I wrote a piece for The Good Men Project, about my time in India and how I came to write Making friends with the Crocodile’. Sushi Menon kindly edited it to make it readable, and gave it a title, and you can find it here:
Category: books
The Book is Released – Hurrah!
‘Making Friends with the Crocodile‘ is now released!
Kindle edition Paperback edition
Anyone who has already pre-ordered it on Kindle / Amazon should have received it by now, and in countries where there is no pre-order facility, such as India, the Kindle edition is also now available to buy.
The paperback is available from the Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.eu sites only – this is a quirk of Amazon – but can also be ordered from the estore at CreateSpace, at the following link:
https://www.createspace.com/6301808
And now, I wait to see what people think of the book, with a considerable amount of nervousness.
If you do buy a copy, please consider leaving a review either at Amazon, or on Goodreads, if you are a member (better still, at both!). Reviews are genuinely the lifeblood of a writer, and do help to sell books.
Finally, the blurb again…
‘Siddiqa was only just into her teens when she was forced to leave her home to live with her new husband and his family in another village. The years have passed, and now Siddiqa has three children of her own. Her grown up son has brought his new wife, Naira, to live with them, so Siddiqa is no longer the lowliest in the household, for she has a daughter-in-law.
Life in rural India is particularly harsh for women. This novel explores themes of female oppression and tradition and asks whether the next generation will find life any easier.’
The Morning After…
Wow, what a weekend!
After the book launch, the parties!
Celebrations!
Oh, and when I looked out of the window to see the streams of bunting all the way along the road, and the swarms of well-wishers gathering outside the house, I was so excited!
Then once I had gone out and signed loads and loads of autographs, I was being chased all over town for interviews by all the big newspapers!
And then I…
Well, okay. That’s not strictly true.
It’s not very true at all.
In fact, it’s not true in even the teeniest tiniest littlest way.
My life does not seem to have altered in the slightest and, actually, I’m glad about that.
Right, now it’s time to get on with the next stage.
I’ve put a link on the image of the book on my sidebar, which goes directly to my book page on Amazon (thanks, Stuart!).
And I’m looking at the best way to create Print on Demand paperback copies of the book, probably by using CreateSpace (lots of recommendations), and hope to have that sorted out in a couple of days. I don’t think it’s too difficult, but my way of dealing with new technology tends to be by shouting at it and slamming doors, so I may take longer than other writers.
But since the release date of the Kindle copy is June 4th, I should have time to arrange for the paperback to be released on the same date.
So, what next?
Actually, it will be great to feel that I can focus on just writing again, and not just constant editing and revision, so it’s back to the long Work in Progress, ‘The Assassin’s Garden’. This has a timeline that stretches from Medieval Persia through Medieval India and the British Raj, through to Edwardian England. It’s already a long novel and nowhere near finished, so I suspect that I might eventually have a trilogy on my hands.
I might even write a short story or two.
Ooh, it’s exciting. I do love this writing lark!
Published!
Well, blimey, Making Friends with the Crocodile is now published on Kindle and is up on Amazon as we speak!
About a week ago, I reached the point where I felt that the editing was finally complete, or, at least, if it wasn’t, then I might just pick at it for ages without really making any further difference, and so it was time to get the process finished.
What a relief.
It feels as though I have been under pressure for weeks. I’ve felt tired, I’ve felt tense.
Ooh, I’ve been irritable!
All this pressure, of course, is of my own making. A lot of it, I suspect, being due to this being my first foray into publishing.
I knew that I needed to format my text for Kindle, and heard that Scrivener was a useful tool for that. And so I downloaded Scrivener, and spent a couple of hours working through the tutorial until I decided that it just wasn’t going to happen for me.
I’m sure it is very useful, but I was getting to the point where I felt like chucking the laptop at the wall.
So I went and looked in detail at the instructions for publishing on Kindle, and found that you could just save your file in the correct format and then upload that.
Bye, bye Scrivener.
I looked at a few Kindle books and then wrote the stuff at the front and back of the book – about copyrights and stuff like that.
I inserted my table of contents.
I already had my book cover ready.
I wrote the blurb:
‘Siddiqa was only just into her teens when she was forced to leave her home to live with her new husband and his family in another village. The years have passed, and now Siddiqa has three children of her own. Her grown up son has brought his new wife, Naira, to live with them, so Siddiqa is no longer the lowliest in the household, for she has a daughter-in-law.
Life in rural India is particularly harsh for women. This novel explores themes of female oppression and tradition and asks whether the next generation will find life any easier.’
Working out how to upload to Kindle, and to complete all of the forms and tick boxes proved a little long winded, but reasonably straightforward.
So then, suddenly, there it was. Sitting on Amazon, available for pre-order, with a launch date of 4th June. Although for some reason, unfortunately, pre-order is not available in India.
And now it feels much like stepping off of a crowded and noisy street into summer sunshine; the sounds of the shouting and the traffic disappearing and being replaced by birdsong.
Woo-hoo!
And what a buzz to go and look at my own author page on Amazon, with my own book there!
Woo-hoo again!
For the moment, as I say, it is only available for pre-order, and will be released on 4th June. But if anyone does feel inclined to buy it, pre-orders will help boost the ratings when it actually launches.
I am going to look again at Print on Demand, in a day or so. Initially, I had ruled it out, mainly because the one site that I looked at required the customer (i.e. me) to order and pay for a set number in advance, and I assumed that would always be the case, but now I think that is possibly not so. Certainly, the Amazon tool, CreateSpace, looks as though it might work more the way that Kindle does.
It will be great if it does, since I really prefer to have a physical copy of a book, and I know there are still a few other people out there who still feel that way.
So…now to get my head around promotion…
Ooh, it’s nearly finished!
I’m getting excited, now.
My novel, ‘Making Friends with the Crocodile’ is hopefully ready for its final edit.
This part of the journey seems to be taking a great deal of time, but this might be because it is my first foray into publishing. I know that there is still much to do – formatting, advertising, proof-reading, the publishing itself, amongst a plethora of smaller but no less important tasks – but I am finally beginning to feel that I am getting there.
Curiously, after what I wrote in my last post, I never found any of the characters threatening to hijack the plot in any way. Although I never planned it out in any detail, I had a rough plan in my head, which, remarkably, I kept to. Perhaps it is because the subject matter is strong. I don’t know.
And I think that I have settled upon the cover (the artwork is my own).
I may play around with the wording, slightly, for example I might take out the words ‘A Novel’.
For some background; the story is set in a village in Northern India, some fifteen odd years ago. It is about the deteriorating relationship between two women in a family: the mother and her daughter in law. Like this relationship frequently is, it is a strained, fractious one, not helped by that society’s attitudes towards women and their roles in general. And when one of them gets caught up in events beyond her control, these attitudes become dreadfully destructive.
As always, your thoughts would be very much appreciated.
Mick Canning 