Pinterest

I joined Pinterest over a year ago but I never really bothered with it. I had my Tumblr account to collect my pretties which is here and I have collected very many pretties over the years, so I didn't see the need for Pinterest.

However +Angela Booth in her fantastically helpful blog here says that it is the marketing tool for indie publishers. She says that you should be marketing things with images.  She gives the example of how a writer called Vic Sandborn created a Pinterest board, or boards, that made people who were interested in the world of Jane Austen come to her, and how then this became a powerful tool for Vic to market her writing.

I can see that. I suppose it's helpful if you fix your genre or writing subject and then create your board based on that. I have tried to do this for the Moberly book I've just reissued.

Check out the board - here

But I think I have some way to go.

Here's a link to The Adventure. Currently FREE!  Get it now! But it's your choice, dude.

Here some quotes of how people felt when experiencing these timeslip type occurrences

1941: South West England -

"They both felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding or evil as they climbed hedge after hedge, always dropping down into ploughed fields with no gateways."

Source: http://www.assap.ac.uk/newsite/articles/Time%20slip.html

1957: Kersey, Suffolk, England

"the general feeling certainly was one of disbelief and unreality…We ran for a few hundred yards as if to shake off the weird feeling"

"I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness and depression in Kersey, but also a feeling of unfriendliness and unseen watchers which sent shivers up one’s back…"

Source http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-three-british-boys-traveled-to-medieval-england-or-did-they-35698485/#ixzz2uL2o9SJh

1979: France -

"Despite the oddities, the couples enjoyed themselves"

http://timeslipaccounts.blogspot.co.uk/2009_04_01_archive.html

1970s, Penrith, Cumbria, England:

"As Angela and her friend climbed, they chatted away, but the atmosphere grew increasingly heavy; as if there was thunder in the air…there was a very uncanny feeling about the place."

1988: Leeds, England.

"it seemed very gray and eerie."

http://timeslipaccounts.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/one-thing-leeds-to-another.html

But:

1968: Tunbridge Wells, Kent - England

"There was at the time, she thought, nothing especially odd about the scene."

1935: Minster, Thanet, Kent

"Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing."

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20071007052922/http://www.historic-kent.co.uk/haunt13.html

Timeslip Accounts

A Timeslip from Kent:

On the morning of 18th June1968, and elderly lady, Mrs Charlotte Warburton, went shopping with her husband in the town. They decided to go their separate ways for a while and to meet up later. That morning, unable for find a particular brand of coffee from her usual grocer she went into a supermarket in Calverley Road. As she entered the shop she saw a small café through an entrance in the left-hand wall. She had never before realised that there was a café there. It was rather old-fashioned with wood panelled walls. There were no windows and the room was lit by a number of electric bulbs with frosted shades

There was at the time, she thought, nothing especially odd about the scene. 'Two woman in rather long dresses were sitting at one table and about half a dozen men, all in dark lounge suits, were sitting at the other tables further back in the room,' she said. 'All the people seemed to be drinking coffee and chatting ... a normal sight for a country town at eleven o'clock in the morning.'

Mrs Warburton did not stay but she certainly did not recognise anything amiss either then or indeed for several days. Even the rather formal and slightly off-key clothing made no immediate impression on her. Nor did the fact that although the customers were talking there was no noise from them to cause her to question her senses. Nor did she notice that there was no smell of coffee.

There is clearly something strange here. Yet without questioning the circumstances in which she found herself, Mrs Warburton blithely left the café and went to meet her husband. And she did not suggest to him that the scene at the café seemed in any was odd.

When they came to Tunbridge Wells on their next shopping expedition Mrs Warburton decided to take her husband to the café. Or rather, she hoped to take his there. But, of course, they never did find the place though they searched the street up and down. No, they were told in the supermarket, there was no café there. She must be in the wrong building. It was then that they learned about the Kosmos Kinema which had stood on the site of the supermarket. They were directed to the Tunbridge Wells Constitutional Club, where the steward told them that at one time the Constitutional Club had owned the premises adjoining the Kosmos, which was now incorporated into the supermarket. The club had had an assembly room in those days and to the rear a small bar with tables for refreshments. Mrs Warburton's description tallied exactly with the club's old refreshment room.

