NAVIGATING THE WATERS

It’s an up and down life, this writing business: feast and famine, highs and lows, and the constant pull between nurturing your creativity and producing what pays the bills.

My rights in the Sprite Sister books have been reverted: now there is no Piccadilly Press behind me. I have to navigate my own way. Ahead are the huge, and potentially choppy, waters of digital publishing: few 7-10 year old readers – my market with Sprites – are yet buying e-books. Still, I wouldn’t swap it, this writer’s life, and the freedom of sailing one’s own little boat.

My summer has been spent re-editing the first five Sprite Sister titles for publication as e-books for Kindle, along with a second edition of print-on-demand paperbacks. I have found it a relatively restful experience to focus on stories that are already written, and to further refine them. I have also reconnected with the plots – have been able to pick up the thread once again. That itself is useful with one more title to write. With that I will be done, and bring the Sprite Sister series to a close.

There is a certain satisfaction in this. First, because there is a lot of me in the stories. The experience of writing Sprites has been fun and a way of reconnecting with my childhood adventures. Second, the seven Sprite Sister books will represent a good body of work: over 200,000 hardback books sold in Germany and sales still going strong. The complete series has potential for a children’s film or play. I have my eyes on the Japanese and American markets.

But it is time to move on. Autumn is coming and the air is cool. New stories beckon and I feel the need to write for the adult market. My little boat sits head to wind: I can’t see which way to go yet, but I can feel the pull of a new current. Soon, I will bear away on a new tack and be off once more.

Meanwhile, here are the first two titles of the new Sprite Sisters e-books. By the end of this year, I expect to e-publish all seven books. Just waiting for the illustrator to design the covers! Question: what does one call the image for an e-book – as it isn’t a ‘jacket’?

 Sheridan Winn is a freelance journalist and author of the Sprite Sister books – see www.sheridanwinn.com

The Circle of Power and The Boy With Hawk-like Eyes are available on Amazon Kindle. 

The Magic Unfolds, The Secret of the Towers, The Ghost in the Tower and    New Magic will be available as e-books this Autumn.

JOURNALIST-AUTHOR-PUBLISHER-BOOKSELLER

This blog was originally published on 3rd August 2012

I had never realised my writing career would require so much multi-tasking and so many changes of direction. But perhaps that’s just life: it has a habit of throwing curve ball when you least expect it. There’s a Spanish saying, ‘La vida es corta, pero ancha’: life is short, but wide. Or it could be translated as ‘free’.

You feel you have an innate talent. You learn the skills to apply that talent; work with as much determination, energy and focus as you can muster. Then it is down to the choices that you make – for there are always openings and opportunities to be seized, or not.

I have always believed that there’s an element of luck in every successful person’s life. I also believe that there is a lot more ‘luck’ out there than we realise – and that it is not just about spotting an opportunity, but knowing how to act upon it. Are you making the best decision? The way may be clear at the start, but there are brambles ahead: it may be better to turn down the contract they are waving at you.

The trick is to know when to act and which path to take.

Ah, would that life were so clear! As a birthday looms and another year of my ‘short’ life bites the dust, I am changing course again. It’s not a complete change – more a development of what has already preceded. But have I made the right choice? There’s the rub.

People with concurrent multiple careers – who, presumably, want their lives to be ‘wide’ – often adopt a ‘hyphenated’ professional identity. So we have the ‘teacher-painter’ or the ‘doctor-potter’.

I am, now, a journalist-author-publisher-bookseller. It’s all getting a bit complicated. As I wrote in my May blog, Bits, Bits, It’s All In Bits, I have agreed the reversion of rights in my first five Sprite Sister novels. In doing so, I have bought up the remainder stock from Piccadilly Press. There are now 2000 Sprite Sister paperbacks in my garage – all waiting to be sold. There are e-books to be published.

It was Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost management writer, who mooted the concept of the portfolio career in his book, The Age of Unreason, in 1989. Handy described ‘portfolio working’ as a lifestyle in which the individual holds a number of jobs, clients and types of work, all at the same time. He argued that, even if the portfolio worker made less money, his or her life would be freer and more interesting – and thus richer.

So how does this prepare me for my new role as a bookseller? Despite academic qualifications several aeons ago, everything I have learned, professionally, has been on the hoof.

I have chosen to take the leap. Now I have to quickly apply the skills I already have and learn the ones I need, to translate my decision into future success.

Experience has taught me that things and people turn up in my life as I need them. Not as I want them.

So, readers and book buyers, commissioning editors, foreign rights managers and film producers - come forth! I await you!

PS And please hurry up, as my life is whizzing by and I will soon be too old for all this dashing about.

Half a ton of books arrive

In the garage with my 2000 books

Hope the mice don't eat them

The new edition of The Circle of Power

Sheridan Winn is a freelance journalist specialising profiles of national and international business leaders; the author of the six Sprite Sisters book, and publisher of two of them. She has just launched the first book in the series, The Circle of Power, as a print-on-demand paperback and as an e-book. 

Find out more about her at http://www.sheridanwinn.com