Every Wednesday ALLi will tell the world about our members' latest book launches, news, awards, freebies, workshops and updates on the writing life and take a look at the projects and businesses of our partner members.
Joe Cawley
IPR License, the global and digital marketplace for books rights, has announced that Joe Crawley has won the latest IPR License ‘Agents Pick' for his memoir More Ketchup than Salsa.
Five pieces of work were shortlisted in total. According to IPR, The aim of the competition is to help showcase authors work to publishers as well as agents and highlight their rights licensing potential.
Tom Chalmers, Managing Director at IPR License, commented: ” More Ketchup than Salsa is a deserved winner of the latest Agents Pick and only serves to really emphasise the quality of titles on the IPR platform. With the platform now fully open to non-members to search, offer and negotiate deals on whole book rights more and more key titles are attracting the attention they deserve from interested parties on a global scale.”
Ingrid Williams
Scored a great review for Bing and Nero with a very good UK blog, Read It, Daddy!
Jim Musgrave
I’m launching a new business at English Majors, LLC on May 6, 2014. As a promotion, I’m giving away a free “author app” to all those who join our Facebook event site and fill-out our information form that will be posted on beginning 4/18/14 and continue until our launch date.
Also, we’ll be holding a Kickstarter launch beginning on the 18th as well. We’re giving away apps and eBook “enhancement make-overs” to those who donate to our worthy goal. I can send the link to the launch tomorrow if it can also be included in your announcements for next Wednesday.
Mary Gottschalk
Mary Gottschalk’s first novel A Fitting Place will be released on May 1st.
The premise of the novel, as with her memoir (Sailing Down the Moonbeam) is that you learn the most when you are in situations that cause you to re-examine your beliefs and values and force you to look for more effective approaches to the challenges of everyday life.
In the novel, Lindsey Chandler finds solace in a relationship with a woman in the wake of her husband’s desertion.
Before long, she finds herself ensnared by the same destructive inter-personal dynamics that plagued her marriage. Unable to blame her dilemma on traditional gender roles, Lindsey is forced to look in the mirror as she seeks to define what she wants from this—or any—relationship.
Freed from the straightjacket of societal notions of friend, wife, and mother, Lindsey calls on inner resources she never knew she had, as she sets out to build a new life for herself and her teenage daughter.
A Fitting Place is available on Amazon (paperback and kindle) and from Apple I-tunes.
Debbie Young and Rebecca Swift
Debbie Young
My Talk at the Cambridge Literary Festival
Two days before so many British-based ALLi members (and quite a few who flew in from other countries) were converging on London Book Fair; I was 60 miles away in Cambridge, representing ALLi with a public talk about publishing trends at the Cambridge Literary Festival.
Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy had kindly invited me to join her for a double-act. After working at prestigious trade publishing house Virago, Rebecca founded The Literary Consultancy in 1996 to provide editorial guidance for authors before they submit to agents and publishers, or indeed before they hit the “publish” button, if they're taking the self-publishing route. If you'd like more information about TLC's (great acronym!) services, here's their website: www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk.
Rebecca began the talk by offering advice on placing work with trade publishers, before I addressed the opportunities that lie within modern self-publishing. Our common theme: quality is all! Whichever route an author takes, he or she should ensure that any manuscript is the best it can possibly be before sending it out into the world.
Our packed and enthusiastic audience lingered long after the talk to discuss their own projects with us. At least two people have since joined ALLi as a result!
Big thanks to the lovely Rebecca and to the organisers of the wonderful Cambridge Literary Festival for all their help, and to the very interesting audience members who shared their ideas and projects via a lively Q&A session. If you'd like to read more about our talk, there's a more detailed post on my author blog here.
I loved taking part in this event and am now looking forward to my next public talk at the Romantic Novelists' Association's AGM this summer.
Rohan Quine
Interview on Lichen Craig's “Fireside” podcast
My thanks to Lichen Craig for interviewing me in depth, as part of her beautifully-produced “Fireside” series of podcasts.
It was a pleasure to be grilled with such sparky fun and engagement as we chatted about the nature of the world, the darkness and brightness in life, literature, and a sensible dose of silly stuff here and there as well – along with my novel The Imagination Thief and four novellas The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the quiet, reassuring crackle of a cosy log-fire behind us, throughout the interview, which is a nice touch: in reality, the two of us were thousands of miles apart, communing through a Google Hangout, but there was a log-fire crackling within us nonetheless, of course.
Fran Pickering
My book, The Cherry Blossom Murder, has made it to the quarter finals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2014.
The contest runs annually and accepts 10,000 entries worldwide in five categories – general fiction, mystery and thriller, romance, young adult, and science fiction, fantasy and horror. The Cherry Blossom Murder is in the mystery and thriller category.
In the first round, entries are reduced from 10,000 to 2,000. In the second stage those 2,000 compete for a place in the quarter finals, open only to the best 500 (the top 100 in each category). That means that 95% of entries fail to make it to the quarter finals.
So you can see, it’s pretty exciting to still be in the running as one of the top 5%, especially as a competition as prestigious as this, run by the biggest publisher in the world, attracts a mass of high-quality entries from Indy authors.
Carol Cram
Here is some news about my recently published novel The Towers of Tuscany and my current blog tour sponsored by the Historical Fiction Virtual Blog Tour.
From April 14 to April 25, historical fiction bloggers all around the blogosphere will be featuring The Towers of Tuscany! There will be reviews and interviews, and even some giveaways.
The last three stops on the blog tour are:
Wednesday, April 23
Review at Flashlight Commentary
Interview at Oh, for the Hook of a Book
Thursday, April 24
Review at Svetlana’s Reads and Views
Interview at Flashlight Commentary
Friday, April 25
Review & Giveaway at Words and Peace
Find more details and links on my blog.
J.F.Penn
With the launch of ACX in the UK, NY Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, J.F.Penn has used it to publish her audiobook, One Day In Budapest, available now.
If you love audiobooks, review copies are available. Please email [email protected] if you're interested.
Catriona Troth
For those of you in the London area, Triskele Books, ALLi and the Chorleywood Literary Festival will be coming together in this autumn to organise an INDIE AUTHOR FAIR. On the afternoon of Sunday 16th November, authors will be able to book a table at which they can sell their books, chat to readers and – if they wish – offer ‘Human Library' style one-to-one sessions one specific topics (e.g. design, editing, marketing…)
Afternoon teas will be served throughout to encourage people to come in and browse.
Tables can be reserved nearer the time through the Chorleywood Bookshop. However, for now we would like to be able to gauge the level of interest, in order to assess the size of venue we need and work out costing. Price of booking is expected to be under £5.
Chorleywood is half an hour out of central London on either the Metropolitan Line or the Chiltern Line.
To register your interest, or for further information, please send an email registering your interest to Catriona Troth at [email protected]
If you are a member of The Alliance of Independent Authors and you would like to showcase your work on our ALLi Showcase, please send it to [email protected] to reach me no later than the Friday proceeding the Wednesday you would like it published.
Just about to self publish in Malaysia. require foreign regional marketing help.
[…] members are also entitled to submit news items about their work for inclusion in the weekly Member Showcase. This is expertly compiled by Karen Lotter every Wednesday to show off members’ news to best […]
Been to tangled up in my own efforts at PR to read this recently but so glad to return to it… almost worth the ‘having to take a few days off, got myself too stressed’ thing!
Just started the Towers of Tuscany last night, and know now my next choice will be A Fitting Place – looks really interesting exploration of a dilemma I’ve promised myself already will appear in my next novel, so shall be interested how this author has tackled it.