The bar, the cinema and the assembly room had all vanished years ago, Mrs Warburton was told. Yet, on 18th June 1968, she had stepped into the past and like others involved in time-slips had accepted without question, the place in which she found herself. Retrospective clairvoyance, it is called. Whatever it is, it is mighty odd to contemplate.

Read more here: http://web.archive.org/web/20071007052922/http://www.historic-kent.co.uk/haunt13.html

And one from South West England by Terry Cox:

In August 1941 two young sisters, aged twenty and eighteen, got off a bus at St. Mary Road [pseudonym] in order to walk along the very familiar road to Upper St. Mary [pseudonym] where a dance was being held in the village. It was 6.20pm when they set off along a road which they had cycled along many times. It was a pleasant summer evening, and they were anticipating an enjoyable night out with friends. They were country girls used to walking distances even at night and kept up a brisk pace. Ahead of them lay Home Farm [pseudonym], and they could hear the barking of the rather nasty farm dogs they usually outran on their bicycles at other times. It was then they made the fateful decision that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. They would leave the road at this point, circle round the farm inside the hedge, and rejoin the road beyond the farm and the noisy, threatening dogs. They estimated the time as being about 6.40pm as they walked past a hayrick in the first grass field, entered the second, green field, and headed back to the hedge to rejoin the road. They climbed what they thought was the hedge by the road and dropped down .... into a ploughed field. It is at this point that what I like to refer to as the 'Brigadoon factor' set in. Both sisters agree that, although it was about 6.45pm on a late summer's evening, from the moment they dropped down into the ploughed field it appeared to be dark. Except that there was a very large red moon which, totally out of character for a harvest moon, both dazzled them and threw long, dark shadows from trees and hedges. They both felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding or evil as they climbed hedge after hedge, always dropping down into ploughed fields with no gateways. They were always aware of the position of the road because they could see the tall trees of Home Farm and hear the dogs still barking - also the very occasional vehicle went past (there were few privately owned vehicles in 1941). Eventually they found a gap in the hedge and found themselves on marshy ground where they could hear a stream, but could not see it for the alder trees growing along the bank. Importantly, as we shall see later, they insist they did not cross it. They headed back through the gap in the hedge and saw a previously unnoticed gate. In the hedge near the gate was a tall white pillar or stone, unusual for these parts where grey granite is the norm. Equally unusual and frightening was the loud squeaking noise that was coming from the pillar at regular short intervals. Remember, these were country girls. As they insist, they were used to animal and bird noises at night, and used to lonely country roads. In their own words,'we were not town girls lost and scared in the countryside'. Taking the plunge, they dashed past the white pillar and threw themselves over the gate into the unknown road. Read more here: http://www.assap.ac.uk/newsite/articles/Time%20slip.html

The Adventure - did 2 Englishwomen walk back into 1792?

The Adventure: check it out here

This book was originally published in 1910 and represents the accounts and research of two English women who had an experience of some kind of 'timeslip' in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris on August 10th 1901. They apparently walked through the gardens as they were on August 10th 1792, the day the French monarchy fell during the French Revolution. They wrote a book about this called The Adventure though the incident is also known as The Ghosts of the Petit Trianon.

This account is remarkable for its detail of the accounts of the two women and the efforts they went to establish the historical evidence for their belief that they had strayed into the past. They wrote the book under pseudonyms - Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont - though their actual names were Charlotte Moberly (1846-1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863-1924). Moberly's father was headmaster at the prestigious Winchester School and later Bishop of Salisbury. In her account she distances herself from a belief in ghosts and the occult (an epidemic of Spiritualism was sweeping Britain and America at that time). Jourdain's father was a vicar of the Church of England. 

Moberly was principal of a hall of residence for women at Oxford University and Jourdain was to be appointed as her assistant. Jourdain at that time was working as a tutor in Paris and Moberly went to visit her there to get to know her better before she took up the job.

As their accounts show, their visit to Versailles on 10th August 1901 was one of a number of tourist trips they went on while Moberly was visiting Jourdain in Paris.

They wrote separate accounts of their visit three months later in Oxford.

