Another reason why writing matters is that it is an absolute fact that your writing can live longer than you do.  Think about it – even if you never become a bestseller, whatever writing you do can still last a long time, providing both entertainment and an insight into your own self for generations of your family to come.  If you do manage even a modicum of success, your work has the chance of being discovered and celebrated, and of affecting people for potentially hundreds of years after you yourself have departed this mortal coil.

Affecting people is actually yet another important reason why writing matters.  Writing can touch people you’ll never meet, in places you’ll never go.  Even something as simple as a blog with a very limited readership can still reach out and touch someone, affect their lives for the better.  Even fan fiction, often a form of writing sneered at by many can produce some often beautiful, haunting, touching pieces of prose that can genuinely affect and move another human being, perhaps in another country, or many years after it was actually written.  That’s power.  That’s writing.

p.s. Writing can change lives.

The fact is, what you are writing matters, for a variety of reasons.  For one, even if you aren’t getting paid at the present time, at the end of the day no one becomes a writer for the cash anyway.  It’s a nice thing if you can get it, to be sure, but writing is not just a career, and it certainly isn’t just a “hobby”.  Writing is a calling.  It sounds terribly pretentious, I know, but how many of us, when we first picked up a pen, did so because we envisaged great riches or just to pass the time until something more interesting happened?  Very few, I’d wager.  We write because we don’t have any other choice.  It’s more than what we do, it’s what we are.  So published or not, paid or not, the fact that writing is such an intrinsic part of our identity as an individual human being is what makes it matter.

p.s. Writers are writers, regardless of success.

After all, a TV show lasts about an hour while even the longest “Harry Potter” movie lasts 2 ½ hours at the most – a book, on the other hand, takes up to ten hours for the average reader to get through.  Ten hours is a very long time, so those characters – whether they’re good, evil or somewhere in between – had definitely better be seriously interesting in order to justify your reader’s investment.

Another tip is simply to write like you.  This simply means to develop your own style of writing and not to try to emulate someone else’s.  If you have a sense of humour (and if you don’t, you have bigger problems than trying to self-publish a book, let’s face it) that humour should bleed through into your characters and your work.  If there is a big idea in your work, make sure it’s an idea that you are taken with.  This isn’t just for your readers’ sake – it’s for your own.  Trying to write a novel about something you don’t care about in a style that isn’t your own is practically guaranteeing failure before you’ve even started.

p.s. In writing, as in life – be yourself.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule for how much you can earn as a self published author.  Book authors do not get a salary – how much they earn depends on how many of their books they can sell and what royalties they then receive from those sales.  Some self published authors have been successful enough to earn something like 100,000 US dollars inside of six months.  Others would be lucky if they earned that much in a lifetime.  Some self published authors, of course, can end up selling not so much as one copy of their book, so you can probably guess how much they’re earning.

The truth is that the success of a book is something like 20 per cent writing, 80 per cent marketing, so to be a success as a self published writer, being a good writer simply isn’t enough – you need to be a good, if not great, marketer as well.

p.s. Quality writing and canny marketing skills are the only ways to make good profit as a self published author.

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Description

Wheel of Destiny is a novel of intrigue, adventure and explicit sexuality. An English teacher flees the threat of death across the world in the company of his provocative pupil. When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls’ grammar school in England and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather’s wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest that ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters’ latent sexuality. While the novel takes the form of a thriller, it is also a love story. The plot pivots round the war-diary of a man whose bomber was shot down in action in Egypt in 1941. The man had invested money in partnership with his wartime friend in an opal mine in a place designated by the letters ‘C.P.’ in ‘S.A.’. His granddaughter’s search for the mine affects her own as well as her former teacher’s destiny.

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Bryan Cromwell

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Description

The first part of this book deals with disease, health, and diet mainly in Knightswood prior to, during, and immediately following World War II. The second part is concerned mainly with the education of primary school children in the same area and during the same period, although there are several ventures beyond Knightswood and into Glasgow generally.

This is not intended to be an academic treatise but is more in the form of a collection of experiences from a number of men and women who spent their formative years in Glasgow’s largest between-the-wars housing development. The accounts are equally applicable to all of Glasgow Corporation’s pioneering garden suburbs. In addition to anecdotes there is a great deal of easily verifiable “official” information; for example, details of Glasgow’s highly successful mass chest X-ray campaign in the 1950s and a fair amount of factual material concerning the Scottish education system operating in the early to mid 20th century.

Perhaps this modest book, although concentrating on health and education, will go some way to giving Glasgow’s largest garden suburb the attention it deserves. After all, this “land of hope and glory” has nurtured many people who came to the forefront of public attention and in a variety of occupations, having survived the diseases of childhood prevalent in the period covered and benefitted from a ‘guid Scottish education’.

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Description

Ivor’s Ramblings is a feast of poetry covering many subjects including fantasy, trips within one’s mind, spirituality and life’s experiences with an ever present message of having fun, enjoying life and making the most of the hand life dealt you to travel the pathways of life.

It is coloured by his being brought up in a large military family, his teenage years living on the island of Penang in Malaysia and the trials and successes he has encountered throughout his lifetime.

Avenues of the mind, depression, laughter, death, disability, religion and spirituality are all unfolded here in a most surprisingly entertaining fashion.

The clear message of having fun whilst rising from the ashes of depression, redundancy and personal loss have never before been presented in such a personal and open manner that makes one feel that just reading his work could guide you towards one’s own personal fulfilment.

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Description

Inspired by a challenge to “do something I had always wanted to do” I chose to write a poem from which came this anthology. “Open the Door” is a poetic reflection of my journey – a journey of discovery during which I began to understand that a true relationship with God needs to be living and active.

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Description

Set initially in Lancashire in the late twenties, this story follows the early life and Vicissitudes of Tim who, shortly after birth, was fostered out by his mother to a poor, socially deprived family, in Blackpool.

Unable, or unwilling, to cope with her illegitimate offspring, Tim’s mother made for the brighter lights of London, ostensibly to seek work. But there was always a mystery surrounding the boy’s father, his background, whereabouts and profession.

While essentially an autobiography, the author’s memories are distilled in the form of an exciting and absorbingly interesting novel. Indeed, the book is a good read and without doubt will constitute a valuable record of social history, especially regarding the socio-economic conditions prevailing just before, during and after WWII. The eye-witness accounts of the London Blitz, the strafing of a key aerodrome by low-flying Nazi planes, and the daily onslaught of V1 ‘doodlebugs’, and the vicissitudes of the young boy as he is shunted from foster-parent to foster-parent and finds his way in life and society, places the reader in the cut and thrust of day-to-day survival during this vital time in recent English history. The graphic character sketches and colourful dialogue adds both verisimilitude and entertainment to the narrative.

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Description

Eli Murray, a war-weary ex-captain in the SAS, is holidaying in Morocco with his wife and two children when a roadside car bomb explodes, killing his family and seriously injuring him. Seconds before the explosion, he sees three of the terrorists involved and, while recovering in hospital, determines to seek revenge.

Recuperating in Casablanca, he is approached by two Israeli Secret Service officers. They ask him to join their hunt for the terrorists, who are bent on disrupting the Israeli and Palestinian peace conference with a trail of death and destruction across North Africa and the Middle East. Murray agrees and, helped by a woman – an Israeli Army captain – he wages an unrelenting campaign of merciless vengeance against the terrorists.

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