather not have received comments that appeared to apply to someone else’s work.

I know that publishers will take on books that they think will sell in large quantities or books they love so deeply that they will try to conjure a large market through sheer force of character.

I don’t know if there’s a huge market, small market or no market for my books. I like them. People who read them tell me they like them.

I have no particular target for sales and am happy every time one of my books goes to a new home. It’s not about the numbers for me – it’s about feeling that the book is as good as I can make it. It’s about not feeling “that’ll do” about anything in the book – but feeling proud that I wrote what I meant, how I meant it, with my own idiosyncrasies and phrasing quirks.

In fantasy land, Benny Baker  should become an Aardman film, Timestand should be directed by Terry Gilliam and They All Die At The End  should be a television series in the style of Roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected. I won’t be bitterly disappointed if these goals aren’t met but at least one out of three would be nice.

Vomiting badgers

Part of the battle is to even get the attention of a publishing house. I have, once or twice, tried to attract attention by the literary equivalent of jumping up and down and mooning in front of them. The theory is that this may lead to someone looking at the work. The jury is out on that one.

For example… Recently I read that Random House had commissioned a couple of pop stars to write a children’s book about a defecating dinosaur. No, really, they did: See here

So I sent Random House a pitch for the follow-up about (what else?) a vomiting badger. No, really, I did: See here

They haven’t responded. I’m deeply offended…

Amazon, the white knight riding on the back of the internet (too much?)

Lulu may have made it easy and cost-effective to print my books (and they are all available in paperback form – don’t let me stop you   but it is Amazon who are leading the charge towards authors selling directly to their readers. But if you’re reading this, you already know that.

Despite selling a few boxes of books to schools, despite the enthusiasm from the children, despite a stampede when I started signing copies, I feel that my career as an author (which I’ll arbitrarily define as a writer with readers) only really started when I converted my books to ebooks and made them available through the Amazon Kindle store.

The ability to set an enticingly low price (while still collecting a greater royalty than if I had charged ten times that amount for a paperback) was genuinely thrilling. The discovery that the whole process took about five minutes (from word-processor file to Amazon listing) was startling. It might only have been about twenty quid but finding the first deposit of royalty payment into my bank account was a euphoric experience.

It’s questionable whether or not I need an agent or a publisher. I certainly need a marketing expert, but one who will work for a percentage. Paying an upfront fee would make me a vanity author and besides, someone working for commission will be someone who believes the work will sell – which surely would be better than getting someone to fake it. Any sensible offer considered. Similarly, any illustrator prepared to work for royalty share should get in touch.

Short stories – perfect ebook material?

Meanwhile, perhaps not all publishers have the same view of short stories. I always felt mine were a perfect length for an average commute (as long as you’re not driving) and perhaps Penguin feels similarly since  it has launched a new series of digital-only short books. (Only by authors they already know, of course. I can’t blame them. If I ran a publishing house I’d probably to do the same to dissuade the great unwashed from sending their thought-disordered manuscripts.)

And mine are a bargain in comparison – ten stories for the price of one and a half from Penguin. But then I don’t currently have any middlemen or a corporate structure to support. Just me, my family, the electricity to run the computer and the broadband to provide countless distractions and encourage procrastination.

Coming soon

I’m working on two books at the moment. Well, maybe three if you count the one that’s currently parked. Each day I decide whether I’m in the mood for another chapter of the intrepid explorers finding adventure in their own back garden (children’s book) or the contemporary state-of-the-nation satire (adults’ book).

As of today, the children’s book is nearer completion, and perhaps the other needs to sit on the back-burner a little longer to bubble away. But it might be the tortoise to the other book’s hare, if you’ll excuse the image of a tortoise bubbling away.

And it’s about time that Benny Baker  became an ebook. It’s on the list of things to do, together with finishing outstanding books, learning how to sell my work and tidying the desk.

 CHRIS LONGMUIR

In the beginning there were two types of published books. The traditionally published ones and the vanity published ones. Vanity publishing was where the author paid a company to publish their book, irrespective of quality, whereas traditional publishing was where the author managed to break through the gatekeepers of the big publishing companies to have their book professionally published and available through bookstores. There is now a third type, and that is the Indie.

The rise of epublishing led to a new phenomenon, that of the independently published book, which acquired the name of Indie. I publish ebooks and am proud to call myself an Indie writer. But how did I become an Indie writer, and why would I want to be one?

I’ve been writing most of my life, although when I was a child, writing only took place in my head. I would plan books and stories and live in my imagination. I was a dreamer. You see, when I was younger my imagination didn’t stretch to thinking I could be a writer. After all writers were magical people, special people, and I wasn’t special.

So I did what most people did when they left school, I went to work. Now at that time girls weren’t encouraged into education because the expectation was marriage and babies. That meant I left school with no qualifications, my dreaming days were over.

Work wasn’t that bad. I worked in shops, offices, factories and was a bus conductress for a time, clippies we were called. That was fun. Then it was the marriage and babies bit, and that was good too. I was lucky, in an age when husbands expected their wives to conform to the ‘obey’ bit in the wedding vows, mine was far more flexible. So once the kids had grown up a bit I started to study, night school first and then the Open University.

That was when my dreams started to resurface. However I couldn’t waste the degree I’d worked so hard to get, so I became a social worker, and that’s where I learned about the dark side of life.

So now you know why I write dark crime and why I find it so difficult to write romantic fiction. Oh, I do sprinkle a bit of romance throughout my books, but it is quite a bit darker than many of the love stories and chick lit novels that are out there.

Anyway, back to writing. I suppose I’ve been writing seriously now for the past 23 years. Using a pen name I published short stories for women’s magazines. I wasn’t ready to come out of the closet at that time. Then I started publishing articles under my own name and I did quite well, managing to get published in the UK and the US. My confidence was growing and I started to write novels. My first novel was a historical saga, now published as A Salt Splashed Cradle, after that I wrote a historical crime which is not yet published, following which I wrote Night Watcher, and then Dead Wood.

Then the demoralizing round of submissions to agents and publishers started. I now had four books in the bottom drawer. But, although my confidence was at a low ebb I didn’t stop writing, because by this time it had become an addiction. If I wasn’t writing, I went into withdrawals.

When I traditionally published my first book, Dead Wood, it was the highlight of my writing career, and to see it on the bookstore shelves gave me a thrill that was like no other. But don’t think Dead Wood hadn’t been down the rejection trail, because it had. I could have papered my study with all the rejection slips I received over the three years I’d been hawking it round agents and publishers.

So, after all these rejections, what was the change that made my book suddenly acceptable for publication? Well, my big break came when I won the Dundee International Book Prize with Dead Wood, in 2009.

I really thought I had it made, particularly when the book sold so well that the first print run was exhausted within four months.

However, pride always comes before a fall, and my fall came when I tried to publish my second book. I thought book number two would be snapped up because Dead Wood had been such a success. What I hadn’t reckoned on was the recession and publishers refusing to take risks. They started getting rid of their mid-list authors, all good sellers but not in the millions category. Contracts were dropped, new authors were rebuffed. What chance did I have when some of my friends with over 20 books in publication were losing their contracts?

Like Dead Wood before it, Night Watcher was rejected time and time again. After two years, on the advice of an agent friend, I published Night Watcher as an ebook, this was closely followed by A Salt Splashed Cradle, and two collections of short stories Obsession   and Ghost Train are doing well as ebooks, and the only regret I have is that they are not available in paperback for those of my fans who do not possess ereaders.

As I said before I’m proud to be an Indie writer. I am scrupulous in having my novels professionally edited before publishing them, and I am now investing in professional covers. No doubt there are some Indie writers uploading books of inferior quality, but the majority of us do invest in the things that a publishing company provides, namely the editing, proofing, and professional covers, and there is a lot of quality work being published electronically.

