digital

… from the marketing furore. My short story, A Change in the Weather, ended at #3 for family relationships on Amazon’s top 100 free ebooks, and #8 for historical fiction, with over 1,100 downloads! All those lovely people, reading my fiction, it’s enough to warm the cockles of my heart, as they (used to) say in England. I was really touched by the essential niceness of writers (feel free to disagree), particularly the ones I interacted with as they showed solidarity with me and one another through the self-publishing process. Whether it was through the support of sites like the Author Marketing Club, which is like a one-stop-shop for everything you need to get your ebook launched, with their book marketing and selling tips for authors… or the fantastic folk on my tweet teams, over on World Literacy Cafe. Funny that an act as solitary and inward looking as writing can foster such a sense of community, but then again, every act of writing for publication (in any format) is ultimately an act of generosity, of sharing. (Lord knows, very few of us are in this for the money!) Everyone gets a chance to share their hard work. I certainly don’t subscribe to the opinion that self-publishing is the death of good literature; the way I see it, the more people who are motivated to develop their inner resources and at least try to create art, the better place this world is. I was also touched by those gentlefolk who were kind enough to offer to review my book/short story gratis, simply because they love to read and want to help out new authors. And finally, I can’t forget the kind lady from Belgium who tweeted me to say thank you for the chance to read my ebook. Timeless manners in the digital age.