Interestingly, subsequent to The Adventure, Moberly had claimed to see ghost of the Roman Emperor, Constantine in the Louvre in Paris in 1914. Jourdain later became principal of St Hugh's at Oxford and there is a report of almost delusional thought when she became convinced that a German spy was hiding in the college. Later, her management style caused mass resignations at the college and in the middle of this scandal, in 1924, she suddenly died.

In 1931, J W Dunne, the author of An Experiment With Time  wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Adventure and he said,

"Hence, if Einstein is right, the contents of time are just as `real’ as the contents of space. Marie Antoinette– body and brain–is sitting in the Trianon garden now."

You will see that Moberly's theory is that somehow they were viewing the memories of Marie Antoinette from 10th August 1792, not that they had stumbled into the past. To my mind, the idea of a timeslip seems more plausible than reliving a dead person's memories. I know this is still a pretty controversial view, but I would base it on Dunne's quote above and evidence from other timeslip type experiences which I will discuss after the text of The Adventure.

However, there are problems too with the timeslip explanation.  Moberly makes much of the anniversary - that it was 10th August when they saw these visions and 10th August was the day of the downfall of French Monarchy (though Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were not executed for many months). But we see that on 10th August, 1792, the King and Marie Antoinette were at the Tuileries in central Paris when it was assailed by revolutionaries - not at Versailles. After leaving the Tuileries for their own safety, they then retreated to the National Assembly. After a deliberation the Assembly locked them in the small reporters' box called the logographe. At the end of that day Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple.

Imbert de Saint-Amand gives a detailed account of that day in his Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty (trans. Elizabeth Gilbert Martin)

Also the Count de Vaudreuil was not present in Versailles on 10th August 1792 as he had left France in 1789 after the storming of the Bastille. I suppose this is why Moberly does not feel she walked into the past as it was on 10th August but into the memories of Marie Antoinette as she remembered Versailles from her confined prison in the logographe at the National Assembly. She discusses these points in the chapter Answers to Questions We Have Been Asked.

Get the full book here

15p?

So for each book that I sell in the US for 99 cents. Amazon withholds 30% tax, then there is a conversion to British pounds and I make 15p. It's gonna take of books to make my fortune...

It's a numbers game - or is it...?

A long time ago when I used to organise events for a sort of living, we put on a Rum Festival at Whitehaven. We got free rum from lots of rummeries (is this a word?) from all over the world and offered it to the public. We did other things such as organise a (fake) public hanging in 18th Century dress which made the front page as the local churches wanted to get us to stop it! Great publicity. And we had pirates on stilts and pirate dance bands and we released a cloud of parrots into the air (that isn't actually true, though the rest is). There were wigs and dandies galore too.

But the big attraction was the free rum. We had a tent where people doled out free tots of rum to a never ending queue. It was very popular with everyone but the police who had to deal with the effects of it. It was a really hot day and people were walking round in shorts and t-shirts. There were thousands of people on the streets and of course businesses did well.

I was talking to the owner of a local menswear shop and he said that he actually sold more full three piece suits that day than any other he could remember. It was no weather to be wearing a suit, so the message I took away was that it's a numbers game. The more people who see what you're selling, the more people will buy it. It's just stochastic like.

I guess your product should avoid being shit too.

But, today 20th Feb I've sold 102 books...

Feels ok even if it's not quite sufficient to retire to Whitehaven.

Mash Ups

When is a Public Domain Book not a Public Domain Book?

There is a book called The Adventure by Miss Moberly which details a timeslip at Versailles at the beginning of the 20th Century. I became aware of this book years ago when I was teaching nightclasses on ghosts and the paranormal. It is a classic and available at Archive.org.

There are also a couple of version on Kindle. One at least has a decent cover. The problem with The Adventure is that Moberly uses footnotes extensively and also uses a lot of French in sometimes long passages which she doesn't bother translate. The OCR has totally butchered the text with the footnotes being incorporated into the main text rendering it nearly unreadable. Also the French, though it has copied pretty well has been stripped of its accents and diacritic marks, so that it really isn't French at all.

I had thought I would clean up the text, restore the footnotes and re-do the French. I thought I'd also translate the French for the benefit of those who don't speak it.

