Today I am celebrating

Today I am celebrating, as not only am I off to my favourite place (Lundy) in the whole wide world tomorrow, but I have just received an extra special present from the postman - a big fat royalty cheque for the princely sum of £83.07! It may not be a fortune, but it is a lot bigger and fatter than my last one, which was for just £19.11. It will help to cover the cost of this trip to Lundy if nothing else.

Yesterday I recorded a lovely interview with Ben Ruddy from Nothing Binding. Ben is the business partner of Jerry Simmons, who is setting up the independent authors programme that I mentioned yesterday. He has a nice American accent as you will hear when you listen to the recording. I never thought I would say this, but it was almost worth missing an extra week in Lundy to be able to do this, as it could do wonderful things for my writing career. The sound is a litte distorted, but not too bad. You have to expect a few glitches with international calls. It was worth the cost of the phone call, as one never knows who may get to hear these things ...

Nothing Binding

My writing buddy, Nadine Laman emailed me some time ago regarding a programme that is being set up in the States for international independently published authors, by this I mean all those who are in some way self published, either short print run, or as I did, print on demand. The project is headed by Jerry Simmons and sounds very exciting. It could potentially do great things for me, by bringing my work to a much greater audience.

Jerry is setting up a website (Nothing Binding), which will go live on April 2nd, which will feature as a showcase for the 200 authors who have initially signed up (I should add that it is all free). We will have the chance to add links to our own sites, and various places where our books are available, add events, author bio and lots, lots more. Today I also recorded a short interview with Jerry's business partner, Ben Ruddy, which will be put on YouTube. I am free to link to this from any other website, including Jerry's and my own.

Only 200 authors have signed up for the initial stage, from all continents of the world, although mostly within the United States, since the project is based on that side of the 'pond'. Ben said that I was the first author from abroad to be recorded, so it doesn't sound like there are too many of us outside the US. Anything that helps to promote my work in the States has to be good. It is after all a much bigger market than the UK.

Feedback re New book cover

I added a new page to my website a while back and also posted on several of the writing sites I frequent, to see what peoples views would be re the proposed new book cover, shown in the post below. The feedback so far seems to be very good, with 99 percent of them saying that they much preferred the new orange cover. The one person who didn't like it said that no matter what I did he would not be interested in my book, so I am going to worry about him !

The general consensus though seems to be that they love the orange, and the idea of a bigger font. What they are not so keen on is the characters on the front cover, with most stating they needed to be more lifetlike (no one volunteered for the job of being a model though ....). One person suggested that the cross should be changed to an ankh, since this is a symbol of life whereas the Christian cross is a symbol of death - something that I may well ask the designer to look at. It has also been suggested by some that I drop the of Man from the book title, stating just Genesis: the answer to life, the universe and everything in between. An intriguing thought that does have some merit, only the bit about the answer is not really a subtitle, but a strapline. The book has been bout there now for 7 months already anyway, so not sure about the logistics of changing the title anyway, it will no doubt involve more expense for re-registering etc, something else to talk to Richard/Paul about.