 BILL KIRTON

To answer that frequently put question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I always have to think hard. Sometimes, if I have to read something from one of my books – when I’m giving a talk or doing a workshop, for example – it’s a question I ask myself. Because completed books are always that – complete. Things fit together, there are progressions, solutions, and it all seems … well, complete. Equally, the actual concept of ‘a book’ has changed since the arrival of ebooks in all their formats. I still love books as independent objects but, as a writer, I appreciate the opportunities that ebooks represent. Somehow, by bringing the book-reading process closer to the way we use computers and communicate by texts and IMs, they’ve brought writers and readers into an even closer intimacy. OK, your ebook is just one of maybe hundreds sitting anonymously in the guts of someone’s Kindle or Nook, but when they access it, contact with the writer feels more personal. Readers and writers are relating to one another in that area where FaceBook and Twitter chats occur, where people are ‘friends’ and ‘like’ one another, and where opinions about your work are more freely given. The democratisation ebooks have brought has had both positive and negative consequences but there’s little doubt that they’re the future.

To get back to the ideas behind my own books, it’s hard to remember any single, exact trigger that started it all moving. So here, all I’m trying to do is retrieve glimpses of where each of my (so far) eight novels came from to see whether there’s any pattern to it.

I’ll take them in order of publication rather than when they were actually written. The first came about because the publisher Piatkus liked a thriller I’d sent them (the story which eventually became The Darkness) but wanted a police procedural. So I created a copper, DCI Jack Carston, and wrote Material Evidence. The original idea came from reading a book on forensic medicine. One of the cases described was very striking so I borrowed it but by the time the characters had had their say the details of the killing had changed completely.

The second, Rough Justice, was sparked in the course of a meeting with a very unpleasant individual for whose company I had to write a promotional DVD. He was rude, self-obsessed and so typical of a particular type of male that I wanted to punish him. So I did. Unlike crime, writing lets you do that and get away with it.

But that little revenge was nothing compared to the revenge I got on behalf of someone else in the next book, The Darkness. I went to a restaurant with my wife and some friends and noticed that the waiter had a west country accent. I said ‘you’re a long way from home’ and he told me the reason why. His wife and their two little daughters had been killed by a drunk driver who’d been sentenced to just two years in prison but released after eighteen months. ‘That’s six months for each life’ as the waiter put it. I felt so sorry for him and the feeling stayed with me for ages so eventually I started writing The Darkness to get rid of it. It was only the second novel I’d ever written and its first versions were pretty blatant vigilante vengeances. But the more I worked on it, the more shaded the choices became and, in the end, I didn’t want it to be a straightforward ‘The guy deserved to be punished’ story but tried to make readers feel uncertain, maybe even uncomfortable, about where their sympathies lay. It obviously came from somewhere deep inside me because in the course of the story Jack Carston started changing too and he was different in the two books that followed.

One of the seeds of the next, Shadow Selves, was also with me for years. Ages ago, an anaesthetist friend said that, if ever I wanted to include an operation in a book, he could arrange for me to see one close up. I jumped at the chance, was worried that I’d faint, but went anyway and was fascinated by it. I came away with copious notes, but they stayed locked in the computer until the extra idea I needed to use them occurred to me. That idea was to set the story in a university so that I could draw on my time as a lecturer for authenticity and have a sideways look at academia at the same time.

Unsafe Acts and The Figurehead both came from suggestions by another friend. He said that, with North Sea oil platforms now being decommissioned, they were ripe for sabotage and made a great setting anyway – and he was right. I have a rather tenuous claim to fame in the acknowledgements of Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue. I’ve written lots of material for use on offshore platforms and Ian wrote to ask what procedures Rebus would have to follow if he visited one. I was able to tell him and I also put Jack Carston through the same experience in Unsafe Acts. One of its main themes concerns the crime of what’s still colloquially known as ‘queer-bashing’ and it was disturbing to learn that, for all the advances that have been made in countering homophobia, there’s still a residual feeling that it’s ‘excusable’ in certain circumstances.

Those are the five books so far in my detective series. As I said, the idea for my historical novel, The Figurehead, came from a friend. One day, out of the blue, he just said ‘You should write about a figurehead carver’. He gave no reason and didn’t expand it further. But I like sailing, I did a PhD on French theatre in the 1830s and 40s so I had a feel for the period and I was tempted. So I went to carving classes to find out what it was like to carve a figurehead. I also sailed as a paying crew member on the beautiful Christian Radich from Oslo to Leith, realising a dream of being at the helm of a square rigger under sail. And, since the layout of the streets and quays of Aberdeen Harbour is more or less the same now as it was in 1840, it was easy to fix the setting. Even then, though, there was a twist because, although all my books are basically crime novels, the central female character in this one took over and made it into a romance as well.

The Sparrow Conundrum is a mystery in both senses. It’s the first novel I ever wrote and I’ve rewritten it many times since but I’ve no idea what made me start it. Up to then I’d written plays but one day, I just started writing the story and the characters were so extreme and absurd that I just let them get on with it. It, too, has gone through countless versions but the characters must have known what they were doing because last year it won the Forward National Literature Award for Humor. (The Darkness, by the way, won silver for Mystery at the same awards.)

Finally, Alternative Dimension is a novella I just had to write after spending some time playing the game Second Life™. There was no single source for it but the striking thing was that, in the game, people were so willing to shed inhibitions and open up to total strangers that there were umpteen stories to be told about it. I set it in a different (fictional) online game and wrote it under the name of my avatar, Jack Lefebre.

So there doesn’t seem to be a pattern and, in a strange way, I have the feeling that the original idea for any book may have little to do with how it eventually turns out. In nearly all mine, the themes and issues that give the book its specific point are things that have developed through the creative process and they may end up miles away from whatever triggered it all in the first place. The real constant in shaping and deciding a book’s ‘completeness’ is the characters who inhabit them, whether they’re composed of printing ink or pixels.

Whatever you read, and however you read it, happy reading.

 CATHERINE CZERKAWSKA

When I first began writing, more years ago than I care to think about, and although I aspired to publication, it wasn’t the foremost thing in my mind. The thing that gave me pleasure was the writing itself. I read a lot and I wrote a lot. A prodigious amount. I wrote when I was at school – often when I was supposed to be doing other things – and I wrote when I was at university and after that, I wrote in any spare moment I could snatch from several years spent teaching English as a Foreign language in Finland and Poland.

I wrote poems, plays and stories. With a combination of pride and uncertainty that is the mark of youth, I sent some poems to a Famous Writer, asking for advice. He was so very famous that I can’t in fact remember who he was, which is a pity, because he gave me the two best pieces of advice I have ever had and I’ve passed them on to numerous aspiring writers ever since.

‘The only way to learn how to write is to write,’ he said. ‘Oh – and you probably need to stop watering your Dylan Thomas adjectives and watching them grow.’

I began to be published in magazines. A poetry collection with Andy Greig called White Boats was next and then a solo collection called A Book of Men which won an Arts Council award. I was doing readings at various festivals, for BBC Radio, even on television. And I was writing radio drama, just for fun. I had my first radio play – a weird little play called The Hare and the Fox – broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland. The producer, the late Gordon Emslie, took it upon himself to mentor me. I would send him scripts. He would send me pages of questions. He didn’t edit what I wrote. He just asked questions. Sometimes they were difficult and challenging questions. But he was doing me the favour of taking me seriously. Eventually, I found the answers and learned how to write a radio play in the process. My plays began to be broadcast on Radio 4.

While I was working long but very happy hours in Finland at a private language school, (and being taken out on dates by my students, young businessmen from the local paper factories!) I wrote my first novel, called Snow Baby. I still have it somewhere, in faded typescript on flimsy paper. This was before even electric typewriters were affordable. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, it’s good in parts. A year or two later, some extracts of it were published by Scottish writer Carl MacDougall, who was editing a magazine called Words. It was the most beautifully designed magazine, a visual treat. He talked to me about the work, again doing me the favour of taking me seriously, but he didn’t edit it. He just published what I had written, the way I had written it.

