A Self-Publishing Author’s Playroom
Good day everybody!
I’m Seumas Gallacher, pronounced ‘Shay-mas’. I tell people that straight up, beacuse I often get amazingly mangled verbal productions of it. In truth, it’s the Scottish Gaelic version of ‘James’, which is what appears in my passport, but yeez can call me anything, except too early in the morning. Oh, and another thing, my laptop seems to have difficulty in writing ‘you’, ‘your’ and ‘you’re’…it prefers the sounds we make North of the Border for those--- ‘yeez’, ‘yer’ and ‘ye’re’… well, it is a ‘Mac’ after all.
The Weekender has seen fit to invite me to share my sometimes unconventional thoughts about life in general and living in the Middle East and Bahrain in particular and for that, I’m grateful , otherwise all that stuff would continue to ricochet around my brain forever, and I’m not sure if what’s left of my wee grey cells can handle that. Y’see, I’m a writer, well I do have a corporate day job, too, but the real pleasure is in the scribbling and to be precise, I’m a self-publishing author.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be describing some of the joys and banes of competing with the lordly global major publishing houses. Everywhere I go, when people learn that I’ve ‘done books’, many tell me they also want to write; everybody has at least one book in them, so they say, and my response to the newbies is constant-just do it here in Bahrain! We are blessed with a terrific group, the ‘Bahrain Writers Circle’. If yeez live here, or visit here on a regular basis, bring yer writing desire along and enjoy the warmest welcome I’ve ever known in any writing group. The support and encouragement is outstanding; the advent of the social media universe has made it so much simpler to crystallize the dream of becoming a published writer. Amazon Kindle provides one channel and has given this ol’ Jurassic Scot a wonderful trip over the past eight years.
However, a wee word of caution- there are several things to address before getting yer masterpieces on to the eBook merry-go-round. Apart from actually creating yer narrative, such minor, (ahem), issues as proof-reading, editing, cover artwork, formatting, and re-drafting will absorb a lot of focus then, there’s the not-so-small matter of marketing and promotional activity. This demands an immediate and continuing program to create an author presence on the web, called ‘building the platform’, in places such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and Pocket. And running with yer own blog site is a useful imperative too, but enough of the things yeez have to do. I’ll address these in later blog posts. In the meantime, if the urge to write takes yeez, then go ahead and start. Enjoy-see yeez later-LUV YEEZ!