The footnotes are of two types - extra commentaries and references to other books. I thought I would remove them altogether by using modern Harvard style referencing rather than footnotes and just incorporating the extra commentary in-text.

Further than that I wanted to add an introduction and link it to subsequent reports of timeslips such as Dunnichen Hill and Broad Street, Liverpool as well as some told to me directly by my students over the years. I have a nice one from Pembroke Castle for example.

When I've done all this - is this still public domain, or is the work my copyright?

Here's a link to US copyright law summarised by Project Gutenburg.

And there's a nice summary of the UK position by Tony Laidig (no relation) here, which is more complex than the US position.

Given that roughly the law is that 70 years after an author's death the works pass to the public domain, here's a list of the date of death of authors...

List of Authors by Year of Death at KingKong.

Like who would? But I'm glad they did.

A Difficult Start

So, I've sold 78 books so far this month and we have about half of it left. That's good. As for free downloads they are in the 100s. I read +Joe Konrath 's blog and it is inspirational.

But chicken and egg. If people haven't heard from you it's difficult to connect with them - or make them want to connect with you. And without that base of people who are interested, how do you get the word out in the first place?

Seems the answer is slow. I was reading in +Brenna Aubrey  's blog that she gave out lots of Advance Reader Copies before publication and this worked so well that she sold 9,129 books in December. That's the sort of figure to knock your block off.

How's that done? Probably by writing something pretty good that people want to read and then knowing how to market it. I have nothing wise to say about this, except that it feels a long way off.

Smashwords Update

So I mastered the template. All good. Haven't got the hang of the cover yet as no matter how big an image I use, it doesn't like it. I am going to have to get a a professional cover designer involved. But, the books don't sell in the numbers that justifies a cover costing $300. A conundrum As we sit here now, I have "sold" about 230 copies of a novel on Smashwords. That's in about 48 hours. Fantastic! I let the reader set the price, so they pay me what they think is fair. Weirdly 230 of them have all decided on the same price! Yep, you guessed it - they all thought my work was worth $0. All of them set the price as zero! You would have thought there would be one kind soul who thought it was worth a dime, but not so far.

Reader Set Price

Ok, this is a cool feature of the Smashwords Store - the Reader Sets Price.

It's pretty much the same as a free promotion - the books fly out and most people set the price as 'free'. Who knew?  But some kind souls, or people who value what you wrote, don't set it as free!

This is my excitement for the day. Now back to writing.

Visibility

When I was at school, which is some time ago now, there were only a few bands you could listen to. I would say that all the bands that anyone listened to - that were on the radio, that were in your record store, that your friends, and even your enemies listened to or went to see was less than 200.

That included every genre, every style. So, amongst those 200 some got to be very big. They had all the focus and all the visibility.

But what happens now is that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of bands. Some of them are pretty good. You'd really like some of them a lot, if you could only find them. The music industry is now fragmented and diffuse. There are some big names up there still of course which have huge marketing machines behind them, but increasingly good musicians are playing to smaller audiences.

It strikes me that the same thing is happening with authors. There are hundreds and thousands of authors publishing their books and ebooks now.  Most of those are never ever going to be professionally reviewed. Unless they break out and sell millions like John Locke or Amanda Hocking that is.

So, even if you have a good book, you are going to struggle to be visible. And by the old statistical bell curve of normal distribution, some books are going to suck, a lot of books are going to be ok, and some books are going to be brilliant. But how to tell?

John Locke says that his books are ok. I read one recently and it was absolutely that in my humble opinion. I'm not saying I can write better - I certainly can't sell better.

But we like to think that our work would succeed on merit - that if it was a wonderful piece of writing then it would rise to the top of the pile.

There are two questions I have here:

1) Would it though? Even if wonderful, does the huge ocean of other books drown it out?
2) Is our writing really that good? It might be ok, but the critical acclaim (I'm not talking about 2-3 positive reviews) is still not there. Maybe because it just moderately blows. And even if it doesn't blow, maybe it just doesn't shine.

Only time will tell (this is my favourite saying at the moment).

Sales so far

38 books sold up to 12th February. I don't think that's bad for a beginner.

