…re-run by popular request… Foreword for SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES…

…yeez are very nice people out there, Lads and Lassies of Blog Land… many of yeez have suggested I run the Foreword for SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES so that my fellow quill-scrapers may get a clear notion of what it’s about… if it can help any of yeez, that’s a bonus… here it is:

Foreword to SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES

I started writing my first crime thriller novel in early 2009. I finished the first draft in a matter of a few months. Then, I thought, all I have to do is to send it off to a few Literary Agents in London. One of them would be sure to throw lots of money at me for the right to carry my masterpiece into the public readership market.

In fact I sent off forty Query Letters, submitting the novel for consideration. In the beautiful balance that is the writing universe, I received back precisely forty Rejection Slips. It took a while later for me to understand from fellow authors, that such rejection was the standard, the par for the course. Indeed, many famous names in the libraries had initially racked up several times that number of rebuffs for their work.

Around the same time someone suggested I put the thing onto Amazon Kindle. I looked blank and explained that I had never heard of Kindle. You see, then in my early sixties, the whole computer business and social networking fields were distant concepts to me. All my commercial life, my offices had been run by a succession of personal assistants who did ‘that stuff’ for me. I was faced with the option of forgetting the whole authorship idea or adapting rapidly to the realities of modern self-publishing.

The result has been astonishing. Sales and downloads of my books (currently three crime thrillers, with a fourth as Work In Progress) have surpassed 80,000 copies.

It has been a wonderful and gratifying trip. I will not pretend to be an expert on the social networks nor on the ePublishing business. I simply want to show what worked for me.

SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES is intended to share with others the various steps I took on that journey, and to encourage independent writers never ever to give up on their dreams.

Seumas Gallacher

Abu Dhabi

2014

…the Amazon links are here :

UK: http://amzn.to/Qq2c3y

US: http://amzn.to/1lt6bcv

…see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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