The writing was – to me – far more important than any ‘career’. I’m sure I hoped for a career as a writer. But only because I thought that it would buy me even more time to write. The writing was more enchanting to me than any prospective publication or production. I sent work out, lost track of it, didn’t care. I was writing like a maniac and there was always more where that came from. There were times when the writing became so all-consuming that I felt quite crazy – as if I were living on another plane of existence.

I was also networking. But that wasn’t what it felt like and I wasn’t doing it because I thought these people might be useful to me. I was just gravitating towards writers and readers, people who thought and felt the way I did, who shared my interests and became my friends. We talked (and grumbled) about publishing and money, just as we do today. But far more often we talked about writing. We wouldn’t have dreamed of critiquing each other’s work although occasionally – when we trusted somebody enough – we might ask for an opinion, a friendly but different perspective on it. Mostly we talked about ideas. We talked far into the night, just as young people still do. Just as I still do with a few close writer and artist friends. Just as I often talk about books and reading with other readers.

I was lucky enough to find myself in the company of some distinguished older writers at that time. Norman MacCaig was a (scary but brilliant) writer in residence at Edinburgh University. Poet Robert Garioch, kindly and clever, was another, but he didn’t see himself as a tutor either. Writers in Residence were just that: writers. They weren’t project co-ordinators or opportunity facilitators or sustainable developers. They were good writers who were qualified to talk about writing. I remember him asking me a lot of questions about my poems, about what I was trying to say and how I was saying it.

In the Edinburgh pub called Sandy Bell’s I met my hero Hamish Henderson. He talked and sang, and we young writers and musicians listened, and realised that if we went on listening, we might learn something from this wise man.

Some years later, when I was more or less ‘established’ as a writer, I taught an Arvon course at Moniack Mhor in the Highlands. My fellow tutor was Iain Crichton Smith. Not only did he not tell me how to write, but I don’t think he really told the students how to write either. He questioned them and listened to their answers, and engaged in debate. He brought out the best in them. He read his Gaelic poems aloud, and although most of us didn’t understand them, it was magical. It was – in retrospect – one of the most memorable weeks of my life. It taught me a lot about the right way of helping writers – mostly that there are no certainties. And that the very best writers would never dream of destroying the confidence of beginners.

Somewhere along the way, I acquired an agent. I was writing a lot of radio plays by that time and earning a reasonable, if precarious, living. One of my plays won a major award and that was the way I got my agent. I wrote another (not very good) novel and filed it away. Then, a third, a piece of young adult fiction which was published by a small Scottish publisher called Molendinar Press.

When I finished my fourth novel, my agent neither edited nor rewrote it. She didn’t consider that to be her job. But she certainly sold it. Sales and Marketing were only marginally involved in the sale. They had no right of veto. The publisher’s editor didn’t rewrite it either. But she did ask a lot of searching questions. And she pointed out that although I was writing from my heroine’s perspective, it might help if the reader could also see things from the hero’s point of view as well. ‘What do you think?’ she said. I thought she was right. So I climbed inside my hero’s head and found out what was going on there, and the book improved no end.

For various reasons, some personal, some financial, and some to do with changes in publishing, I had an interval working as a playwright. By the time I went back to novels, I had a new agent who told me that publishers were looking for an ‘oven-ready product’.  She was a good and helpful mentor and I liked her a lot but she was definitely looking for an instant hit from me. What she really wanted was a stonking great bestseller. I can’t blame her. She was just doing her job as she saw it.

For me, the writing itself was still exhilarating, but everything surrounding it had started to feel a bit like a treadmill and somewhere along the way, I realised that I had lost the joy. I had also, in a strange way, lost sight of my readers. I was no longer finding the kind of ‘mid-list’ non genre specific books I liked to read in the big bookstores.

Then along came the revolution. Like many revolutionaries, I joined in because I had absolutely nothing to lose. A novel called The Curiosity Cabinet, shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize, had been traditionally published but had gone out of print and the rights had reverted to me. People who had read and enjoyed it were contacting me to ask when the next book would be out but I had no idea when that might be. Eventually, I decided that I simply couldn’t wait any longer and indie-published it as an eBook, under the Wordarts imprint. I followed that up, over the course of a year, with two new novels: Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart. I have other plans: print on demand for those who are asking for paper versions, many more new novels, (two of them already written) some non-fiction.

There’s one thing I’ve learned, over all these years, over this rollercoaster of a career: there are no shortcuts.

There’s reading (extraordinary books, good books, even bad books, so that you can learn to tell the difference) and there’s writing. A prodigious amount of both. You begin by imitating what you love and end up by finding your own voice.  Pursuing what writer Bernard MacLaverty calls ‘made up truth’. It’s about discovering the germ of truth at the heart of whatever you are writing. Everything else is a distraction.

 DENNIS HAMLEY

THEN  

A rather extraordinary thought has just occurred to me.  My first-ever book was published fifty years ago this month.  So long ago?  Incredible.  it seems like last week.  I’ve got it in front of me now.  A rather insignificant volume, I fear.  Not even a carefully preserved  original  complimentary copy but rescued many years later from a school stock cupboard, in Ipswich of all places, before they threw it out.  I’m not going to print out the cover: it’s hardly mind-boggling.  But oh, how proud I was.

It was called Three Towneley Plays.  They were modern versions of three medieval Miracle Plays and I wrote them for schools – even though I was, for at least half of the book, still a student myself, which now seems pretty cheeky.  ‘I’m on the way,’ I thought.

Vain hope.  My next book was published twelve years later.  In 1971, I started my first children’s novel, Pageants of Despair.  It was published in 1974.  After that I was writing in the moments I had free from teaching and advising until 1992.  In that year, after fourteen years of being County English Adviser for Hertfordshire and fed up to the teeth with dashing round the county peddling the then new National Curriculum and seeing a job I loved take new directions that I didn’t like, I retired early to become a full-time writer, which I’ve been ever since.   I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve written, but there are over sixty now, all sorts – novels, short story collections, books for schools, non-fiction for all ages.  The War and Freddy, Hare’s Choice, Death Penalty, Out of the Mouths of Babes, Spirit of the Place, Ellen’s People, Divided Loyalties, historical, fantasy, contemporary and (as far as I can make it) serious, though I like to think cheerfulness keeps breaking through

Writing has given me so much pleasure – as well as hard work and often anguish.  It’s a craft.  I had to learn it on my own.  But we can do better than that now.  We can spread the word to others who want to share in writing’s wonderful experience and this is a movement I’ve tried to involve myself in. In 1985 I started the “Lending Our Minds Out” writing courses for children at the Pearse House Conference Centre, Bishops Stortford.   After I retired early, Philip Levy, the director of Pearse House, and I decided that these courses offered too good an experience to let die so we set them up for primary school pupils from all over the country, using Youth Hostels as venues.  These courses ran until 2004, when rising costs meant they had become too expensive for most schools or parents to afford.   Many hundreds of children had been to them over the years.  And now there’s a chance that I may be able to start them afresh, here in Oxford where I now live.

NOW

Anyway, here I am, an Indie author.

You’re probably fed up with being told that the world of publishing is in a sorry state at the moment – at least, it is for people like me who have been writing successfully for a very long time but are now seen to be not profitable enough any more and so find getting new publishers difficult.  There are many in the same position, including some very famous names.  So we have to take matters into our own hands. As a result we feel suddenly free and in charge of our own destinies, like farmers giving up their ruinous contracts with big supermarkets and opening their farm shops.

Something which Catherine Czerkawska said in her Writer’s Piece last week  struck me quite forcibly as something else which  I have in common with one writer – and, I believe, most others  -  in this festival.