Smashwords

I've spent pretty much all night trying to format a manuscript for uploading to Smashwords. I would say "in the end" - but it wasn't the end at all - I downloaded the template manuscript and I spent a long time following it, to what I thought was the letter. However, I still have autovetter errors.

The trouble is, it tells you that you have them, but it doesn't tell you what they are. Or at least as far as I can figure out. So I now need to go through the whole manuscript and guess what Smashword's Autovetter thinks is wrong.

I see from trawling the internet on this subject that I am not alone.

Still, going through the Youtube tutorials, reading the style guide and ploughing through the template have made me a better person.

But, it will make me give up on trying to publish on Smashwords unless someone can convince me it's worth the crazy effort of trying to second guess what their autovetter thinks is wrong.

Reviews by Family

My girlfriend bought and read one of my books to be supportive, but she actually liked it. So she went on Amazon, again to be supportive and left a 4 star review and what I thought (though I am biased) was pretty accurate and her own opinion.  But Amazon seemed to have pulled this review...

I feel hurt. I don't think they're being fair. However you don't want to upset the big Amazon bear by poking it, or it might just swipe you out of existence.

Anyone else have any views on this?

Coming Clean about Dirty Stories

I don't read erotica. I've never bought a Kindle erotica book, so I don't know much about the genre. But I read that people are making money from writing this stuff.

So I thought I'd give it a try. I did some research. I figured that men don't buy books of any kind to get off; they'd rather watch a video or look at some pictures. I'm listening to a podcast about this as I type as it's making me laugh.

So this guy in the podcast is saying, "Amazon does not allow bestiality erotica, but you can have bigfoot" (bigfeet?). And my nerd mind gets involved with issues of cryptozoology. What is bigfoot then? Is he an animal or a man? You can also have werewolf erotica. But I would have thought that when the man turns into the wolf, he's an animal, ergo... bestiality. Whatever. I've stopped laughing now.

I thought I'd better be a woman to write this stuff and I certainly didn't want it associated with my name in case my kids read it! So I created a persona. I had such fun doing it. I made up her life story, I researched where she'd gone to school. I realise as I write this that I'm going to get into such trouble if anyone finds out. Especially the ex-gf whose photo I used. I want to come back to the ethics of this (it's at least mildly unethical)

So, I created a gmail account for her; a facebook page a tumblr account and guess what, soon she's getting friend requests from people who think they were at school with her.

But I like her persona. She's kind of become like my friend.

But coming back to the dirty stories. I like writing the setting and building the scene; writing the dialogue etc, but the rumpy-pumpy - the actual accounts of the deed, the act, the acts, is pretty repetitive. And also because Americans might read it, there is the issue of what is a fanny. It can get awkward.

Also I kind of feel dirty writing it.

So here I am pursuing money and prostituting my art. I don't have an issue with writing as a product. I'm producing a product for people to buy just like the bards and the silver poets and the copywriters did and do.

But it's not selling not for me. And I guess that maybe because my heart's not in it. When I have downloaded free samples of other erotica I'm generally not impressed with the writing. I think mine's better. There are some exceptions to the poor quality. Generally those that show some kind of wit and humour. There was a great one that started: "Eight inches. I want eight inches or nothing."  It's like me when I went to the hardware store to get some 2 by 4. When you need wood, it's got to be exactly the right size.

Or my erotiks could not be selling because they is shit?

Only time will tell brothers.

The Importance of Covers

I am absolutely learning as I go along. But, I was looking at my reports at 4 am (I don't wake up on purpose through night to check them, just if I wake up anyway) and it struck me that some books sell better than others.. For example

Three Celtic Ghost Stories

wasn't selling as well as:

Three More Ghost Stories

(I'm pretty imaginative with titles, don't you think?)

Even though in my estimation both volumes are equally good.. Then I realised that it was because the second one had a skull on the cover. I thought the first cover was stylish and moody (it was a standing stone) but it didn't point directly to the contents of the book being ghostly.

