Discussion
Andyroo's book seems to have gone down well here and Mobsta's thread on book publishing here seemed to get a fair bit of interest, so I thought you may be interested in my journey as well.
My new book, Hell's Garden is now on the kindle store: Hell's Garden. It will also be available in Paperback in the next few days. If anyone fancies a read, I'd welcome any feedback.
To give a bit of background, a few things came badly undone last year (career in a declining industry, business got sunk by major customer going under etc.), so I found myself taking on the majority of childcare to my two- and four-year olds, while my wife took her career onwards and upwards.
In the fleeting spare time I had during the transition to 'Stay At Home Dad', I put together a novel that had been brewing for a while in the back of my mind. It was finished in early January and I let it simmer for a while, before doing a hefty rewrite / edit in February.
Whilst I love the concept of 'Best Selling Multimillionaire Author who spends his whole life in Hollywood with mountains of coke and hookers', it is actually a route to try and earn a bit of money and keep the brain ticking over between changing nappies and the school run.
I talked to a couple of agents about legacy publishing and they came back with quite a bit of interest, but it didn't ultimately go anywhere, so last week I looked into e-publishing, inspired by authors like JA Konrath ( linky. He also has a huge download on his main site about publishing which I'm about to work through.
I was amazed at how slick and professional Kindle Direct Publishing and Createspace (others like smashwords are available, but I haven't looked into those yet), so I bit the bullet and uploaded. The other nice thing about e-books is it is easy and free to change covers and make minor amendments. I think the e-publishing world will evolve to be far more interactive than legacy publishing ever could be. It feels quite an exciting time to be in a new and emerging market.
I welcome feedback and I hope you enjoy it if you choose to download it.
My new book, Hell's Garden is now on the kindle store: Hell's Garden. It will also be available in Paperback in the next few days. If anyone fancies a read, I'd welcome any feedback.
To give a bit of background, a few things came badly undone last year (career in a declining industry, business got sunk by major customer going under etc.), so I found myself taking on the majority of childcare to my two- and four-year olds, while my wife took her career onwards and upwards.
In the fleeting spare time I had during the transition to 'Stay At Home Dad', I put together a novel that had been brewing for a while in the back of my mind. It was finished in early January and I let it simmer for a while, before doing a hefty rewrite / edit in February.
Whilst I love the concept of 'Best Selling Multimillionaire Author who spends his whole life in Hollywood with mountains of coke and hookers', it is actually a route to try and earn a bit of money and keep the brain ticking over between changing nappies and the school run.
I talked to a couple of agents about legacy publishing and they came back with quite a bit of interest, but it didn't ultimately go anywhere, so last week I looked into e-publishing, inspired by authors like JA Konrath ( linky. He also has a huge download on his main site about publishing which I'm about to work through.
I was amazed at how slick and professional Kindle Direct Publishing and Createspace (others like smashwords are available, but I haven't looked into those yet), so I bit the bullet and uploaded. The other nice thing about e-books is it is easy and free to change covers and make minor amendments. I think the e-publishing world will evolve to be far more interactive than legacy publishing ever could be. It feels quite an exciting time to be in a new and emerging market.
I welcome feedback and I hope you enjoy it if you choose to download it.
Well, it has been a very strange experience over the last couple of weeks. Sales were slow (as I expected them to be - by all accounts the e-publishing world is very much a 'slow burn' experience) and then something (I still don't know what) happened and I sold over 4x the amounts I've sold since I published in the space of 24 hours. It propelled me up to 57th in category and about 1200 overall in rankings. A hell of a day (and now I'm just praying that it'll continue). Au thoughts on what caused the spike would be gratefully received.
Hi RS: the book is the first in a series about a lawyer who gets kicked out of his legitimate job because a (hot) Detective Inspector wants to find his father - who just happens to spend his life growing cannabis. He is then blackmailed by the government, who want to find a way to draw tax / income from cannabis without legalising it. I won't spoil the rest of it, but this is the introduction to what I hope will be a long-running series following the two main characters in a similar vein to Lee Child / Iam Fleming.
I should also say that it purposely takes a neutral stance on cannabis - it isn't about the rights or wrongs, rather it is an alternative take on how government could react to the change in public perception (such as is happening in some of the US states).
I should also say that it purposely takes a neutral stance on cannabis - it isn't about the rights or wrongs, rather it is an alternative take on how government could react to the change in public perception (such as is happening in some of the US states).
funkyrobot said:
LeftmostAardvark said:
funkyrobot said:
Maybe, if it had guns.
Sort of...
RealSquirrels said:
me neither but I kind of like the idea of looking at how the government deciding to drop its ridiculous moral objection to drugs would affect society.
I should reiterate that it is fiction, although it has been pointed out to me that I should expect a knock on the door from a huge 'government official' who would simply ask me the question: "How do you know?"Wow...I know an author I read!!
Downloaded it and relatively liked it. Is the sequel you mentioned ready to download yet? Im hoping you learnt from the first one and smoothed around the more irritating plot holes...and they were pretty irritating, but the overall story was good enough to cover them.
You know Konrath aswell? Another one that I read!! Gotta love Kindle for this s
t
Downloaded it and relatively liked it. Is the sequel you mentioned ready to download yet? Im hoping you learnt from the first one and smoothed around the more irritating plot holes...and they were pretty irritating, but the overall story was good enough to cover them.
You know Konrath aswell? Another one that I read!! Gotta love Kindle for this s
t Edited by DJRC on Wednesday 5th June 09:19
DJRC said:
Wow...I know an author I read!!
Downloaded it and relatively liked it. Is the sequel you mentioned ready to download yet? Im hoping you learnt from the first one and smoothed around the more irritating plot holes...and they were pretty irritating, but the overall story was good enough to cover them.
You know Konrath aswell? Another one that I read!! Gotta love Kindle for this st
Thanks - the first one was a huge learning curve and I hope the next one will reflect the mistakes and the 'Eureka' moments that I experienced with the first one.Downloaded it and relatively liked it. Is the sequel you mentioned ready to download yet? Im hoping you learnt from the first one and smoothed around the more irritating plot holes...and they were pretty irritating, but the overall story was good enough to cover them.
You know Konrath aswell? Another one that I read!! Gotta love Kindle for this s
t Edited by DJRC on Wednesday 5th June 09:19
I've had a couple of reviews recently that mentioned they disliked the violence in it, which worries me as Book 2 is turning out to be even more violent. I don't want to tone it down though - the plot still revolves around the illegal drugs industry which is fairly violent by definition... I'm still holding a 4.4 average from 16 reviews though, so it seems that most people don't find it gets in the way of the story.
The sequel is coming together nicely I think, I should have it available for download by mid-July (want to hit the summer holiday beach reading season) and books 3 and 4 are sketched out to varying levels.
Konrath is fascinating - as much because he seemed to be a pioneer in publishing and really seems to 'get' the ebook revelation. It's worth reading a bit of his backstory and opinion pieces if you're interested in that sort of thing. I'm also digging into the experiences of Rachel Abbott, who seems to have exploded onto the scene in the last year or so.
I just like the stuff Konrath writes. Most of my "books" these days are Kindle 99p, etc jobs. All small authors, self publishers, etc. Suddenly loads of material you would never know about or find or read via the traditional method comes to your attention.
Dont have a problem with the violence, never even noticed it in fact! The operational side of things though leave glaring holes in your plot. Shoot me an email if you want to talk about them away from folks who havent read the story.
Dont have a problem with the violence, never even noticed it in fact! The operational side of things though leave glaring holes in your plot. Shoot me an email if you want to talk about them away from folks who havent read the story.
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