About Anna Lindsay:
Anna graduated from St.John’s College (Cambridge University) and has worked everywhere from Hong Kong (as a volunteer working with Jackie Pullinger to help drug addicts) to temping in Switzerland and as a teacher in the UK. Health challenges forced retirement, since when she has served her community in a volunteer capacity including 16 years as a Trustee of a tiny local Registered Charity.
Anna is available for book signings and interviews, and If you have been encouraged, stirred, uplifted, or generally blessed by ‘Eden Undone’, then she would love to hear from you!
What inspires you to write?
Find an idea. One of those ideas which, once it’s occurred to you, seems blindingly obvious.
Feel certain that dozens of others must already have had the same idea, and explored it in their novels.
Discover that no-one has.
Write it yourself 🙂
Oh, and a willingness to ask awkward questions and follow the answers to their logical conclusion, outcome, or implication! And then to have fun with them 🙂
Tell us about your writing process.
This is a difficult one for me to answer, because writing Eden Undone was like nothing else I’ve ever written.
I guess I start off with an idea, mull it around for a few months, let it simmer, ask awkward questions, research where appropriate, ask some more questions, and let my subconscious pull it, push it, and knead it into some semblance of shape. Then I sit down and write to find out what happens next…
Having a purry cat to remind me that it was sleep-time helped too, or I might have written myself into a jelly-like state of exhaustion and incoherence.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I just follow their characters to find out what happens next!
What advice would you give other writers?
Be excited by what you write.
If it has you giggling, or fighting a lump in your throat, chances are that it might do so for the reader too.
Don’t be afraid to season what you write with a bit of the other – a pinch of humour in a tragic situation, a deeper current to light-heartedness. Life is three-dimensional: let your characters be so too.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I felt that if Eden Undone were truly as special as I sensed it might be, that it had to be good enough for a traditional publisher – and that if it wasn’t, then it might suggest that I had simply been deluding myself. I wasn’t interested in “vanity publishing” – publishing at any cost just for my own self-importance.
What I didn’t realise is that… by going with a traditional publisher, you lose 90% of the royalties. And you lose many of your rights to the book. Yet the marketing / promoting… is probably nevertheless going to be almost entirely your responsibility. So for 10% of the royalties, you probably end up doing about 90% of the footwork and marketing once the book is actually published.
My publisher is wonderful – but it doesn’t lessen the shock of the above.
On the plus side, if you’re lucky, your publisher will ensure that you have a superb editor and a wonderful proof-reader and fantastic cover artist, and will genuinely believe in you and in your book and do what they can to help you. And of course, going with a conventional publisher means that your book is likely to be distributed far further afield than you could normally hope to be.
Though of course, unless *you* do the promoting, the fact that it’s *available* further afield… won’t really do anything to help you!
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
No idea. I hear from my publisher that it’s looking grim for conventional publishers and bookstores: that fiction in the UK shouldn’t expect anywhere near the level of sales that almost any non-fiction book would get… and I wonder to what extent that’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.
What do you use?: Professional Editor, Professional Cover Designer
What genres do you write?: I’m not entirely sure how to classify ‘Eden Undone’, as it straddles various genres (read it for yourself, then tell me!): but other than ‘Eden Undone’, I have written (unpublished) children’s books, and poetry, and am working at the moment on creating a colouring book for adults 🙂
What formats are your books in?: eBook, Print, Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Anna Lindsay Home Page Link
Link To Anna Lindsay Page On Amazon
Your Social Media Links
Facebook
Twitter
All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit, to allow you, the reader, to hear the author in their own voice.
