A long Genesis

Genesis

This is my first post of a blog about my journey as a writer and all the fun that comes with trying to achieve my dreams. Before I begin I just want to thank my friend Cheryl for encouraging me to write this. I will update every Saturday and when I feel there is news or information worth sharing. So here it goes.

Ideas
As most of my friends and family know at the beginning of 2010 I started to write my first book. I had no real experience in writing beyond what I had done at high school and at university, but I felt I had a few very good ideas for a trilogy and started to write the first book.

Writing
I wrote a 1000 words a day and by April the first draft was finished. During this period I had a wave of ideas and the trilogy developed into 6 books. I was very very excited by it all and all the ideas I had come up with for these books. I lost a lot of sleep when thinking about the books and often when a new idea evolved I was so excited that I felt like a child at Christmas.

Agents/Publishing
The normal way of becoming published is to have an agent who contacts publishers. They will then hopefully publish the work. I wrote to a few agents hoping that they would like what they read but I had no luck.
In my research I found this is very common experience. It is also interesting to note that even if a writer gets an agent they may not get published, or find it very difficult. A prime example of this is J.K Rowling. Harry
Potter went to 12 different publishers before she got published (source: the writers guide 2011).

ebook
Also during this period I got in touch with an ebook publisher North Highland Publishing. They agreed to have my book on their website. In December 2010 the book was put on their website as an ebook.

Hard copies/Doing it myself
Having the ebook was great but I really wanted hard copies of my book for people to read. I had given up on getting an agent, as my personal belief is that the system of agents is flawed. I kept reading about successful authors who got rejected by lots of agents before they got one then became successful. I also read about some authors who got successful without agents. One example was of a writer who started their own publishing company and published a high volume of their book and sold it on ebay. They then became known by people and gained success (source: writers guide 2011).

I started to think that the only thing that matters is marketing and people reading the work.
So at the beginning of this month (February 2011) I went to Stirling University print services and priced up how much it would cost for them to print off an A5 copy and to see the quality. They printed it and I cannot express how excited I was.
I wanted to sell the book but it was proving difficult to find a way of doing it that was cost effective. Thanks to my friend Bruce and his advice I found a cost effective website to sell my book on. The service is a print on demand and when a book is ordered I contact the printers and they print the book off.

Marketing
At this point in my writing career the main focus is marketing of my first book. There are a few things in the pipeline but I will update on these in the future.

My book
These are the websites were you can find information about the book such as the blurb, synopsis and also to buy my book.

ebook: http://www.northhighlandpublishing.com/
Hard Copies: http://www.stevenjguscott.bigcartel.com/
Opinions on the book: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Chronicles-of-Elementary-The-Journal-of-Fire/152130681491544?sk=wall

Thanks for reading :)