Also please take the time to enter the fab giveaway at the bottom of the post! Good luck!
You can buy When Alice Met Danny as an eBook now.
"The long hard road to publication.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Writing the books is the easy part. Finding a publisher is far, far harder. Take me for example:
It was only last year, at the ripe old age of 64, that I got my first publishing contract. I opened the e-mail at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning and had to re-read it a few times before it sank in. I had done it. I had got a publisher. I rushed through to the bathroom and scared the life out of my wife in the shower as I blurted out what had happened. I think she thought I was having a stroke. When you reckon that I wrote my first book forty years earlier, you begin to see why I have called this the long, hard road to publication.
My first book (which I still keep meaning to pull out and dust off) was The Man of Blood, a timeshift thriller dealing with the prophecies of Nostradamus and the troubles in Northern Ireland. Ironically, of all my work up till last year, it was the one that got closest to publication. It was read twice by Collins. That was back in the days when publishing houses were still prepared to receive full manuscripts direct from writers – seems a long way off now. I still have the letter I finally received from them. It says all sorts of complimentary things, but ends with the words, ‘…owing to the present parlous economic situation in the country, we are unable to take on new authors at present.’ That was in 1974. So what’s new?
Anyway, since then on the writing front; zilch. I found myself doing a very full-on sort of job. I was running an English language school and that involved, among other things, a hell of a lot of travel all over the world, doing my best to drum up business for the school. Before the days of laptops and iPads, there was no way I could seriously continue to write while hopping from one long-haul flight to another. And, of course, when the summer came and we had something in the region of 500 students in the school, there was barely time to eat and sleep.
I got back to writing seriously about fifteen years ago. I have always been hooked on history, and the Middle Ages in particular. I wrote a trilogy of historical novels dealing with the Knights Templar, the Cathars, the Crusades. In fact, pretty much all the stuff that Dan Brown put into the Da Vinci Code. Say what you like about Dan, the stuff was all out there; he was the one with the good sense to turn it into a bestseller. Alas, unlike Dan Brown, I was unable to find any takers for my “serious” stuff.
Which brings us to January 5th 2013. I read an article in the paper in which an editor at The Bookseller magazine predicted that, in the wake of 50 Shades of Grey, erotica would do well in 2013 and historical erotica even more so. I knew I had the historical background. Unfortunately I knew very little about erotica. And that’s how Dirty Minds was conceived. Quite amazingly, I wrote the whole thing (80,000 words) in less than a month. Six months later, it came out.
Since then I have written three more books, the latest, When Alice met Danny, only just published, and am just beginning to think about my fifth. So, I am one of the lucky ones – at long last.
A final word of encouragement for any would-be writers out there: e-publishing has suddenly opened many, many more doors. I seriously question whether a traditional publisher would have risked the considerable investment of taking on a new author (particularly an old one). It was e-publishing and a terrific editor called Clio Cornish at Carina UK that did it for me. So, remember, there’s never been a better time to get into print. At least not since the invention of the TV. "
Thanks so much, Trevor!
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This looks like such a wonderful read.
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