It was a simple thought, backed by a genuine concern. Write a book was the simple thought. My alarm at the number of public sector scandals, the genuine concern.
As I reached the end of the book, thoughts and questions appeared. What was good, what wasn’t good. What did I enjoy, what didn’t I enjoy? What would I do differently if I had my time again? Well, considering, I have written that there is another book in me; I suppose it might help me think about what my future authorship position is. A kind of review.
I found that writing the book was exhausting. It took much longer than I had planned for two reasons. The first was down to my mental health. When I started writing the book, my mental health was terrible and remained so, on and off, for a long time. The day will come, perhaps, when I want to talk openly about this but, for now, I’ll leave it at that. The second issue, which may well be related to the first point, was about the direction of the book. I have written about my love of innovation and the long-standing fascination I have with generation after generation improving on the previous one. Adapting, inventing, learning and improving so that we now understand, and can do things, which only a short time ago would have been thought of as science fiction. Perhaps it was because of the fascination with this field that I found the book drifted towards this area. As an author, you create the book in your head, and you can drift off for a long time, before realising and correcting yourself. I suppose, on a positive note, I already have quite a lot of material now for my second book, should that day come!
In the next book, I will identify the overall theme and direction first. The, where is it going and what am I trying to achieve element. From this, I will identify the chapters with an outline and ensure this all fits together to achieve my aim. I didn’t do this the first time around and that was a mistake. Doing this will also help with another problem I encountered; distraction. I suppose, because of the nature of the book, there was always a danger of this. Most weeks, tragically, there is some horror story appearing about our public sector. Sometimes that might be the preventable death of a child, through to the unfolding and enormous scandal surrounding post masters in the UK. This interests me, of course it does, but it is too easy to jump off from what you are doing and to dive into something else. This is why, in the book, I only touch briefly on the post office issue, despite every instinct wanting me to dive in to find what happened and why (the post office scandal had all the elements of a typical public sector scandal so I will write about it one day, just not yet).
So, you have a book in your head, and you might even have some of it written, then you try to work out where you go from there. Obviously, the internet is a must for any author and a simple online search uncovers lots. The good news that you’ll discover early on is that Amazon has revolutionised the book publishing world, thankfully, and anyone can write and publish a book now. The days of hunting down someone who might be interested in publishing your book are now gone, for most. You just write it and upload.
So, with that good news tucked away, you can continue your online search with two caveats to consider. First, as with anything online, you can lose yourself for hours and sometimes find information which often seems to be pretty similar between one site and the next. Second, is that most authors and online publishing information seems to be aimed at fiction. So, if you have dreamt up the latest romance, thriller, or similar, you will find a lot of stuff online. Away from that, information and help are a little less easy to find. Though there are similarities, for example, both will need book covers designing for them. There are other areas which are not similar, or as critical, like copyright.
When I did my own online search, I remember feeling a little daunted by the many options. You have to sort through what you find, but there is definitely some great material out there. I came across Jane Friedman’s site, for example, which I found helpful. Jane provides lots of resources, like this self publishing checklist along with downloadable ones that you can use.
As the checklist shows, though Amazon is a great help, the author still has much to do. The learning curve is steep. As with many things you have the choice of doing all the other jobs yourself, getting someone else to do it all, or getting someone else to do some of the other things you need, but that you are either no good at, or you don’t like the look of. The list is big and includes the book cover design, the book size and trim, ISBN numbers, the proofreading, editing, book pricing, and more. Then you need to get copies out to people who might be interested in reviewing it, along with the formatting of the book, the website, and any real world/ social media / video / Instagram / or other online marketing are still your issues, as well. You may have written a book, but all these trimmings are needed to get it up online, and to get the attention you need it to get, in the Amazon pond. Amazon is also, as I’m sure you are aware, a very, very big pond if you are trying to get attention.
