Fuchsia Box

Hi, I have been busy during the last few weeks preparing to move house, so I have had little time to do any writing. However, I have managed to do a bit of scroll work on my saw and I thought you might like to see the results of my efforts.

I did the design myself which is based around my wife's favourite flower. I hope you like it.

Mad Mad World

Hi All,
This world is getting crazier and crazier.

A couple of weeks ago, we decide to buy a new car and to finance the deal we decided to cash in some bonds that were gaining very little in the way of interest. Anyway, we put the certificates in an envelope and posted them off to be cashed in. The whole thing was supposed to take a maximum of 8 days so that's when we arranged to pick up the car.

How silly were we expecting the money to arrive on time. Well to be honest some of it did and some of it didn't, but being as the certificates all went in the same envelope we were a little concerned. My wife rang the bonds people and this is what she was told.

"A machine opens all the envelops and it only expects to find one piece of paper. If there was more than one certificate in the same envelope it will probably of destroyed the rest."

No we couldn't believe it either, but they promised to look into it. Today we received a letter from the bonds people repeating what had been said on the phone. They also gave us a form to fill in and on the bottom of it this is what it said.

"Please insert the form and any certificates into the envelope provided and return."

Is it me or what? If the machine only expects to find 1 piece of paper in every envelope, why ask people to put certificates into the envelope?

Regarding the car, we managed to scratch enough money together to pay for it, but we are hoping the bonds people get their act together so that we can get straight. I will not be investing any money with them again.

On  lighter note, one of my books BossyBoots is available for a free download for the rest of September 2013.

If you would like a free copy just pop over to smashwords, type Bossyboots into the search box and at the check out enter coupon code VG74R.

Happy reading

Free Book

Hi all,
This is only a short post, but I wanted to let you know that I am am giving away one of my books for free.

"No Fishing In Here: Just Short Stories"  is a step away from my usual fishing stories, but hopefully you will find it entertaining. It contains 12 short stories that cover various topics like revenge, denial and humour each of which will will tug on your emotions.

The offer is at smashwords.com and is available to download in versions that will suit most e-readers.

To claim you free copy please click here and type in coupon code CP64V at the check out.

I hope you enjoy it and look forward to any comments on its content.

Indie Author

Being and indie author has a lot of advantages. I've managed to publish nine books so I can now appreciate the good bits and the no so good bits.

The good
I work when I feel like it, I write what I want to write and I control what I publish. When compared with my previous occupation of being a manufacturing manager in a factory it is absolute bliss. I don't have to get up at some ungodly hour, suffer endless traffic jams and stress.

The key to being an indie author is in not setting  unobtainable goals. Of course we all dream of being best selling authors, making lots of money and having our scribblings turned into films, but it would be foolish of anybody to expect it.

The reality is that I probably work longer hours now than I did in the factory, but I get to choose the hours.

The bad
Being an indie author is one thing, but being a successful indie author is something else. The sad thing is that it is getting more difficult to find sales because there are so many books out there, and, even worse, there are literally thousands of free books on the market.

Trying to get a reader to stump up their hard earned cash on an indie author's book is difficult when they have so much choice. The facts are that most indie authors are spending more time promoting their books than they are on writing new ones. The average day for many indie authors consists of round of forum post, blogs and tweets.

I've been there and done that and can honestly say that it doesn't make much difference if you tweet or not. Indie authors are very busy twittering away to other authors who don't even bother reading the tweets never mind buying a tweeter's book.

I now believe that the only way forward is to spend 90 percent of  ones time writing and only 10 percent on promoting. After all, Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble are the people who have the tools to sell books. Perhaps we should let them get on with it and concentrate on writing.

In my next post I will go into more detail about some of the pitfalls of an indie publisher. Things like proofreading, which is a real pain in the neck. My spelling isn't so good and my grammar isn't perfect (what, you've already noticed) so I have to use somebody else to do that. They don't do this blog though, so if you find any mistakes on here you will know that proof reading my work isn't easy and the earn their corn.

Domain name sorted

Hi I don't know how but I have managed to link my domain name to this blog, but it looks like I've done it. This is great news because it is saving me a crate load of money on hosting.

Anyway, I've still got to sort this space out to make it look decent and I will be doing that over the next couple of weeks. In the meanwhile, if you have arrived here looking for information about me, my books, scroll sawing or pyrography please click here to got to my website.

First Blog

Hi, The aim of this blog is to try and use it to give people information about my books and anything else that I think might be of interest. I am also going to try and set it up with my own domain, we will see if that works and if there are any hidden charges.