the joys of writing part four

A month on from the publication of “Trousers” I finally yielded to temptation and looked at how many people had obtained a copy. I was hopeful that I might have been up towards the top end of  my wildest expectations because of the contact that I have had from people who have read it, but the figures from Amazon show that it is close to six times those wild dreams.

Much of the feedback has been around the three link sections that I wrote about my first, second and third steps on the leadership ladder. To help me write those three pieces I had put together a precis of my career and some stories of events around the places that I have been privileged to visit over the years. The interest in those stories suggested that they might make a book in their own right and I’ve spent much of the last few weeks revising and adding to them to the point that I now have over 90,000 words written and proofed towards what will now be two books. The first will be stories from my various jobs since leaving school in 1969 and the second a series of stories of places and people around the UK and Europe. Current plans are well enough advanced that the e-Book version of the first of the two could be available next month with the paperback about May or June.

Back with “Trousers” for a moment, there has been enough interest shown to warrant a paperback version and that will be out around May. Once released it can be bought from Amazon and other book shops on-line or in your High Street.

As with so many things though, none of this is all that easy. Yes, Amazon make getting the finalised text onto their platform fairly straightforward, but there is a lot to do to get a book to the stage that it is ready. If you put in the effort then it is all worth it in the long run, but even something as simple as blogging takes time and effort to put together. I have been able to keep hitting my 600 words every week for Monday Musings as well as hitting deadlines for three magazine columns, but all of my other blogs have suffered from a lack of my attention as the books take precedence. Oh for 36 hour days and  nine day weeks!