My Books and My Disillusionment

The writing was never really the difficult part.

The difficult part was discovering everything that comes afterwards.

When I started writing, I imagined that publishing a book was relatively straightforward: write the novel, find someone who knows what they're doing, get it edited, put a good cover on it, and somehow the book finds its way into the hands of readers.

It turns out there is rather more to it than that.

There are agents, publishers, submissions, rejection letters (many of them), offers of representation that vanish, and more.

And then there is the slightly uncomfortable realisation that writing a good book and getting people to discover it are two completely different things.

That has been one of the reasons I've decided to take more control of the process myself.

I'm not pretending that self-publishing is easy. It isn't. In many ways, it means taking on all the jobs that a traditional publisher would normally divide between different people.

There are the hours spent designing book covers, and then redesigning them because they're only 99% of the way there. There's formatting for KDP, yet another burden on relatively little disposable time. And then there's the endless learning curve of trying to work out how everything actually fits together.

And I haven't been doing it alone.

My wife, Amie, has been an enormous part of this journey. She has edited my manuscripts, challenged me when something doesn't work, spotted mistakes I've read straight past, or simply ignored (because you can do that).

The books themselves are a collection of the things I enjoy writing about: science fiction, dystopian futures, mystery, technology, survival and the rather darker questions about what happens to people when society stops working the way we expect it to.

The Legend of Annabelle Lee is the beginning of that journey for me as an author. The Darkness Between Days takes a very different route into the future, exploring a world where humanity has fundamentally changed the way it lives.

There are more books coming.

I'm still learning how this publishing business works. I'm sure I'll make mistakes along the way. But perhaps that's part of becoming an independent author.

For now, I'm concentrating on doing the thing that started all of this in the first place:

Writing stories I want to read.

And hopefully finding a few other people who want to read them too.