What do you do when you get invited to meet Jane Fallon at the Ivy? You get yourself down there as quickly as possible.

Jane, Helen and Laura

Joe from Penguin and Helen.

Novel Kicks got to go to the Club at the Ivy to meet the lovely Jane Fallon, author of Getting Rid of Matthew, Got You Back, Foursome and her latest, The Ugly Sister which is due out on 29th September 2011. Thank you to the guys and girls at Penguin for a wonderful night.

Helen and I arrived and we were immediately taken aback by the Ivy. I’d never been to anywhere like that before and I was so excited to go in and have a nosy around (and not actually be thrown out again.)

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Laura has asked me to write a few words about Indie publishing as my latest book, Sometimes It Happens… is published on Amazon Kindle. The ease in which you can publish your own book has changed dramatically over the last year. E-book publishing is now extremely fashionable with sales souring and in some cases outselling conventional paperback / hardback books. Adding to this, the launch of the Kindle and iPad has created a whole new experience in reading.

I choose the route to Indie publish for several reasons, but one main reason is that I don’t live in the UK. I live on the beautiful island of Lanzarote in the Canary isles. There are many good reasons to live here, but it does distance me from agents and publishers who like their clients to be closer at hand. So in light of my location, I decided to publish my books independently.

Independent publishing does mean you do everything; from publishing to marketing, and you can do much of the necessary steps yourself, but there are stages in your writing when you do need to use a professional. For my third book, Sometimes It Happens… I was fortunate enough to work with the brilliant author, Helen Hollick. www.helenhollick.net

Helen has been my writing guide and editor and saw me through the entire manuscript of Sometimes It Happens… Her expert eye checked for continuity, believability, repetition and so much more. These are areas that as a writer you cannot always see yourself and a fresh, experienced set of eyes can. My published book as to compete with all the other well written books in this highly competitive market, therefore it not only must be a good read, but a professionally polished publication. I cannot stress enough the importance of having an editor to check your writing. Helen’s help has been invaluable and her knowledge and experience has taught me so much more. Continue reading →

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This is a post from Lynn Shepherd (taken from her blog) about how she went about ‘Ghosting Austen’
I was writing Murder at Mansfield Park when The Duchess came out on film, and I heard it being reviewed on BBC Radio 4. The critic said she loved the authentic settings and costumes, but felt it was let down by the script – especially the reference to Georgiana offering to ‘make a deal’ with her husband, when what she would actually have said was ‘make a bargain’.

It was a salutary reminder of what I already knew – even relatively small things like this will cumulatively detract from the authenticity of your prose. Right from the start, I’d always been determined to get this aspect of the book right – perhaps it’s the academic in me – but I knew my novel would never pass muster with the true Austen fan if it didn’t pass the accuracy test.

In practice this meant downloading all the novels, and checking pretty much every word as I went along. It sounds time-consuming – and it was – but imagine trying to do that before computers and wordsearch! The other key aspect of this process was to check not just if a word was used, but the context in which it appears. For example, my copy-editor came back to me after her first reading, and asked if we could change ‘the mood in the room’ to ‘the atmosphere in the room’ in one scene. I said I wished I could, but Austen never used the word ‘atmosphere’ except in the context of the weather. Again, it’s the little things. Continue reading →

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