PUBLICATION DAY!

There, it's done.  I've clicked on the publish button.  My first novel has flown the nest and is available on Amazon, a mere snip at £1.99 for the Kindle version and in paperback for £7.99.

Now let's not get too excited about this.  For every 50 Shades of Grey there are countless other eBooks which only ever sell a few copies.  Why should mine be any different, when the literary agents offered the book responded with resounding silence and as the one sex scene in my book probably wouldn't have offended my mother?

Well, first of all I'm proud of having written it.  When Dr. Johnson was told about a woman preacher he commented "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a a dog's walking on this hind legs.  It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." Substitute me actually finishing a 104,000 word novel for the female preacher or the dog and you get the idea.

But I'm vain or disillusioned enough to think that it is done well.  Readers of course, if there are any, will be the judge of that.

And talking of being vain, isn't self-publishing online just vanity publishing, now available to any Tom. Dick or Harry because there are no associated costs?  Probably, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

To quote a man who should know, back in 2006 Rupert Murdoch said "Technology is shifting the power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite.  Now it's the people who are in control."  Traditionally, publishers decided which books were likely to sell and then marketed them through book reviews, publicity and advertising, and often simply through paying the major bookshop chains to promote them.  But publishers are now losing control of the supply and demand of books in the same way that record companies have lost their monopoly of production and access to recorded music. Yes, there's a downside. Quality control is largely out of the window with a haystack of books now available online in which there are few needles, but it's democracy in action.  Word of mouth, or it's contemporary equivalent, a social networking buzz, can now turn a publisher's reject into a people's choice bestseller.  Say what you like about the 'Fifty Shades' phenomenon which started life as a self-published eBook, but 40 million readers can't be wrong.

So now it's up to me to try to create the buzz, of which this blog is a part.  After that "it's the people who are now in control."

Let's see how far this bird will fly.