 It seems the lesson is don't be clever, be obvious. Maybe I'm wrong? I changed the first volume's cover to guess what - a skull. But a different one. We shall see. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Free giveaway books

It's amazing. You put any book up for free and it starts getting downloaded. For example my book about beating anxiety, the refreshingly titled:

How to Beat Anxiety

That downloaded very quickly in the hundreds and hundreds. Particularly in the USA. This was the first ebook I wrote. It was based on my solid professional experience and it is exactly what I would be telling my patients face to face. What I say in it works too. So it wasn't a useless infoproduct. When it went on money sale, sure it sold. It sold slowly but as we speak averages about 2 copies a day. This isn't bad as I'm only into the weeks stage of my ebook career.

Some of my books downloaded well and then are lucky to sell one, or in one or two cases zero copies.

Then I look at my behaviour with free ebooks. I download them. I only download the ones that are of some interest. So, I've downloaded smoothie recipes, books about bitcoin, how to drive a woman crazy in bed (I knew all this anyway of course), erotica (just to see how people wrote it).  I wouldn't have bought any of these books even for 99 cents, even though when I read them (apart from the erotica which with some well-written exceptions - was utter drivel. I've got nothing against rude words, but they just should be in the right order) - I thought they were useful, ok books that I was glad I'd read. But I wouldn't have paid money for them.

So take my ghost books. One of which is here:

Three Celtic Ghost Stories

It's 99 cents. It's about 12,000 words (iirc). That means each of the carefully crafted, and if I may say, pretty good, stories is 33 cents. That's about 20p in British. This is the kind of money that if you dropped the coin a large proportion of people wouldn't stoop to pick it up off the floor. But it's still a barrier that free isn't.

So, my thoughts about free are that some people download anything that's free, and they're not your real readers. They are never going to buy your books even if they are stupidly cheap. And if someone has no real interest in your books, they aren't even going to shell out 99 cents. I swear down (as they say) that I have never bought an erotic novelette, even for dirt cheap and I probably never will. I can't see myself buying a romance either.

So what's the value of giving away books? Now, +Sean Platt  and +Johnny B. Truant  (my new heroes - so their plan does work you see? Made me into a fan) say it's about funnels.

I'm so sick of these short post titles - back to the books

I had a lot of drunken teenage girls round at my place last night. They're still here in various states of undress and hangover. I wish they'd leave. So I went out shopping to get away from them. I bought four things: cheap tea; peach green tea (not for me though I may sneak some); a loaf of bread and six rolls of toilet paper. Teenage girls use so much toilet paper it's hard to imagine what they do with it.

I also nearly bought a second hand copy of Iain M Bank's Inversions as I haven't read it and I love him. I love his writing and it was only £2, but I still didn't buy it. That has lessons.

As far as I go, my book sales on Amazon continue to trickle out. I am not going to pay my rent this way for some time, but it's gratifying to see that people are buying my words. I even have a handful of good reviews. And I'm only 3 weeks in.

Some days when nothing sells, I feel pretty miserable, then a sale or two clicks in and I'm happy. I think crystal meth must be a bit like this.

I have bought various books since I started my ebook craze.

These were in order of purchase:

How I Sold a Million eBook in 5 Months by John Locke
Two main things jump out at me from this book: the fact he treats selling your stories like a business, and that you have to create your author platform. So here I am; creating my author platform by me and you having this conversation (technically it's a monologue, I know). I was shy of this. I didn't want to spam my friends on Facebook and Twitter with sales pitches. So I've set up a separate blog and twitter account.

Kindle Money Mastery: How I made Six Figures Through Amazon Kindle....This is a get rich quick book. Still I enjoyed reading it as it made me dream of wealth beyond imagination, probably in my hands within a matter of weeks. There was some useful stuff in it but I am wary of get-rich-quick schemes.

From Word to Kindle by Aaron Shepard
The reviews let you know it's a bit dated as Amazon no longer lets you use html in your product description, but it was a useful guide to the perils of formatting.

How to Sell Fiction on Kindle by Michael Alear
I thought this was a pretty useful book. It tells you how to utilise search terms in your book copy. In a sense it is "gaming" the system - still I managed to make my books more visible by changing the text in my description and some other tips he gives. I would say this was worth buying.

Then I got:

Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
I read it and thought my head was going to explode with excitement. Firstly it's not a get rich quick promise book. It tells you that success is going to take work and time and work. In fact I think you have to be a writing machine for it to work, but I can write pretty fast if I'm not distracted by video games. I wrote 2  short stories last night - about 6000 words, while I was drinking wine. At the time I thought my style was vibrant and powerful. I haven't looked at them this morning...

