Funny old day – A writer’s view of swings and roundabouts.

Funny old day, today. My crime novel, Burn, Baby, Burn started life eight years ago when I decided to test out the idea that ‘everyone has a book in them.’

It took over my life, well a year of my life, but I finished it then more or less ignored it for a year or two. Or three, or four, or five, actually.

I eventually took up writing again, wrote two more novels, which won a couple of competitions for new writers, you know the sort of thing I mean – best unpublished novel by a man living in a ruined old house in rural Spain and the like – but never even suggested they would ever earn their keep.

18 months ago, unable to go out after operations on both knees, I joined the writers’ site, Authonomy with my original book, by then entitled ‘Mummy’s Boy.’ After a nervous breakdown or two along the way it eventually received a Gold Medal as one of the top five books on the site.

Post-Authonomy, I submitted the book to agents, publishers, built up a splendid collection of rejections. A few were scribbled notes from people who’d probably not read past the first paragraph, but mostly they were encouraging.

If rejection can ever be ‘encouraging.’

I learnt to look for familiar phrases: shows great promise, liked it, didn’t love it, in the present financial climate – these words, or variations on the theme, were part of virtually every letter.

In mid-January I decided on a different approach. I still had the whole manuscript out, being looked at by an agent and a publisher, but I took the plunge and ‘made’ an e-book. It’s the future, isn’t it? Books that can be read on a Kindle, an i-Pad, a laptop, a PC, even on a mobile ‘phone. ‘Proper’ writers do it, why shouldn’t I at least test the water?

This morning I had a reply from a publisher who had been looking at my manuscript for weeks. He’s clearly read it, all of it, and provided me with a very useful critique. The final sentence ‘We like it, we don’t love it’ was familiar territory.

A downer then, another setback?

Well, yes and no.

You see, the e-book is doing rather well out in the mysterious world of cyberspace. Since I toddled off to bed last night I’ve sold 103 copies of my book. One hundred and three! Many of them while I was asleep.

Burn, Baby Burn is the 14th, yes, that’s fourteenth biggest-selling book on the Amazon Kindle Thriller charts. The books above mine, well if I say I’ve heard of all the authors, many of them being household names, you’ll see how ecstatic I am.

The e-book was only ever intended to widen my readership, get me noticed. It’s certainly doing that! I’m a complete novice, no idea about how to go about marketing, publicity, all that stuff, don’t have a major publishing house behind me.

None of that.

Swings and roundabouts, eh? Knocked back one minute, over the moon next.

Wonder what the next 24 hours will bring.