Monday, October 16, 2017

I'm all booked out!

I had to do it, and I'm very glad I did, but now I'm all booked out!

I first conceived the idea of "Life with our feet under water" after about two years of living and travelling on Kantara. This blog had a lot of regular readers, so there was at least some interest in this boaty life of ours. I had to try it. I love writing, I love the sound of my own voice on paper (I'm not too keen on it "live"), and I loved the challenge. What seemed like ages later, I published the book on Kindle, did a bit (or was it a lot?) of promotion, and sat back to see what happened. I was delighted by the result, and despite a few one-star, one-liner reviews (from people, I reckoned, who had clearly not read the sample pages provided on Amazon before buying), it seemed that folk were really enjoying it.

Riding on the euphoria of that, I had to see if a sequel would come equally easily to the pen keyboard, and started to bash my way through that. In truth, though, neither one of them was as easy as I had expected them to be, and it was during a time of writer's block (aka would-be writer's what-the-heck-do-I-do-next?), that I felt compelled to commit to print the collection of bits and pieces of advice we'd picked up over the past few years, and the useful stuff we'd learned from our won experience. This was going to be a much shorter book, and wouldn't take nearly so long to prepare, so I put "working-title, Feet 2" aside, took a break from my bogged-downness, and launched into this fresh, new project.

It was a lot of fun. It was easy, and I was very proud of it. And I called it "Hints and tips for life with your feet under water", which I thought was a clever title, not realizing at the time that its length was rather unruly. It, too, was published on Kindle, and sat proudly next to its big brother on my Amazon Author Page, cheaper and thinner, but just as worthy. And it started to sell, too, though not as well as the other; largely, I thought, because its appeal is to a smaller potential readership; "Hints and tips" is aimed at those who have already embarked on a life which involves a lot of time on a narrowboat, or are currently considering doing so. "Life with our feet under water" is written for those same people, but also for anyone who simply has an interest in canals and boats. And since they don't need canals for readers to appreciate the book, it also sold in several countries where there are none.

In due course, both books got really good reviews in Towpath Talk, for which I was very thankful.



Much encouraged by all of this, I was propelled back to "working-title, Feet 2", I decided on its final title, and was eventually ready to publish "Moving home with our feet under water". I was wanting to release a second edition of  "Life..." (it was at about this time that it occurred to me what stupidly long titles my beloved books had) at the same time. I'd made some small textual changes, and given it a new cover.

But there was still a problem with it.


>>>===<<<

2 comments:

  1. Which was? Oh dear...do I have to wait for the next instalment now? :)

    ReplyDelete

I'd love to hear from you!