Why Some of us Self-Publish.

What a blessing Amazon is for those of us who seem to have spent most of our lives writing books but not getting published. Obviously at first our books weren't well written. And I confess that my first attempts were embarrassingly awful!

We gradually improved, went to classes or workshops, worked hard and learned our trade. But we still couldn't get published. Why not?

We had excuses and advice from agents and publishers and enough rejection slips to paper a room. The favourite excuse was 'not our type of thing'. A popular piece of advice is 'write about what you know'. So I did. A crime novel set in Spain with the main characters being a Spanish detective and an English hotel rep. Response? 'We don't publish courier books.' Oh what a laugh - it wasn't a courier book. Obviously no one had actually read the manuscript.

Still I kept trying as I know thousands of other writers have done and continue to do.

Now many of us are published - on Kindle (or on some other e-reader) and we sell our books. If your writing isn't any good you don't sell your books! The only way to find out is to go ahead and publish them. If they don't sell find a good editor to advise you where you are going wrong.

For me the best thing about self-publishing is that I don't have to try to mind read as to what agents/publishers think is going to be the next popular type of book. How would they know anyway?

Of course one thing that all self-published writers need is promotion. Which is where you, dear readers, come in. If you like a book then PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, give it a star rating (obviously we all want 5 stars) and recommend it to your friends. If you see a link to the book (or another in that series) on Twitter, Facebook etc. etc. please re-tweet - you know what I mean! We rely on you to spread the word.

In the meantime, thank you all very much for your support.