      | So, book number three is now published - super excited here! The first collection of Harry short stories, Harry Kenmare, PI - At Your Service, arrived yesterday. The sense of achievement as a writer when you can actually hold the book in your hands is beyond description, even for a writer! Now, aside from slaving over the manuscript writing the book, which is down to yours truly (writing is a very solo project in that regard), the final book only gets there with a whole lot of input and assistance from others. So, my acknowledgement page in the book records for posterity all those who were part of this effort. And now it's time to say THANK YOU to them all here and, for the professional contributors, to shout out my recommendations for their work. I've embedded the website links so you can check them out further. First up my partner, Ruth, who puts up with the author and all his mess (and thousands of books!). Ruth was also a beta reader for the stories, as was my sister, Katie, over in France, and my good friend here, Allan Yates (who will be the MC again at the upcoming book launch - stay tuned on that one). Beta readers are invaluable - thank you all. This time, being short stories rather than a full-length novel, I did all the editing myself, so there was no separate editor. I'll be getting an editor back on board for the third novel, currently in progress. For liking my short story work enough to publish it in the USA, including three of the Harry stories in this book, and for the fundamental encouragement and motivation that gave me, thank you to Scotch Rutherford, the editor of Switchblade magazine out of L.A. And also for the encouragement arising from publishing my short fiction, and not a Harry story, thank you to J.D. Graves, the editor of Econoclash Review magazine also over in the US. Thank you to the recently formed Independent Fiction Alliance for their support. This Alliance, set up in L.A., is for writers and publishers who are committed to freedom of speech and who loathe censorship of any kind - yeah, if you've read any Harry, you can see why I joined them. The Alliance didn't make the acknowledgements page in the book, as the manuscript had already been typeset, but their Kraken logo was able to be added to the back cover. Talking of typesetting, there is a vast range of work that goes into the mechanics of publishing a book, including typesetting the manuscript, formatting for publication, arranging the printing, and doing all the digital and ebook conversions. As for my two novels, I returned again to the wonderful Publicious up in Queensland. Andy McDermott and his team there have been superb to work with every time, and if ever you're thinking of self-publishing, I can't recommend Publicious enough. The cover work here really does speak for itself, and I'll certainly be going back to the hugely talented J.T. Lindroos for future book covers. J.T. really nailed what I wanted and I couldn't be happier with the cover. And on the subject of artistic talent, Ran Scott drew me a set of eight superb noir images, one for Harry's introduction at the start of the book, and then one each for the seven stories. I sent Ran drafts to read and he totally captured the dark feel of each story. You can find Ran on Twitter: @RSPMystery And to round out the design contributions, thank you to my friend Stephen Hill at Dylunio, who did the original ABP logo with my Irish heritage clover, and has done the bookmark collection to accompany the new book. There's a set of eight, each with one of the internal images and a quote. THANK YOU so much to all of you. Cheers, ABP |
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