Katherine Roberts

On this bank holiday Monday, I am delighted to bring you an interview with Ana Posada, the Spanish translator of my short story Death Singer. Ana has also kindly translated my questions into Spanish and provided her answers in both languages, so this is a special dual language post to get you in the mood if you are travelling to a foreign country this week. Ana Posada KR: Why did you choose this story (Death Singer) to translate? KR: ¿Por qué elegiste traducir esta historia ( Death Singer )? AP: Before explaining the reasons why I chose this story, I think I should clarify that at first this translation was part of my thesis entitled “The translation of a fantasy juvenile short story: Death Singer ”. Therefore, the reasons to choose this story are directly related to the development of the aforesaid work. Firstly, I wanted to do a thesis about something I liked and that I would enjoy, so I had to work with the kind of literature I like the most, that’s fantasy lit...

How ebooks can work for young readers.    This post will concentrate on the Kindle e-reader, though many of these features will of course also apply to other e-readers and tablets – if you have a different type of e-reader with a useful feature that I have not covered below, then do let the unicorn know! Advantage 1: Make any book child-friendly. You can change the text size, line spacing, font style, and number of words on a line. Children’s publishers often use a bigger print size than that used in adult books, and will space out the text as well to make the pages look less forbidding to a younger reader. Choice of font can also be important to convey atmosphere. For example, here is a page from the paperback edition of Sword of Light (book 1 of the Pendragon Legacy), compared to my book Spellfall , which was published for a slightly older readership. Sword of Light (first picture) is around 60,000 words and 478 pages, whereas Spellfall (second pi...

Muse: I’ve finally pinned down my author with my glittery horn, so here is a series of posts from her about children’s ebooks… not YA obviously, so if you haven’t got any foals yet then go straight to objection 5 and come back later! I’m keeping out of that. PART 1: The Objections - why ebooks don’t (yet) work for children. The Midnight Stables from my youngest title "Magical Horses" (Carlton Books) While adult books appear to be taking off in e-format, it seems younger readers still prefer print. Sadly, most of my backlist is now out of print, so those books are currently only available as ebooks or used paperbacks. Since secondhand book sales do not provide royalty reports to the author, I have no way of comparing my backlist ebook sales with backlist paper sales. The Unicorn says this would be a pointless exercise anyway, since those books are backlist and have already sold tens of thousands of copies in print, combined with the fact I have no publisher to p...

The Muse is feeling very lonely lately. No sooner did Katherine get back from the History Girls blog, than she rushed off again to be interviewed over at Rinn Reads! She wants me to give you the link, so here it is: http://www.rinnreads.co.uk/2013/08/feature-author-interview-with-katherine.html Now I do know authors (and their editors) deserve a holiday, but my horn is itching to make a start on the next book... so if you see Katherine enjoying herself, can you please send her back here? Tell her if she doesn't come back soon, I'm going to start interviewing other authors on this blog, and see how she likes it. Lonely unicorn seeks author... GSOH, sparkly horn.

What does a self-respecting dragon leave behind when he flies off to another realm? A pile of stolen treasure? A few charred bones? Find out over at The History Girls, where today I am talking about legacies: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/legacies-katherine-roberts.html