Meet Helen Hart of SilverWood Books

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Helen Hart, publishing director at SilverWood Books. She has written novels under pseudonyms for Scholastic, Virgin Books, OUP and HarperCollins. One of her Young Adult novels, written as Maya Snow, was shortlisted for the Solihull Children’s Book Award 2010.

Helen was on the judging panel for the 2010 and 2011 […]

Meet Geri Clouston of IndieBRAG

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Geraldine Clouston, founder and president of IndieBRAG, an organisation whose mission is “to recognize quality on the part of authors who self-publish both print and digital books.”

One fearsome, but in a way reassuring, statistic is that IndieBRAG rejects 90% of books that it considers. Not quite two years old, […]

INCEPTIO is officially “awesome”

What? A while ago, I applied for INCEPTIO to be listed on the Awesome Indies list, a prestigious indie book evaluation site. Determinedly and fearsomely focused on ensuring only the best self-published titles are included, they have an equally fearsome submissions process.

And this is A Good Thing.

With the huge growth of self-published, sometimes […]

Self-publishing times are a-changing

Maybe my RNA colleagues were being polite at the annual conference this last weekend, but I didn’t get one remotely pointed remark about my self-published debut novel, INCEPTIO. That sounds defensive, I know, but what a change from even 12 months, let alone 24 months ago.

Are we all now ‘published’ rather than self/independent/mainstream/traditional? Have […]

Romantic Novelists' Association Conference 2013

The Edge accommodation

Fun, friendship and some serious talk – these were the keys of this year’s conference at the University of Sheffield’s The Edge campus. We’ll take it as read that the evenings were convivial, that was much exclaiming of “How lovely to see/meet you in the flesh!” and comparisons with previous […]