But anyway back to Write. Publish. Repeat. I think it makes excellent sense. But I'm shy! This email list thing. Who'd want to listen to me?

Let's see.

I saw a rainbow this morning. You know that the word for rainbow in Welsh is enfys; In Greek it's iris. Rainbow is pretty good, but I think those are better. I remember talking to a German who told me that he thinks German is ugly (I don't by the way. I like the sound of it.) He gave as an example schmetterling for butterfly. He said the English and the French words (papillon) are more beautiful than the German. I don't think butterfly  is beautiful. It's only a fly that eats butter. And we don't like flies with their scratchy legs and big multi headlamp eyes. Now flutterby is a whole different gig.

Laters homies

Tony

But...

The thing is I love writing. Always have. I'm writing now! (I mean on another screen on this PC). I wonder if this is what Joseph Campbell meant about finding your bliss. When I write, I feel this is what I'm meant to do. So it doesn't matter if no one reads it. If the path is long and hard and fruitless. I guess I'm always going to write.

But I would like someone to read what I write...

I always say that all art is a form of communication where people get to talk to each other at a level below words. That's why it feels so intimate when you're reading someone's work and you feel yes! this is exactly what I feel too. Someone clever said that before me. Was it How Green is My Valley? A scene from the movie when he's on a train... Vague recollections.

Anyway I am going to retreat from the stream of consciousness experience thing I'm doing here and go and write some more.

Languishing

So that was a year ago. I got an email, I think, letting me know about Kindle Direct. I had Word files of the novels and I had no expectation that they would sell at all. I mean at all. But I put them up there. Now you may ask if I didn't think they would sell, why did I post them up there?

I don't know. And then I forgot about them. I didn't check sales. I didn't look at them. To be honest I'm embarrassed about them now. They had formatting errors, the covers were abysmal. They were dreadful. Then towards November last year I got an email from KDP saying they would now pay me. I think it was just a few dollars, but when I checked back over the year, even these awfully formatted, appallingly presented, books - where the descriptions were a few lines I'd just knocked out in second and the covers were just an image without even a title - they had sold a few copies.

So, I started reading more about self publishing and by mid January I was obsessed.

So far

Well, I have always written. When I finished my first novel at the age of 21 (previously I'd considered myself a poet and essayist...) I thought, 'that's it - I will be recognised. The wonder of my work will shine all around.'  But it didn't happen like this. As I kept sending it off, and in those days it was a slow process, copying, mailing synopses, writing letters, the rejections kept coming back. I was in fact very surprised, and I suppose that turned into a sense of defeat. So I gave up with that novel - which was remarkably funny, I just rediscovered it in a box. I then took to writing my second novel. And after months and months of sweating and crying and typing, I sent it off to publishers. Rejections. Lots of them. This was quite perplexing. I couldn't work it out. It must have been a mistake. But lots of publishers and agents were making the same mistake - one after another.

So, then I thought I'd write another novel. This disappeared when I was burgled and my word processor was stolen. Probably just as well to avoid the heartbreak of further rejection.

Then I thought I'd write a novel for kids. In fact a publisher even wanted to see the full manuscript and I got very excited, but then they returned it with a short form letter saying it wasn't for them.

So I then thought I'd write some vampire books and I wrote 3 novels in the mid 1990s. A small publisher really liked one of them and was going to publish it, but then they got taken over and the bigger publisher didn't want it.

I then self published a ghostly guidebook (I was doing lots of ghost tours at that time) and that was a lot of work but fun - finding the printer, getting the barcode (this was 1998 and it wasn't so simple to do those things). On delivery I arranged national distributors but mainly went round local bookstores trying to get them to take it. They mostly did. It sold out of the print run of 2000 and got a lot of favourable reviews and press response. But I didn't manage to follow up.

Then I wrote another novel and I actually got a "master class" through the local arts board and submitted the first three chapters to a well respected published writer. He ripped it apart and kindly asked me why I didn't just stick to my day job.

So, I didn't write anything much for over 10 years. A couple of short stories. Nothing much.

And then I got involved with Kindle Direct...