As you may have guessed from the headline, I'm going to have something published. The something being my first novel, The End: The Beginning, in ebook format. This will be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble by the end of this week. The link here will take you to chapter one.
I've very happy with this development, even more so as it came out of the blue.
One of the problems writers have is getting our work seen by anyone. Visual artists at any level can have an exhibition, but we can't. When our work is finished, it is sent of to publishers and literary agents where it languishes in slush piles, dusty and almost forgotten. And when it is read, then it's only read by one pair of eyes. You can send it to more people, but even then it's not being seen by more than a handful of people.
So we work on our own and then when we finish, most of our work is buried before it is born. If there's one thing you can say about us writers, it is that we must be fantastically optimistic and strong willed to keep going. Who else spends so much time working on something they know may never see the light of day, and then repeats and repeats until they succeed, or die?
Liberated by the Libboo Project
The fact that my story is now going to be blinking shyly in the spotlight is due to it being part of a experiment being run by those fine people at Libboo.com, people who just cannot stop themselves from wanting to do things differently. These are the same lovely people who brought you the first ever crowd-sourced novel, PARADOX, which was based on a first chapter written by the bestselling author Richard Wiseman. I somehow managed to be part of the team that wrote this book, though my input was minimal. A large part of the work was done by Maureen Hovermale - who is an excellent friend, writer, editor and motivator.
Libboo are now running a wholly different experiment where an author groups around themself a team of people who work together to publish and promote the author's book. I now have such a team, and it is they who are responsible for recreating my work in ebook format and for getting it onto Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Now all we have to do is promote the hell out of it - hence this story and the whirlwind of activity on Twitter and Facebook.
But wait, you too can also play a part in my slow but certain rise to fame and fortune (and you do want me to be famed and fortuned don't you?).
All you have to do is contact as many people as you can and tell them about my book, what a brilliant read it is and that at only $1.99 it's so cheap they'd be rather silly to pass it up. If you're unsure about how to do this, start by telling all your Facebook friends, then ramp it up to coffee mornings and garage sales, then spin it out to your local television station and newspaper. Simple and almost effortless.
Remember, what we're trying to create here is a ground level buzz that will swell to a crescendo of jingling tills and the sound of my wallet stretching itself around my unfeasibly large fortune.
Thanks awfully...