Catherine bemoaned the fact that she could no longer find ‘the midlist, non-genre specific books I like to find in the big bookstores.’ And why is that?  Because so many authors, including Catherine, refuse to write the same book over and over again: refuse to be typecast.   But the very  term ‘midlist author’, once something quite well worth being, has now become a kiss of death.

I felt a sharp shock of recognition.   Publishers like authors to be like cobblers, sticking to their lasts (and look where it’s got them in these days of sweated-labour Nike trainers).   If a book catches on, they want the same again.  And again.  Some writers can do it – PD James, Ian Rankin, PG Wodehouse.  But that’s because they are wonderful authors who – good phrase this but sadly not mine  – ‘define the taste by which they are judged.’  That’s not open to most of us and anyway, many authors would find such a life boring beyond belief.  When one book is done, the next must be totally different.  A new challenge, a new exploration.  Catherine is one of those, and so are Jan and Chris and Dan and John and Bill and Cally and Peter and pretty well everyone else in this festival.  And so am I.

When I first started being published, I was labelled a ‘historical novelist’.  And it’s true: I often am.  But then I wrote a few ghost stories.  ‘Ah yes, DH the ghost story writer,’ people said.  I wrote a lot of stories and two novels about  football.  I was dismissed as ‘a writer about football’.   I wrote stories about war.  Football and war – I was called  ‘a  writer for boys.’  Hadn’t anybody noticed how often my main character was female, including in my three most ambitious war novels, The Fourth Plane at the Flypast (1985), Ellen’s People (2006) and Divided Loyalties (2008)?   I wrote my little book of short stories about Freddy in World War 2, The War and Freddy.  It’s done well, still in print after twenty years, read in primary schools all over the country.  ‘Oh, let’s have more like that,’ people said.  Well, no.  Freddy was finished, his war was over and there was no more to say.  I was already writing a sequel to Hare’s Choice, my favourite among my own books.  Hare  was not after all the standalone which I had intended but the first in a trilogy.  This was not because anyone asked me to write one, in fact the publishers were quite doubtful when I announced it, but because I realised I had to.  I wrote Out of the Mouths of Babes, a fairly strong book about contemporary society and a clash of class values.  Shall I write another like it?  I doubt it: I’ve had my say there.   Will I ebook it?  I doubt that too: it would have to be updated because it’s set clearly in 1997 and this would be a major, major job which probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.   I wrote Spirit of the Place, a serious time-slip book which is my next to be put on Kindle because rereading told me that I really liked it.  I was going to update the (nearly) present-day bits but then realised that no, they had to stay as they were because if I changed them the whole point of the book would be lost.  Yes, I know The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay consists of six books.  But I was first asked to write a series and I couldn’t stand the thought of getting on a treadmill which I could only get off when the publishers got tired of it.  Joslin’s story was conceived as one big 250,000 word novel in six volumes.  I was once hauled in to see the Scholastic publishing director and told that they wanted me to be the British answer to RL Stine.  What an appalling prospect.   I said I’d think about it.  This Writer’s Piece is the result.  Thank God.

The main reward for any writer is to be read.  That’s more important than earning lots of money, more important than being famous.  If nobody reads you then you’ve got no chance of either.  This is why so many of us are turning to open access publishing on Kindle and the like.  This is why some writers, including me, are planning to set up their own publishing co-operatives, to reissue some of the books we have put on Kindle as high quality printed editions and publish new ones.  After all, nothing in the world can really beat the feel, the smell, in fact the beauty, of a new book – or the indefinable romance of an old one.

I have seven books out on Kindle now.  The eighth, Spirit of the Place, is nearly ready to go.   A time-slip novel – 1773 through to 1993.  It deals with, I hope, some big subjects.  It’s got a bit of supernatural, some things to think about: science and art, what the human function in the world is and, I hope, some good entertainment.   And a lot of poetry you’ve never read before.  Or ever again, I shouldn’t wonder.

 ROSALIE WARREN

Hi, I’m Rosalie Warren. My Scottish credentials are slightly dubious, but I’ve managed to bluff my way in anyway. I was born in Yorkshire but moved to Scotland at the age of 22 and lived first in Edinburgh and, later, just north of Dundee, for nearly twenty-five years. My children were born and brought up in Edinburgh and I did my PhD and taught at two universities there. Oh, and I always make sure I cook haggis on Burns’ Night, even now I live down south again. And I support the Jam Tarts… hope that’s enough!?

How to introduce myself? Well, I’m one of those annoying writers who wants a finger in every pie and a toe in every puddle. In other words, I like to try everything. In some cases, the experiment is short-lived, like my attempts to write poetry. And to be honest I’m not too hot on short stories either, though I do forget this once in a while and try one, to everyone’s embarrassment including my own.

My real love is the novel, and of course this gives me a fair bit of scope for experiment. I started by writing Charity’s Child, which was originally aimed at adults. However, it featured a teenage narrator and protagonist, which led me later to reclassify it as YA fiction (I’m still not quite sure). Charity’s Child was originally published by a small independent, Circaidy Gregory Press, but a few months ago, having regained the publication rights, I reissued it as an eBook. I’ve had some heartwarming reviews and am now working on a sequel, which is set twenty years later and which I expect to bring out as an eBook sometime next year.

The Charity in question is in her mid-teens, and a member of a fiercely evangelical church group in the early 1980s. It’s set in a tiny windswept seaside town on the Yorkshire coast of the UK – the kind of place where I spent many seaside holidays in my youth. The sea and the wind are important to the book, as they are to me. Charity becomes pregnant, and refuses to name the father. Suspicion falls on Alan, the assistant pastor of the church and a rather naive enthusiast for ‘the gifts of the Spirit’ and the like. But Charity soon begins to insist that the father of her child is no one other than God Himself. Joanne, Charity’s close friend and lesbian lover, has her doubts, but part of her wants to believe in Charity’s claims. The resolution of the mystery uncovers unpleasant secrets that have deep implications for a number of characters in the book, not least Joanne.

I found myself heavily involved with the people in the story as I told their tale. It’s not based, thankfully, on anything that happened to me, though the religious environment is a familiar one from my younger days. I suppose the story came out of one of those ‘what ifs?’ that writers set themselves… and I was shocked as any of  my readers when the ending emerged in the first draft.

So perhaps it’s an issue-based book of the kind that are written for young adults – or perhaps the incorporation of an adult narrator from time to time knocks out that possibility? I can’t decide. If you read it, I’d love to know what you think.

I’ve also had a book published, Coping with Chloe (Phoenix Yard Books, 2011), that’s definitely for young teens.  I’ve delved into romantic suspense with my novel for adults, Low Tide, Lunan Bay(Robert Hale 2009). And I’ve been commissioned by Phoenix Yard to write a series about a young boy and his robot, for 7-9s. (You’ll have realised by now that I’m an agent’s nightmare, which I’m sure is one reason why no agent has yet had the courage to sign me up. They come close, but then they back away…)

I’ve written another novel for adults, called Alexa’s Song, about a female musician who falls in love with an artist but then marries his brother. It could, I suppose, loosely be described as ‘women’s fiction’. I’ve had positive responses to my submissions, but I’ve also been told that its male narrator is ‘problematic’. Anyway, I’ve decided to bring out Alexa as an eBook, and it should be appearing once I have a cover, very soon.

I want to write serious, ‘literary’ fiction – to experiment with language and form. I want to write for babies, for reluctant readers, for older people and for everyone in between. I want to write issued-based books (I have a dream of writing a loosely linked series featuring children with various disabilities), but I also want to explore religion, the supernatural and the paranormal.  I want to push the idea of an eBook as far as it will go. But I also want to write cosy, funny, chocolate-flavoured fiction of the kind I like to read on an off day when I need comforting.

