Showing posts with label childrens' publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label childrens' publishing. Show all posts

Friday 3 March 2017

How To Self Publish Your Book In Dubai. Or Anywhere Else, For That Matter...

I just thought this was more fun than the EAFOL logo, to be honest...

The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is once again upon us. Yup, that was a year right there.

I'm doing  workshop on how to self publish in the UAE, although you'd be able to use the info to self publish in Copenhagen, Watford or even, to remain topical to our peregrinations last weekend, Kathmandu.

I'm also doing a Q&A panel session on publishing, apparently which seems to have become an annual event confirming me as the UAE's poster child for self publishing. Which is all very nice, but I'd honestly rather be talking about censorship, selling books, telling stories, spies in the Middle East or the region's troubled relationship with narrative fiction, building a sense of place in novels, terrorism in fiction or a number of other aspects of my booky life. Hey ho.



What do you get for your Dhs 250? Well, you get to be shouted at by me for two hours. You'll also learn about editing, cover design, page layout, formatting your core manuscript, file management, rights, ISBNs and copyright, dealing with the National Media Council and booksellers in the UAE, printing books and mounting to sites like Amazon - as well as ebooks and Kindle, Apple, B&N and other online outlets. Then we'll also explore book marketing and promotion, online marketing, using dashboards and other booky sales stuff.

In short, a grounding of all you need to know to publish your own book effectively, to the highest possible quality and directed at the widest possible audience. Not bad, eh?

Friday 2 December 2016

I've Been Busy...

English: Santa Claus with a little girl Espera...
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I've written a children's book.

I could tell you that it was because we were riffing around with my wee niece Ellen in the summer and teasing Nanny Webster about her obsession with cheese, and so I eventually decided to write the book in time to make it one of Ells' Christmas pressies but you wouldn't believe me.

You'd probably think I did it in an explosion of jealousy at 'I only have to write 10,000 words' lunatic and childrens' writer Rachel 'Poo Pants' Hamilton. That I got sick of watching her relieving small children of their money at a rate of thousands of Dirhams an hour and decided to get myself some of that 'scoop the wee brats out of their pocket money' dosh action. And you'd be basing your assumptions on some pretty decent science - Rachel literally hoovers the stuff from kids when we do markets and stuff together. Hoovers it, I tell you.

But the truth is - honestly guvnor no word of a lie, trust me on this one - it's a present for Ellen. A book as a Christmas present is, if I say so myself, rather inspired. If you are in the fortunate position of being able to write, edit and produce books, they make a rather fun personalised gift!

And the idea for Nanny's Magical Cheese Box did, in fact, come during our stay at the wonderful Inchiquin House in the County Clare. Ellen's Dad (the book's cover designer, as it happens) had the idea and then I made up some daft story for Ellen about how Nanny saved the world using nothing more than various types of cheese and she was entranced.

I remember being like that when my Dad used to tell me stories about Charlie the Chipmunk every night when he put me to bed. Charlie was a major highlight of the day. He used to get up to all sorts of high jinks. Wonderful stuff. When I was about eleven I asked him, 'Whatever happened to Charlie the Chipmunk, Dad?' He promptly responded, 'Oh him? He's dead.'

There went innocence.

So this is going to be an interesting addition to the old Amazon profile: Middle Eastern thrillers, nukes, whores and deaths by torture alongside decent bombers and psychological thrillers about girls going bats and then we have Nanny's Magical Cheese Box.

There's precedent. Aldous Huxley, James Joyce and even Mr Macho Hemingway himself have all written children's books. Few people realise Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was written by Bond author Ian Fleming, for instance - although the original Fleming novel (published posthumously, Fleming died of a heart attack before the book went into distribution) has little to do with the story told in the popular film. Actually, something of a worry, one scathing review of Fleming's book said, "We have the adult writer at play rather than the children's writer at work."

Fleming, by the way, was an unmitigated shit as a human being. The only Bond book in which the female lead is not referred to as a 'stupid bitch' is The Spy Who Loved Me, which is (uniquely) written in the first person - that of the female protagonist, who doesn't let the side down by herself announcing, 'I know I'm a stupid bitch, but...'

All that apart, the world of children's fiction can likely rest easy. Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is going up on Createspace for the hell of it and I'll print a short run of Christmas presents with Jamalon's POD operation. I'll probably 'properly' publish it to Kindle for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2017, where I'm doing a 'how to publish books' workshop thingy. Having said that (and sales of NMCB are truly the last thing on my mind), kids' books don't sell well on Kindle. It's A Great Truth that kids like paper best.

It was a whole lot of fun to do, by the way. But I think Rachel's safe. It's not really 'me' as far as the old writing career goes. Now that Nanny's Magical Cheese Box is done, I'm back to working on next novel project, The Dead Sea Hotel.

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