Archive for May, 2013

Meet the new Johnny Mackintosh

Posted in Battle for Earth, Book news, eBooks, star blaze with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2013 by keithmansfield

Spirit-of-London-eBook-(webStar-Blaze-eBook-(web)Battle-for-Earth-high-(web)

With the kindle version of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London topping the Amazon children’s chart (across all media) recently, I was horrified to realize I’ve not announced the existence of the eBooks on the site. They were published in December 2012 and I think they look gorgeous.

Each time one of the print books was published I thought the cover superb, but my favourite is probably Battle for Earth. It’s tremendous now to have a standard look that clearly identifies the series to date, even if that’s only for the eBooks at present, and I’m delighted Quercus picked JMB4E as the model.

Of course eBooks exist in myriad different formats for all the various devices. I’ve had to make a choice here, so if you click a cover it will take you directly to the Kindle store. If anyone from Kobo/Nook/etc wants to email me and request I switch the links to a different eReader for a while, I’d be happy to do that.

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Top of the Pops

Posted in Book news with tags , , on May 8, 2013 by keithmansfield

Top of the Pops

Johnny Mackintosh at number oneHow exciting. As I write, Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London is, for the second day, the number one title on Amazon’s list of Children’s book bestsellers, having displaced Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay from The Hunger Games series. Further down we find Percy Jackson, The Hobbit, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and even Key Stage Three Mathematics Revision Guide. No photoshopping has been done on this screenshot (honest!).

One of the biggest hurdles for many writers is showing their work to others. When I’ve been in writing workshops, a point I sometimes make to shy authors is that, if you want to be published, your work will be read. People will begin to comment on it, and it stops being your personal story, instead being owned by your readers. That’s tough because there’s no more personal, individual work of art than a book. Compared with a movie where hundreds of people can be responsible for the creative vision, with a book it’s a single person.

But we write because we love telling stories – we can’t help it –  and most authors want their work to be read by as many people as possible, even if it’s a little humbling and daunting. It’s great that more readers are being introduced to Johnny’s story, and encourages me to get moving on book four!

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Amazon UK Kindle deal of the day

Posted in Book news with tags , , on May 6, 2013 by keithmansfield

Hurrah! It’s great that all three books are now available on Kindle and now, for one day only (May 7th 2013), Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London is one of five books on Amazon UK’s deal of the day. Buy the book before 11.59pm tonight and you get it for a bargain 99p.

As an author, you want your stories to reach as many people as possible, so this is a terrific opportunity for that to happen. Feel free to spread the word and, if you enjoy this story, remember the next two in the series are already published.

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Johnny Mackintosh: The Movie

Posted in Movie News, television with tags , , , , , on May 2, 2013 by keithmansfield

I wrote much of Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London while working for the British Film Institute and, probably inevitably, many sections ended up in quite a cinematic style. Scenes such as leaving Earth in the space elevator, or when the Spirit of London unfolds over a drowning Atlantis, or Johnny being chased through prehistoric jungle by a tyrannosaurus rex, were all very visual in my mind’s eye.

Johnny runs from a T-RexAs a lover of film, it was always my hope that the books would one day be transferred to the big screen, but it still came as a surprise when I was approached by a production company, keen to make this happen.

When you’ve worked in film and television as I have, you know it can take forever for a movie idea to become reality, and most will fall by the wayside, but it’s still tremedously exciting and the production people have a track record of getting things done. I’ve taken a few day’s holiday to think about how the film would work, and script a few key scenes, to help the process along.

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