Oh yes, and drama. I’m currently working on a play based on Coping with Chloe. I would absolutely love to see my work come alive on stage.

I’m well aware that I don’t have as much time left as I’d like, so I’d better get a move on. Perhaps it’s time to stop worrying what anyone thinks or how to label my books, but just get on and write them. I know… that goes against all the best advice. But I’m a rebel at heart, and if I ever find success within one set of rules I’ll only want to change them and start all over again.

 JULIA JONES

The last time I was in Edinburgh was in 2005. The university hosts the Centre for the History of the Book and I was attending their rather grandly-entitled conference Material Cultures and the Creation of Knowledge. Looking back at the programme I see sessions on typography, libraries, marginalia, commonplace books, dissemination and several on reading communities. I was there because I was ‘giving a paper’ (quaint terminology) on an obscure nineteenth century evangelical newspaper.

It was a major academic event with scholars from all over the world but it was the antithesis of the literary festival. There was no focus at all on writers Yes, there were some bigwigs of the cultural history world – Robert Darnton, Juliet Gardiner, Peter Burke, Laurel Brake – but this was an event that was books minus creators, minus the personalisation that’s at the heart of the festival.

I find it hard, when I’m asked what I do, to answer confidently ‘I am a writer.’ The few books that I’ve written do make me happy. There is a trilogy of sailing stories (The Salt-Stained Book, A Ravelled Flag and Ghosting Home), a published biography (The Adventures of Margery Allingham) and another forthcoming (Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory). Writing, however, is only one part of my occupation. Apart from the first incarnation of the Margery Allingham biography, which was published conventionally by Wm Heinemann Ltd, all these books have been home-published.  This means that I’ve chosen their covers, talked to the designer, discussed their typefaces and the placing of the illustrations, sent them to the printers, received them home again, marketed them, distributed them, sold them, stored them. These books are thoroughly material objects, commodities in the Marxist sense.

I have also expended my labour on new editions of Cheapjack by Philip Allingham and The Oaken Heart by Margery Allingham. These are wonderful and unusual memoirs by two writers who were born-to-the-trade. Yet I feel that those two Golden Duck editions of their works are also, in some sense, mine. Then there was the PhD. I wrote 100,000 words of text, yet it’s probably the appendices that represent the main achievement. I spent hours (hours? months or years, I should say!) of archive research compiling a catalogue of work by an anonymous and forgotten hack, Herbert Allingham. It was onerous but exciting, constructive as well as geeky. Perhaps it felt  like a detective investigation.

When I was a village bookseller, long ago, I did local, small-scale publishing. There were four volumes of essays by elderly Essex people that I published in support of the charity Age Concern: When I Was a Child, Yesterday’s Heroes, The Last All-Clear, In Those Days. I was the editor and publisher, not the writer of these books, and when I look at them now I see how many mistakes I made in their presentation. Yet I feel almost as imaginatively involved in those earlier books, as I do for the recent books where I provided all the words.

I wonder whether this is partly to do with the way that the words you write seem to change their character once they are published? They are like the children who have left home – you don’t possess them any more (if you ever did possess them, but that’s another question, both about children and about words). There’s still the uncomfortable awareness that your parenting was inadequate and all their personality faults can probably be laid at your door but once they have left home (or been published) they take their virtues with them. They seem to have become detached  – at least this is my experience. You reread them with slight surprise – did I write this? Is this large, inarticulate, hairy monster my sweet baby?

I find that the books I’ve produced for publication give me a different, more tangible pleasure –  or otherwise. I can look at them and yes, I do think that illustration’s in just the right place; mmm … I’ve always liked that typeface; drat, how could I have missed those typos? There’s a lot of material labour goes into a book, quite apart from the words. I’m only gradually learning the craft of epublishing but being an independent book publisher does sometimes feel like a creative process as well as solid hard work.

Many of the writers who will be appearing at the main Edinburgh Book Festival will have been separate from the production stages of their work. They will have handed their latest opus to their agent or editor, possibly been asked for an opinion on the cover (or not), answered the copy editor’s questions, checked the proofs and got on with the next project  – whilst responding to any publicity department requests to appear at literary festivals, book-signings etc. ‘I am a writer’ they can say, professionally.

How does this work for participants in the independent ebook festival? Differently again, I would say. And differently for each person too. For many of us indie-publishing has been a process of re-integrating ourselves with our labours. People who have previously experienced the conventional publication of their work are discovering the more holistic pleasures – and pains –  of taking the whole process under their own control. An ebook remains a thoroughly material commodity even though it’s no longer per se tangible. E-writers are also having to discover new ways to interact with each other and with readers now that they are no longer stocked in high street shops or  invited to appear at the conventional literary festivals. Thanks to the Indie e-Book Review for hosting this alternative venue.

I can’t remember hearing anything about electronic formats at the Material Cultures conference back in 2005 though that might be simply that I didn’t attend the relevant sessions. I can’t see anything specific on the programme. There was, however, a lot of interest in the historical geography of the book – I remember the fascination (though not, I’m ashamed to say, the detail) of a presentation that connected various titles and types of publication to the spread of settlers across North America and how this changed with the building of the railways. Epublishing is dramatically changing the geography of the book and the composition of reading communities. I’d  love to be a fly on the wall at the 2105 Material Cultures conference to hear what those academics say about what’s happening today.

Will they still bother travelling to Edinburgh to convene in person? We’re already in the world of virtual conferences and on-line festivals. Here we are, sitting at home, attending one. Yet the editor of the IEBR believes that people / writers are important and that we need and enjoy the sort of personalisation that a 2012 Edinburgh Book Festival attendee would expect. And I think I agree with her.

So get on and introduce yourself, Julia, she might reasonably say. If you’re not sure you’re a writer, what do you think you’re doing in this space?

Would it be okay to answer that I’m a Jill-of-all-trades: a former bookseller, a researcher, an editor, a writer and self-publisher (self-publiciser as well, I suppose)? Could I perhaps present this as going back a historical stage before the alienation of the writer’s labour and the fragmentation of the printing-publishing process?

Scotland has an admirable tradition of referring to artists as ‘makers’. But I’m a southerner. I thought today that I’d badge myself a ‘booksmith’. Thanks for inviting me to this event.

 ROSEMARY GEMMELL

I have been writing on and off for around 15 years while working part-time, running a home and bringing up a son and daughter who are now independent adults with flats of their own. While working, I studied for a BA (hons) in European literature and history with the Open University, then achieved a Masters in Humanities a few years later. I’m now trying to be a full time freelance writer – when not helping my husband with his business and other admin work.

Many of my short stories and articles have been published in national magazines, including: The Weekly News, My Weekly, People’s Friend, Writing Magazine, Freelance Market News, The Herald,Woman Alive, Ireland’s Own, Prima, The Oldie, Scottish Home & Country, and in the US (The Highlander and New Love Stories), and Online. Some of my stories have won prizes, including theWriting Magazine Annual Love Story Competition in 2005, which was the most exciting moment of my writing life so far! Three children’s stories are published in different anthologies from Bridge House Publishing and a children’s story is being published on the Knowonder website.

One of my short stories was included in the fundraising book, ‘100 Stories for Haiti’ in 2010. A historical short story was published in ‘The Waterloo Collection’, launched by the late professor Richard Holmes in April 2011, and another story was included in ‘Lavender Dreams’ a fund-raising cancer anthology from MuseItUp Publishing in Canada.

My first novel, Dangerous Deceit, romantic intrigue in Regency times, was published in ebook by Champagne Books in Canada last year (as Romy), and my first tween book, Summer of the Eagle was published in ebook by MuseItUp Publishing in Canada this April (as Ros). Because of the meteoric rise and success in e-publishing, I then put my own short story collection together for Kindle. Reshaping the Past: Short Stories of Love and Relationships contains 8 of my previously published magazine stories as I thought they deserved another outing for the ebook market Hopefully, I’ll put together another collection with a different type of short stories. I love the global aspect of our books being downloadable from anywhere in the world.

