Looky over there to the right - a picture of a book cover that is also magically a link to a place where you can buy a copy of that exact book!
What happened was, I wrote a children's book, in that 9-12 sort of age range (but there's lots for adults to get as well - in fact the idea is kids reading it will get one sort of book and adults reading it will get another sort of book but I'll explain that later) and got a proper literary agent and everything, and it got very close to being picked up by a couple of quite large proper respectable publishers... then everything ground to a halt. So I thought sod it, I'll have a copy made up on lulu.com so just for once in my life something I wrote actually has a real, physical existence in the world and I can read it to my tiny daughture and everything, and then I ended up roping in brother in law to do a proper layout and cover (seriously, I could not have asked for a better cover) and suddenly it had turned into a proper book! No-one was more surprised than me.
So what's happening is, the link on the right will take you to lulu, where you could IF YOU SO CHOSE buy a copy - but what I'm going to do next week is put a pdf on the blog where you can read it for free. Probably broken into four parts over four posts, but totally free. The hope being that if people like it enough to want a copy they could actually hold in their hand, or read in the bath, or roll up and swat things with, they could do that too.
Anyway, proper blog posts about it next week, but in the meantime, look over there - a link to a book!
3 comments:
Awesome. Go you! I shall buy a copy forthwith (having no doubt I'll like it).
There was a newspaper interview (I think the Sunday Times) with knitting designer Ysolda Teague recently in which she explained how, by self-publishing, she's become fully self-supporting and even employs her mother to help with distribution. Being a very very young person straight out of university, cracking into an extremely competitive business where most old hands say it's impossible to make a living from design alone, you need to also start a yarn line with your name on it - well, this is pretty impressive stuff and clearly shows the benefit of new publishing models etc etc etc.
Of course immediately after the interview was printed, she started getting emails from agents saying "lovely dear, now let me save you from the vanity press and help you become a *real* author!"
Gah.
I hope you do like it!
It's interesting, because for so long there's been nothing between proper publishing, and vanity publishing, which is a dreadful business in every sense of the word. So I think it might be interesting to muck about in this sort of middle zone and see what happens...
Good for you, well done! Definitely a step in the right direction. I wish you massive sales, every single one of them resplendent in the light of not having to pay 95% of the take to publishers, agents, distributors, etc. And of course Nibus and covers are almost synonymous.
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