What makes YOU take a book from the shelf? It’s a question that every bookshop, publisher and agent ponders. It’s a question that every writer should ponder too, if they want to make a living from writing. Covers matter, and titles matter. And I’ll be talking about covers in a while But when it comes […]

Posted by on Aug 24, 2008 in Uncategorised | 5 Comments

Illness strikes My house is like a plague zone – another Bank Holiday weekend will bite the dust. Back when Florence Nightingaling permits, with musings on titles and covers and what makes people pick certain books from bookshelves. Illness courtesy of ghindo

Carmel gets her way As regular readers will know, I have a tripartite writing personality: Kay Sexton writes literary fiction, Ren Holton writes science fiction and a bit of horror and Carmel Lockyer writes erotica. Carmel’s been having a good couple of months on the quiet: a story accepted by Forum, another by Scarlet, one […]

The second Australian publication … … arrived in the post on Friday. Sadly it wasn’t accompanied by another bar of Green & Black’s chocolate so I must accept without equivocation that magazines in which I feature, even if all the way from the Antipodes, do not necessarily arrive on the same day as a free […]

Cracking on What inspires you to write? Is it the words, the idea, the characters in your head? Deadlines? Competitions? A stunning first line? Wanting to earn money? Okay, that last one is silly, forget I said it. You’d be better off getting a paper round, as everybody knows, than trying to make a career […]

Never give up – never give in Crimewave had a story of mine that got put in the wrong drawer. Then they found it again and decided to publish it. Yippee! It would have been better, perhaps, if I’d given them a gentle nudge about six months or so ago, which might have caused them […]

Apocalypse and rejections So, I forgot all about this acceptance until a vibrant copy of Apocalypse Literary Arts turned up in the post. Sadly, it wasn’t in tandem with another chocolate and dried fruit bar from Green & Blacks (but I live in hope that the next magazine publication will repeat the dual delights of […]