I greatly enjoy giving talks on market research and markets to local writing groups and often adjudicate local competitions. I’m a long time member of Erskine Writers, which kick-started my own writing career. I’m also a member of the Scottish Association of Writers, the Society of Authors and the Scottish Fellowship of Christian Writers, as well as several online forums. Earlier this year, I adjudicated the Castles in the Air Short Story Competition at the SAW, and I’ve won a few competitions myself over the last year. At the moment, I subscribe to Writers’ Forum, Writers’ News and Writing Magazine, Mslexia and Freelance Market News.

 CAROL McKAY

Over the last twelve years I’ve had short stories and poetry published in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers and the stories have recently been resurrected in a collection called Ordinary Domestic: collected short stories, e-published by indie publisher Pothole Press.

One of these stories was a finalist in a major Scottish competition called the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition, way back in 2002. It won me £500 so it’s definitely one of my favourites. It’s a tale written in an urban Scots dialect and it’s called Unrestricted.  I wrote it in a fit of angst when I felt I was getting nowhere with my writing. I noticed my husband was gripped by films which featured three things – a car chase, sex and violence. So I challenged myself to write a literary short story which included all three and Unrestricted is the result.

The first story in Ordinary Domestic deals with mental health issues. This is a topic I come back to again and again in my writing, along with the whole idea of misfits and outcasts – people who don’t quite fit in society. There’s a misfit in us all, I think. Frozen Waste is a story about a young man whose mental and physical health problems have led to his self-imposed exclusion. He is squatting in a hut in the town recycling centre when the story opens and finds a little human warmth when he meets a bubbly and upbeat girl. His problems start – intensify? – when she goes missing. Frozen Waste was published in the first issue of Gutter magazine in 2009.

As a child and young adult I wanted to be a writer but gave up my ambitions when I started work. There were so many books published already; there didn’t seem to be any need for me to add to that pile.  I’d nothing new to say. So I spent fifteen years as a librarian, promoting other people’s books.

In my mid thirties, I had the opportunity to live in the south of France for a year with my husband and two children, so I put my working life on hold. What a time I had! Too much sea, sun and … suddenly I found myself pregnant with twins.  There was no financial help towards childcare costs twenty years ago so it didn’t make sense for me to go back to work when I’d four children. So I took a course in freelance journalism and earned my first pay packet as a writer with an anniversary piece about Citroen cars in Autocar and Motor magazine. And I hate cars!  I’m more interested in family and social history so was happy to have pieces published on a regular basis in Family History Magazine and a monthly column about the history of Cumbrian surnames in Cumbria and Lake District Magazine. I also started taking an interest in writing fiction again and never went back to work in libraries.

I started working with the Open University in 2004, teaching their short module ‘A174 Start Writing Fiction’. It was a great course. Apparently almost 19,000 people across the UK and abroad studied it between 2004 and spring this year when it reached the end of its life. I also teach on the module ‘A215 Creative Writing’. I love coaching people and helping them to develop their talents. This coach gets a lot out of it, too. I often think I learned more from teaching these two modules than I did when I studied my MLitt in Creative Writing.

In 2008, Mainstream Publishing in Edinburgh (part of the Random House Group) published a biography I co-wrote. As I lay me down to sleep by Eileen Munro with Carol McKay is now also available as an e-book:

In 2010, I had a bit of a dream come true in that I won the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. This meant I was entitled to spend a full month during the summer living in the Hotel Chevillon south of Paris in a modern writers’ and artists’ retreat. RLS spent two long summers there in the 1870s and he met his future wife there, too. His brother and other artists, including several of those who went on to be known as The Glasgow Boys, also spent time there, finding it and their bohemian lifestyle inspirational.  You can see photos from my time there if you go to my blog posts for July 2010

Quite often, I argue with myself about e-books versus ‘proper’ publishing. I see the odds stacked against me for traditional publishing: I’m too old; I’m female; I’m lazy; I’m unfashionable; I’m too urban Scottish; I’m none of the things that publishing companies seek out to pay their staff wages and turn a profit.

And though some of that’s right, much of it is wrong. I know, because I’ve been published by big companies before. As I Lay Me Down To Sleep (which I co-wrote and directed) sold 50,000 copies. Mainstream Publishing snatched it up. The reason? Mainstream could see it fitted perfectly into a pre-established market; it was bound to earn them money. I wrote about my experience of working with Eileen for Publishing Scotland. You can read the article here

My fiction is less easy to place and that’s the nub of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a fair few short stories published in magazines and anthologised by publishing houses like Birlinn and Luath. I’ve had fiction appear in newspapers, too – both The Herald and The Daily Telegraph have published pieces.

Creative Scotland’s antecedent, the Scottish Arts Council, saw fit to grant me a bursary and a travel bursary on the strength of my fiction. They subsequently awarded me that Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, too.

Can I get past those sturdy synopsis-reading guardians of the publishing houses with my novels, though? Can I wheechy. Part of the problem is that my fiction doesn’t fit neatly into a pre-existing category. In a world of cubes and cuboids, my fiction is a sphere with spikes on it. It’s literary but not literary enough; it’s fast-paced and well plotted but isn’t crime, or thriller, or …  It’s got a speculative fiction element, but only as one ingredient in a larger social realism storyline.

From where I stand, there are three doors facing me, and three options. I can keep pushing on the first door. It’s got a lot of brasso on the doorknob and knocker but my type of person is more likely to be nipping out from inside wearing a pinny and carrying a duster to buff up that knocker than actually being invited inside. The second door leads to a place where I can sulk and give up. That door’s best slammed shut. The third leads to a place where I decide to do it myself and get the work out there as best as I can. And that’s the door I’ve chosen recently. Last year, I had a couple of short stories published online in Spilling Ink Review and From Glasgow to Saturn. Once you’ve had a short story accepted for an online magazine, the step towards publishing a full length work electronically is a small one. A readership is still a readership whether the work is read on paper or screen.

I’m still polishing and revising my work and sending it out to ‘proper’ publishers and agents in the hope that one of them will pick my hard work out of the landslide of the slush-pile, but at the same time, I can take positive action and do it myself care of the e-publishing revolution.

When I say I’m doing it myself, I’m not being entirely truthful. I’m doing it with my partner, Keith, who set up the Pothole Press to help me get my writing out there. To date, he’s published Ordinary Domestic – my collected short stories – and a little e-book called Creative Writing Prompts and Ideas to Feed the Imagination, based on my years of teaching and coaching writing groups and individuals.

Forthcoming in October is Second Chances: true stories of living with Addison’s Disease – a life-writing project which is close to my heart. Addison’s Disease is an auto-immune condition I was diagnosed with in 2010. It’s a life-threatening condition and it’s supposed to be what killed Jane Austen. JF Kennedy had it, too – it’s what gave him his tan! Nowadays, Addison’s is fairly easily managed with drugs but it was scary being diagnosed with it in an emergency. The Second Chances e-book will feature life writing by people around the world who’ve faced the condition: who’ve faced fast-approaching death. And lived to tell the tale. It’s sure to be a stunner.

I’m also jotting down some thoughts towards a memoir of my own. That’s for a future project. Who knows what the e-book / traditional publishing market balance will be by next year’s Edinburgh E-book Festival!

 LINDA GILLARD

Why I went indie (and will stay indie)

When, a few years ago, I was dropped by my publisher (“disappointing sales” was the reason given), my agent set about trying to find a new home for two of my manuscripts. For two years we got what’s known in the trade as “rave rejections” in which editors said basically, “We love your story/characters/setting/style, but we don’t see how we could market this.” (I should perhaps explain, my novels belong to no clear genre, or rather several. Readers don’t seem to have a problem with this, but publishers and retailers do.)

