At last I have managed to release 'MISSING DEAD OR ALIVE' on Kindle. It's about a family 's fourteen year old son who goes missing on the way to school. It's the family's struggle to find him, and how they cope with his disappearance over time. It's full of emotion, love, betrayal, guilt, greed and death. At 86p it's cheap at the price.
This is probably the best way to self-publish your book at the present time. Whilst you can self-publish via the paper method, this is usually very costly with little or no reward. Publish with Kindle at no cost, choose your own price and make a fortune. Well, not quite that. It is easy to publish with Kindle, just upload a cover image and the book itself, along with burb, synopsis and you're off. However you are restricted by the price you can charge, the minimum price is about 75p. There are a lot of disgruntled Indi Writers like myself, who'd like to give copies away free at first to generate interest, but you aren't allowed to.
Unfortunately, the odds are still very much against you. Most authors do sell, but like me only with very modest sales figures. Some like Stephen Leather, Saffina Desforges, Stephen Davidson and a few others have done really well. The problem is publicizing your book. You can do this via facebook, twitter, kindleboards and various Discussion boards on Amazon, but unless you're got the backing of Amazon or a publisher this can be very time consuming and laborious and often it doesn't pay dividends. Obviously it helps to have your work edited/proofread, properly formatted and get a cover done professionally, but in the final instance, a lot of it comes down to luck. And whilst perhaps the majority of books aren't good enough, I can't help feeling a lot of good books slip the net. But all I'll say is don't give up, keep writing, keep publishing, keep sending it off to agents. You never know. So you've finished your book, you've checked it over and over again, and think it's as good as you can get it. What do you do next? Send it off to Agents? To Publishers? Good Question. If you're confident enough you do. If not perhaps you'd think about employing a proofreader, or someone to edit your book.But doing this could cost you a lot of money. Proofreading your whole book could cost you £300 at least if not more. Editing even more, perhaps anything from £500 to over a £1000 .
The question us do you get value for your money? Can this transform your manuscript into a bestseller? Well, in my experience there's no easy answer. If you have a good book, proofreading can improve your book. Editing is another matter. No amount of editing will help a bad book become an exceptional book. Perhaps it may help improve a good book, maybe not. There are lot's of proofreaders and editors out there, and the prices vary a great deal.I asked for quotes to edit and proofread the first three chapters of a novel of mine, and the prices varied from £150 to £500. So what do you do? Take pot luck? In theory the more you pay the better a job you'll get. But isn't always true. Some proofreaders/editors will do a sample of your work, say a couple of pages, to show you what they can do. Maybe OK, maybe not. Some will lower their prices if you barter with them. But at the end of the day, it's the finished product that counts. There's no doubt these people are out to make money at your expense. The answer is probably to get your book as good as you can, and if it's good enough, you'll get taken on by an Agent and then get your work proofread and edited for free.And as they're all working for the same end i e to get your work published, they're bound to do you a good job. The trouble is, Agents taking on new authors these days, are very few and far between. A lot of good authors are getting passed by. Therein lies the problem. If anyone wishes to find an proofreader or editor, there is a Society of Proofreaders and Editor's that's maybe worth a try. < The Bookshed is a Writer's website for talented author's. To become a member you have to submit a piece of work and have it evaluated by the people running the site. If they deem the quality of the writing good enough, then you are admitted. I managed to get a piece of my work accepted, an extract of a later novel called Love Triangle. I have nothing but praise for this site, as it has forums where you can submit your work, and have people critique it, and offer help and encouragement. Without the restrictions of having to critique other people's work in return, although it is advisable to give as well as take.
I put my novel, chapter by chapter through the forum, and found a mentor who was very helpful and improved my work no end. Thank you for that. I did get several nice comments from agents later on, although not enough to get taken on. Searching the Internet like you do, I came across a well known Scottish author, who offered writing services. The author in question was very well known in the seventies and eighties, and also had an autobiography that was excellent and very poignant. I corresponded with him, and sent him an extract of another later novel entitled In the Eye of the Beholder. He worked with me on my first three chapters, and was a great help, pointing out my failings and how to improve. All this was at no cost. I wanted him to help edit the whole novel, but work commitments prevented this. But still the guy was a real gent, and proved there are people out there willing to give up their time to encourage and development other writers. Next time : My dealings with editors and copy writers. Up until then I'd never met or corresponded with a real life author. I don't want to embarrass the said author, so I'll call him RA. One of RA's books was short listed as a Richard & Judy book choice a few years ago. On the strength of that I bought the book, one of many I bought back then, but never got round to reading.
