About Gareth Evans:
Gareth Evans is a guitarist with his own successful Guitar tuition practice with a very low student turnover rate (the same ones keep coming back!).
He started playing guitar at age 8 and by age 10 was with the teachers in the orchestral pit for school plays playing guitar chords such as 9th, diminished and major 7th chord types (and still has the music sheets).
At age 13 grade 5 he obtained classical guitar with honours. Later on Distinction at higher diploma level from the Academy of Contemporary music, grade 8 electric guitar (RGT), grade 8 electric guitar (RSL), grade 8 contemporary music theory (LCM) and grade 8 Bass Guitar (RSL).
Understanding the needs of his students 1-1 helps decide what content to write in his Guitar Books. He decided there where ways things could be done differently, such as his “Guitar for Kids” book that doesn’t focus on sight-reading and uses guitar tablature (like most guitar method books do) or “Chords for Guitar” rather than giving you 1000’s of guitar chords, gives you shapes for various chord types that you can move up and down the fret-board.
What inspires you to write?
Putting down and organizing my ideas, it also helps me with teaching.
Tell us about your writing process.
For technical non-fiction the whole book works organically, most parts relate to other parts in one way or another. For instance, you can’t cover later topics for them to make as much sense unless having already explained other necessary parts further back.
That’s why I do the entire skeleton first without fleshing it out, the basic structure of the entire book from beginning to end as much I can. If you did just the feet first (i.e. the whole first chapter) and fleshed that out completely, when you get further on, you might decide there are different ways you could have written the first chapter to make the book work in its entirety.
In one sense writing for advanced readers is easy because you can assume they already know a certain amount, so you are less likely to feel ambiguous as to whether what you are explaining will be understood.
One the other hand writing for beginners can be hard in the respect that you can’t assume what the reader already knows. This was the one of the most important things I considered when writing the book “Guitar for Kids”.
What advice would you give other writers?
Write about a subject you know about.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
It was a natural progression from my day job.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
No idea. I wonder if even eBooks will be old technology one day. However the written word is always prevalent in films with depictions of the future, albeit on a space ship’s floating screen or hologram.
It’s really the medium that changes, perhaps the written word will be defunct when you can plug information directly into yourself? That said, we still need to use our eyes. Perhaps exercise is comparable; a few 100 years ago nobody “exercised” they were just way more active, whereas nowadays we exercise deliberately for no other purpose than the benefits of the exercise itself. Maybe reading the written word will remain long into the future the same way exercise has.
What genres do you write?: Guitar Tuition
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Gareth Evans Home Page Link