While I waited, I decided to write a really commercial novel, something that would surely secure me a new contract. TWILIGHT frenzy was at its height. All editors seemed to be looking for was paranormal romance, so I decided I’d write one. This was both courageous and stupid. I neither read nor liked paranormal romance. Worse, I’d satirised the genre in an earlier novel, STAR GAZING, which featured a dizzy, middle-aged author of Gothic vampire romances set in Edinburgh.

I confess I felt as if I was selling out, but I badly wanted to get back in the game. I was running out of options and my agent was running out of editors. So I started my new paranormal novel, THE GLASS GUARDIAN  as a NaNoWriMo project and quickly produced 25,000 words. Then I hit a wall. Looking at my manuscript, I no longer knew what genre I was writing. I’d created no brave new urban world. My setting was an old Victorian house on the Isle of Skye, with a sad history and beautiful garden. My heroine wasn’t remotely kick-ass. She was a reserved,  42-year old horticulturalist, out of a job and recovering from bereavement. My ghost-hero was guilt-ridden and rather weary of haunting. Most damning of all, I’d failed to write extended passages of Olympian and largely gratuitous sex. (But there was passion.)

Clearly this wasn’t going to be your standard paranormal romance. My sixth novel was turning into the same sort of unmarketable genre-buster that had given my publishers such a headache. Disheartened, I abandoned the book and decided to investigate Kindle as a possible home for one of my unplaced manuscripts.

The idea of creative control certainly appealed. When traditionally published, I’d had a title foisted on me which I hated; I’d been asked to simplify storylines and make characters more likeable; two out of three of my pbs had been sunk by unappealing covers. So when I e-published HOUSE OF SILENCE,

I paid a professional designer to produce a cover to my specifications. No headless women. No supermodel legs. No illegible fonts. Just a cover that made a clear statement about the content of the book: a spooky old country house under a lowering sky that would pull together my genre-busting description of the novel as “A country house mystery… A family drama… A Gothic romantic comedy.”

To my complete astonishment, self-publishing on Kindle was a huge success. Who knows why an ebook succeeds, but my cover, price and synopsis must have played their part. Readers told me the “blurb” ticked a lot of boxes. Some said they bought HOUSE OF SILENCE on the strength of the “COLD COMFORT FARM meets REBECCA” tag line. (So much for “unmarketable”.)

This wasn’t exactly beginner’s luck. I wasn’t a typical indie author. I’d been short-listed for and won awards and I already had a modest but enthusiastic following. My ebook sales were the culmination of six years’ interaction with readers on the internet. I’d always engaged in blog and forum discussions and been conscientious about keeping in touch with readers. I’d used my Facebook author page and website  to keep fans informed, then when I went indie, it all paid off. On e-publication day, we had an impromptu launch party for HOUSE OF SILENCE on Facebook. My lovely, loyal readers bought the book, tweeted and blogged, so it was selling in a matter of hours. Within a few months it became a bestseller. (Amazon eventually acknowledged my success at the end of last year when they selected HOUSE OF SILENCE as a Top Ten Editor’s Pick Best of 2011 in the Indie Author category.)

Despite two solid years of rejection, I’d never lost faith in HOUSE OF SILENCE. I knew that book’s odd mix of genres didn’t mean it was uncommercial, simply that it was tricky to market. But with an ebook, the author markets directly to readers who just want a good story at a good price. (Publishers have to market to retailers who have completely different criteria based on unrealistic sales expectations and an often misplaced faith in famous names.) I knew my readers and I knew what they liked. I thought they’d like HOUSE OF SILENCE. I was right. Genre simply wasn’t an issue for them.

In the ebook world story is king. Genre boundaries have become blurred. E-publishing has led to a proliferation of genres, sub-genres and a lot of creative inter-breeding. Whatever you might want to read – cougar rom-coms, gay nautical historical fiction, Roman romance with gladiators, male or female – someone will be writing it and now, thanks to indie ebooks, someone is publishing it. Rumours of the death of the book have been greatly exaggerated. We’ve actually entered a golden age for readers and writers.

Back in the word factory, I returned to my abandoned paranormal. My commercial novel still didn’t seem very commercial. I could already envisage the rejection emails from editors, pointing out that THE GLASS GUARDIAN would be difficult to market as it didn’t conform to the genre. But I finished the book and sent it to my agent, asking her to try one last time to find me a new publisher.

Meanwhile, HOUSE OF SILENCE continued to sell. Encouraged, I put two out of print backlist novels on Kindle, then a new one, UNTYING THE KNOT.  They sold too. But I was still looking for a publisher. (At least, I thought I was.) I was now earning a modest living from my writing, something I never dreamed of doing when traditionally published. Fans were begging me for another new book. I told them a manuscript was currently doing the rounds, but I wasn’t too hopeful.

After a couple of months, my agent had heard nothing, so I made a very big decision. I told her to withdraw the manuscript of my paranormal novel. I couldn’t see the point of collecting rejections for a year or so when I could e-publish in a couple of months and start banking the proceeds. Even though THE GLASS GUARDIAN was a new departure for me, I knew I already had a market for this book and a big band of loyal readers who’d do much of the marketing for me.

Flushed with my Kindle success, drunk perhaps on creative freedom, I realised I wasn’t prepared to re-write to fit some marketing niche. I’d already tried to squeeze my square story into a round hole and I couldn’t do it. But I knew, in the unlikely event of being offered a book contract, that’s probably what I’d be asked to do. But if I published the book myself, I could tell my story the way I wanted to tell it. I could also find out if there was a market for a different sort of paranormal novel – the kind I’d written.

I e-published THE GLASS GUARDIAN on Kindle in June. It already has 22 four- and five-star reviews on Amazon UK. One reader called it “a paranormal romance for grown-ups”. Reviewers described it as a paranormal for people who don’t like paranormals. (Try selling that concept to Tesco.)

For me THE GLASS GUARDIAN is a very special book. It’s the novel that made me decide to go indie for good; the one in which I said what I wanted to say, in the way I wanted to say it. And that’s how it’s going to be with every book now, because I won’t be going back. Well, why would I? Traditional publishing was just getting in the way of my books finding their readers.

 ABOUT THE WRITERS

This information is taken from the Writers Festival Page.

 Jan Needle was born in Portsmouth on the south coast of England and moved to the north west when he was 20 to join the Daily Herald. At 25 he left full-time journalism and took a degree in drama at Manchester University, where he started writing plays for stage and radio, then short stories and later novels.In later years he made a living with journalism, radio and television drama, stage plays, and novel-writing, at first for children and later for adults too. He has also written books and essays of dramatic criticism including on Brecht with Professor Peter Thomson. His first novel, Albeson and the Germans, was published in l977, and was followed within two years by My Mate Shofiq and A Fine Boy for Killing, both of which are still in print. He has since written a many novels for children and adults, some making it onto the stage and screen. He continued the William Bentley series of nautical historic fictions, with which he hopes to strip the genre of some of its romantic elements (and still make a living!). More recently he has created “young person’s” versions of Moby Dick and other classics, to open up this sometimes heavy-going world to a new generation.

Jan publishes through Skinback Publishing and his current ebooks are: Kicking Off, Killing Time at Catterick, Silver and Blood: A Return to Treasure Island and A Game of Soldiers.

Jan’s website is www.janneedle.com

Cally Phillips has been writing professionally for 20 years and has broadcast credits for TV and Radio as well many plays for stage. She was artistic director of Bamboo Grove Theatre Company from 2002-2006 and has worked with a variety of mental health/learning disability groups on creative projects.  She has undertaken residencies with DGAA and WLYT as well as teaching many creative courses from dramatic/screenwriting to digital film editing and production.  She was Secretary of the Scottish Branch of the Writers Guild for several years and a script reader for Channel 4. She writes in Scots and English.