Then one day, having finished something else I picked it up, started reading it, and was immediately captivated. I finished it in a couple of days, and found it one of the best novels I'd read in a long time. I was that impressed I felt compelled to email RA to tell him how much I'd enjoyed the book. It was the first time I'd ever contacted an author direct. To my amazement within a an hour, RA emailed me back saying how thrilled he was to have such a nice review.At the end of my original email, I'd mentioned that I also wrote books. He offered to look at an extract for me, and then for the next couple of weeks, we corresponded frequently, talking about all sorts of things to do with books and writing. He was a real nice guy, and when I find out RA was doing a author event at a Waterstones close to me, I had to go. After reading his book, I had to read other's he'd written, and eventually bought and read them all. I have to say they were all just as good as his Richard and Judy book. Since then I've bought and read all his subsequent books, and enjoyed every one of them. Anyway, I was really excited to meet the guy. There were only about a dozen people at his author event, but he was a really good speaker, and offered loads of advice to aspiring authors like myself. When it was over, I went up to him, and got him to personally sign all of his books for me. He even offered to edit the first few chapters of my book 'An Eye for an Eye', while on a long train journey to Scotland. He helped improve this book no end. Later I sent him a copy of the book 'An Eye for An Eye' which I'd had self published. He was the first person to read the whole book, and gave me a good review, which pointed out the good points, but also gave me hints of how to improve it. Since then, I've contacted him infrequently, and he's always answered any questions without any bother. RA, you're a real gent, and if I ever make it in the cutthroat world of being a novelist, it will be due to people like you. After The Naked Mind came An Eye for an Eye. Having discovered the YOU WRITE ON Website, I decided to try my luck there. The book was finished, or so I thought and so I posted my first three chapters on the site. Of course on this site you have to critique other authors work, in order to get people to do the same for you. So this I did. Some samples I read were truly awful, but amongst them were some excellent pieces, which later went on to do really well. One or two even got published.
After doing about a dozen crits, I set my own out into the big wild world and waited full of expectation for the glowing comments to come through. Unfortunately it didn't quite turn out like that. In truth I got indifferent comments, that made me realize I still had a lot of work to do. So I revised my first three chapters, over and over again, improved the comments, but not good enough for my own expectations. Along the way I met up with a guy, who helped me improve a great deal over the next few months. We swapped stories, I did my best for him, and he in turn gave me titles of books that I should read, such as King on Writing by Stephen King, Beginnings, Middles and Ends by Nancy Kress, Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress,the 38 Most Common Fiction Mistakes by Jack Bickham to name a few. I did this, listened to what he said and managed to get into the top twenty on the Site out of hundreds of submissions. Not bad eh. Then I started to send it out to Agents but although I had some positive comments, it wasn't still wasn't enough. Coming next time : I correspond and meet an acclaimed author. After Mother and Son, I began to think more seriously about trying to get something published. I thought the first thing to do was to think of a good story idea, that would be commercial and hopefully get agents interested. So I wracked my brains, and got a few ideas down on paper. And from that, pick one out that I thought was interesting. Then it came to me one day - what would it be like if someone had the ability to read people's mind, so long as they were within a certain distance. It seemed to me to have huge potential, and so The Naked Mind was born. How would a person with this ability be, and how would he use his power, for good or evil? Well the result was a mixture of the two, and by the time I'd finished, I was quite pleased with myself, and very eager to send out the first three chapters out to a whole host of agents. I was expecting to be taken on no problem. Little did I know. I must have sent out about twenty five or thirty. Nearly all came back as rejections without any explanations. Maybe one or two were a little more positive but not enough to take me on. All well back to the drawing board.
I couldn't work out what I'd done wrong, but then hit on the idea of getting the whole book critiqued. Having searched the Internet, I hit upon one, perhaps the cheapest at £750 for the whole book of 140,000 words. Some weeks later a five page critique came back. Here I learnt a few home truths, about what I was doing wrong. Point of view was allover the place, the novel was too wordy, characters stereo-typed, clique ridden, story unbelievable and so on. Oh well, at least he was honest. But a would-be author's ego is very fragile, and I almost gave up. But something told me to carry on. Listen to what was being said, take it on the chin, and try to improve. So that's what I did. Writing Correspondence Courses are not advertised as much as they used to be. But they're still out there, making claims to transform you into a writer by the end of the course.
Having written two novels blind,without having known a thing about writing, I decided maybe one of these courses was for me. So I sent off my money about £500 or so, and waited for it to happen. Within a couple of weeks I got the course in the post. There was certainly a lot of writing matter included, and I was assigned a tutor to send my work to. Pretty straightforward really, and I have to say, some of the modules were helpful, and teach me a few things. The tutor too was very encouraging, although I have a feeling he would have told me gibberish was good. Still I carried on and finished the course, but like many others it didn't result in me becoming a writer. In the meantime I started on a third novel. I got an idea about a woman who had a child on her own and was deserted my the father. She then had to bring the child by herself, and it's the story of how she copes with this, and her relationship with her little boy over time, until he is grown up. Seemed a decent story to me, and i put elements of horror, loss, murder in it to spruce it up. Another long book, taking about two years, also ending up typed but never edited or checked over. Still I was only writing for myself. In those days I didn't really think much about getting published, or even getting read. I was just having a ball, putting pen to paper, and writing whatever came into my head.
Having written Bullies longhand, I typed it up on a manual typewriter, obviously riddled with mistakes, stuff crossed out and so on. I'm one of those people who gets an idea in his head, and just starts writing, and the book sort of writes itself. I have no idea how it will end, and I think that's part of the fun. Bullies was then filed away, and forgotten about. Time to start on book two. I've always loved football, and I remember my dad telling me a story about his younger brother being a very good footballer, but when the men from the Wolves football club came round to sign him for the club, my grandad refused to let him sign, and told him to get a proper job. This was the basis for my story, about a young man who runs away from home after his dad won't let him sign. It's about his struggles to make it as a footballer on his own, his success and failures and how much injury destroys his career and almost cost him his life. It was a long book, took me almost two years to write. Again after typing it up, it was filed away for prosperity. At about this time, I began if my writing was any good or not and how I could improve it. More of that in my next blog. This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.
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