June 2015 A Literary Kitty

It would seem that Bubbles has inherited my love of reading, as she is pictured here, eagerly devouring my long awaited first book of poetry!

I have always loved writing, as I'm sure you have realised by now! Over the last few years I've been writing poetry and this Spring had finally built up what I considered to be a thoughtfully suitable collection for publication. Soooooooooooo.... I went for it!

I had, at first, purely decided to hit the e book market. I told myself there would be little demand for a first-time-published writer's poems in paperback, and everyone reads Kindle nowadays anyway, don't they? I did LOTS of investigating and research on the computer into how to go about self-publishing and finally decided on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform. I would highly recommend this to anyone else who's in the market for, well um, marketing their book! It was pretty straightforward so after a bit of tinkering around and faffing with the format, it was ready to go. Online and on sale within an hour of me submitting for approval. I couldn't believe it!

The surprises kept coming, however, with the amount of people who actually downloaded it and also who have since left me positive feedback or placed a review on Amazon. The support and encouragement was, in a word, inspiring. As were the many requests for a paperback version. More people than I had originally realised were really interested in ordering a copy but didn't have a Kindle or didn't want to download the App, saying instead that they would prefer to have an actual book to hold in their hands. I can relate to this because nothing quite beats the smell of a new, or an old, book!

I really hadn't considered publishing in paperback... but I'm so glad I did! I used a different publishing platform that allowed me to still sell through Amazon, and decided on an alternative front cover, to distinguish my paperback from my Kindle version. But other than that, the books are identical in content. It has proved a big hit so far and has definitely encouraged me to keep writing my fiction book, to hopefully publish as a novella in the near future.

                                                            Kindle and paperback covers