Cally publishes through HoAmPresst Publishing and Guerrilla Midgie Press and her current ebooks are available in Kindle and epub formats:  A Week with No Labels, Brand Loyalty, Chasing Waves, Five Fair Play Dramas, It Wisnae Me,  The Threads of Time and Voices in ma Heid.

Cally’s website is www.callyphillips.co.uk

Peter Tarnofsky. Author, father, husband.

Born in London. Still in London.

Occasionally cooks but won’t iron.

Older than I look.

Studied Materials Science & Metallurgy at Cambridge University then forgot most of it. Had conventional jobs for ten years then decided to try something different.

Peter’s current ebooks are: Timestand and They All Die at the End.

Peter’s website is http://theyalldieattheend.wordpress.com

Chris Longmuir is a crime novelist as well as a short story and article writer. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the CWA (Crime Writers Association), the SAW (Scottish association of Writers) and is a founder member of Angus Writers Circle. She won the 2009 Dundee Book Prize with her novel Dead Wood.

Chris’s published ebooks are available in all epub formats and currently are:  A Salt Splashed Cradle, Nightwatcher, Ghost Train & Other Stories and Obsession & Other Stories.

Chris’s website is www.chrislongmuir.co.uk

Bill Kirton was born in Plymouth, but has lived in Aberdeen for most of his life.  He has written stage and radio plays, songs and sketches for revues, flash fiction, short stories, novels, stories for children and books aimed at helping students to write effective academic essays and dissertations and get the most out of university and work. He has been a university lecturer, actor, director, TV presenter, visiting professor and artist at the University of Rhode Island and spent a few years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in universities in Aberdeen, Dundee and St Andrews. 

Bill publishes through Bloody Brits Press, Pfoxmoor Publishing  and Solstice Publishing  and his current ebooks are: The Jack Carston series: Material Evidence,  Rough Justice, The Darkness, Shadow Selves and Unsafe Acts and The Sparrow Conundrum, The Figurehead and (as Jack Lefebre) Alternative Dimension and (as Jack Rosse) The Loch Ewe Mystery.

Bills Website is  www.bill-kirton.co.uk

Catherine Czerkawska. Award winning playwright and novelist Catherine Czerkawska has been living and writing in Scotland for many years. Catherine is an experienced writer, with a good track record in traditional publishing, fiction and non-fiction, and with many professionally produced (and published) plays to her name. She has taught for Arvon at Moniack Mhor and held a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship for some years. She is currently on the committee of the Society of Authors in Scotland and on the board of the Ayrshire Arts Network.

Catherine’s publishes through WordArts  and her current ebooks are The Amber Heart, Bird of Passage, The Curiosity Cabinet, A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture, The Secret Commonwealth, Quartz, Stained Glass and Burns on the Solway.

Catherine’s website is www.wordarts.co.uk

Dennis Hamley has been publishing for 50 years this month.  That’s enough to give him a ‘special’ place in this festival.  We have termed him the ‘father’ of indie publishing, not in the Tim Berners-Lee sense of the world ‘father’ but more in the ‘Father of the House’ sense! (He’s not the only septuagenarian featured epublishing at the festival, but we won’t dwell on that!)  Dennis scores the accolade of ‘father’ of the festival because of his longevity in publishing.   He has well over 60 conventionally published books to his credit (far too many to list here) and in the last six months he has epublished the out of print The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay series –all six volumes in six months!

Dennis’s current ebooks are The Joslin saga: Of Dooms and Death, A Pact with Death, Hell’s Kitchen, A Devil’s Judgement, Angel’s Snare, The False Father and the short story collection Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Candlestick.  

Dennis’s website is www.dennishamley.co.uk

Rosalie Warren began writing fiction seriously six years ago when she took early retirement from her post as university lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Writing novels was something she had wanted to do since childhood, but in 2006 she realised that now, finally, she had the time and energy to do it. Her first novel, Charity’s Child, was published by the small independent publisher Circaidy Gregory Press in 2008. This was followed by Low Tide, Lunan Bay, published by Robert Hale in 2009, after which Ros decided she would like to try writing for a younger audience. She was delighted when Phoenix Yard Books accepted Coping with Chloe, aimed at age 11+. Ros’s first venture into e-publishing came earlier this year when she brought out a new, revised edition of her first novel, Charity’s Child, as an e-book for Amazon Kindle (other formats will follow soon).Ros is currently preparing another novel for adults, Alexa’s Song, for publication as an e-book. Rosalie Warren confesses that she is one of those authors who wants to ‘try everything’ – the bane of an agent’s life. But she doesn’t care – she’s having fun and seems to be managing quite well without an agent, at least for the time being.As her alter ego Sheila Glasbey, she is a proofreader and copy-editor

Rosalie’s current ebook publication is Charity’s Child

Her website is www.rosalie-warren.co.uk

Julia Jones writes adventure stories and biography. Her first book was a biography of the detective novelist Margery Allingham which was re-published in paperback as The Adventures of Margery Allingham. She inherited a unique archive of material relating to Margery’s father Herbert Allingham, an anonymous writer of instalment fiction for the Northcliffe penny papers and will finally publish the results of her research as Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory, autumn 2012. In the sailing community she’s best known as the owner of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck and she’s used this link as the inspiration for her Strong Winds adventure trilogy. Julia has reviewed for the TES and other national newspapers and magazines.

Julia publishes through Golden Duck and her current ebooks are: The Strong Winds Trilogy: The Salt Stained Book, A Ravelled Flag and Ghosting Home.

Julia’s website is www.golden-duck.co.uk

 Rosemary Gemmell’s short stories and articles have been published in UK national magazines, in the US, and online. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Scottish Association of Writers and the Romantic Novelists’ Association. She often adjudicates short story competitions for writing groups and the SAW.

Rosemary publishes under the names Ros Gemmell, Romy Gemmell and Rosemary Gemmell and her current ebooks are: Dangerous Deceit, Summer of the Eagles and Reshaping the Past

Rosemary’s website is www.rosemarygemmell.com

Carol McKay writes fiction, life writing and some poetry and  teaches creative writing, mostly through the Open University. Her writing has been published in a range of magazines over the last ten years, including Gutter, Chapman and Mslexia. She’s also had fiction published in The Herald and The Telegraph, and anthologised by Birlinn, Luath and Freight. Nine of these stories have now been collected and published as an e-book by PotHole Press, along with some of her previously unpublished favourites.

Carol publishes through PotHole Press and her current ebook is Ordinary Domestic

Carol’s website is www.carolmckay.co.uk

Linda Gillard lives on the Black Isle, Scotland and writes fulltime. She is the author of six novels, including STAR GAZING, short-listed in 2009 for Romantic Novel of the Year and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award. STAR GAZING was also voted Favourite Romantic Novel 1960 – 2010 by Woman’s Weekly readers. Linda’s fourth novel, HOUSE OF SILENCE was e-published in April 2011 and has become a Kindle bestseller, selling over 20,000 copies in its first year. HOUSE OF SILENCE was selected by Amazon as one of their Top Ten “Best of 2011″ in the Indie Author category.

Linda’s current ebooks are A Lifetime Burning, Emotional Geology, The Glass Guardian, House of Silence, Star Gazing and Untying the Knot.

Linda’s website is www.lindagillard.co.uk

Where to buy your ebooks from.

All of our writers are published via Amazon Direct Publishing.  So a good place to start is the Amazon Author Page for each author. Several also have ebooks available as epub and pdf format through outlets such as Kobo and Smashwords and/or direct from their website.  The distribution outlets are changing all the time and as writers we aim to take advantage of all possible options to get work as directly as possible to the reader. Please note that pricing and availability are subject to changes which are sometimes outside the writer’s individual control.

For print editions either go to the writer’s website or Amazon for further information.