27 April 2011
When I got off that plane from South America in 2007 – the bit between my teeth – I’d calculated that writing a book might take a few months.
Complete fantasy.
With hindsight, such naiveté was probably for the best. Read more »
9 April 2011
After securing the publishing deal for The Jolly Pilgrim, I experienced a two-hour period of elation, then knuckled down and focussed on next steps. Eyes on the endgame.
Top of my to-do list that afternoon was getting the hem of a suit fixed. That meant a visit to Sam, proprietor of ‘Smarty Pants’ dry cleaning and one of my local Manor-Park homies. Naturally, we talk about stuff. Read more »
8 March 2011
The Hot Hive is an independent book publisher based in Worcestershire. I first heard of the company last autumn, via a couple of authors who’d secured a deal through it. Given what I was then learning about the book-publishing world, said deal sounded very good, but at the time it was one more lead I didn’t have time to follow up. Crucially, I got my hands on one of the Hot Hive’s books. It was a thing of beauty. Read more »
26 February 2011
‘I’m not sure The Jolly Pilgrim should go to market via a traditional route – it’s a dusty industry caught between austerity, stumbling into the next Harry Potter and pants-down terror of the internet. In this epoch, quality can find its way to the surface under its own merits. Read more »
19 February 2011
My stage-one approach to the publishing industry (more of an all-guns-blazing charge, really) didn’t produce a hit. So I spent a weekend pulling together my communication tools, bought, assembled and fired-up a laser printer, then drew a deep breath and started to network.
The most useful part of networking turned out to be sitting down with published writers and interrogating them about their experiences. Read more »
