That’s something that’s never happened to me before. I was introduced to someone today who told me ‘Oh, I’m just reading your book! I really like the way it deals with the role of women, how they’re treated.’ They then told me they enjoyed the Indian setting too, and I was chuffed, I tell you, chuffed.
I suppose, then, this is as good a time as any to remind you copies are available on Amazon, but if you fancy a signed copy, then head over to my Etsy shop and I’ll be happy to squiggle all over the title page for you. Heck, if I’m feeling generous I might even slip one of my watercolour leaf paintings in too.
That’s the sort of thing that happens when I’m in a good mood.
I’ve admitted defeat. I’ve now spent too long trying to find a platform for my print on demand books that doesn’t use Amazon and I just don’t have the time to faff around with it for any longer. Consequently I’ve put them back up on there.
A few days ago I dug out all the pastel paintings I have hanging around and put them to one side, the intention being to chuck them all out. As part of managing to get my creative side working properly again, I feel I need to clear out the majority of my old work. I think it is simply preventing me from getting going again – as well as taking up space we don’t really have spare. I’ve always been a little reluctant to just destroy a painting I think I might be able to sell at some point, but that’s something that doesn’t matter to me in the same way any longer.
It’s much the same with writing. Nice if someone buys it and nice, of course, if someone reads it and likes it and, hopefully, gets something from it. But not important in the same way as it used to be. I’ve never wanted to be famous, or sell millions of books (much the same thing, of course), and perhaps this is part of that. If the poetry I’m currently writing is any good, I would like someone to publish it, and if a small audience appreciated it and thought it worthwhile, well, I’d be tickled pink. But it’s not that important.
If I paint again, or carve wood, it will be entirely for me. If someone likes a painting, then perhaps I’ll simply give it to them. I appreciate this isn’t a philosophy that most creatives could adopt, but it’s what I feel I should like to do at the moment.
Wall painting in Amberley Church, Sussex. It dates from around 1300AD, was whitewashed over around 1550, and restored in 1967.
April 11th 2022:
We’re off to Amberley for a couple of days. We should have been walking the South Downs Way at the moment, but Covid has left us too tired for that, so we cancelled our various bookings. But to give ourselves a short break, we kept the Amberley one and booked an extra night.
Yesterday I contemplated completely coming off the internet for a matter of all of about half a second. I find it a huge distraction and much of it incredibly annoying, but like most folk I’m in too deep to extricate myself. We’ve arranged our lives around it over the past twenty years especially, and in my own case I keep in touch with many people that way, I have my blog, which I don’t think I’m ready to give up yet, rely upon it for booking trains and finding train and bus timetables, use it for family research, writing research, and to find and order books and music. None of these would be insurmountable problems, but cumulatively it would just be too much hassle to do without.
But even when I’m using my laptop for writing, I get too easily distracted by the internet and I feel a little like those people who walk through lovely scenery staring down at their mobile phones.
April 15th 2022:
Sunny and clear this morning and the forecast is that the day will be warm and bright. Having had quite a busy day yesterday, I felt quite run down in the evening and this morning feel very tired despite having slept well. It is four weeks until we go to Coll and I hope I’ve got some energy back by then.
It is sunny and, dare I say it, warm all day and despite this being Easter Bank Holiday weekend, the forecast is that it will continue this way.
Well, it’s only taken me about six months, but I’ve sent the e-book version of Making Friends with the Crocodile out into the world once more. I expect you thought I’d never get around to it.
Actually, I expect you’d completely forgotten about it. I unpublished both my books from Amazon back at the end of February (this post explains why) and since then I’ve explored a number of platforms, and most of them came up short. I’ve gone with Draft2Digital for the e-books, since I can specify they do not appear on Amazon, although even now I’ve an issue with how my second book will be labelled. It means the e-book is now available on a number of platforms, such as Apple, and this link will let you choose one of them.
It seems impossible, though, to find a publisher that doesn’t automatically offer the physical books through Amazon. Much the same as anything one sells anywhere today, either online or offline, can reappear on Amazon and there’s nothing one can do about it. Short of becoming a publishing house myself, I don’t think I can avoid it.
And before you ask, no!
I’ll now have a last scout around the internet to see if I can find a platform for the paperbacks that don’t sell through Amazon, but I suspect I’ll be unlucky. In which case I’ll probably stick with Draft2Digital and ask you nicely, should you buy one of my books, not to buy it through Amazon.
About Making Friends with the Crocodile:
‘There is an Indian proverb: If you live by the banks of a river, make friends with the crocodile.
Set in India, this is a novel about the corrosive relationship between a mother and daughter-in-law, and the contempt in which that society still holds women. Siddiqa’s son has brought his new wife, Naira, to live with them, so Siddiqa is no longer the lowest in the household, for she now has a daughter-in-law to assume that role. But when Naira accuses one of her husband’s friends of sexually assaulting her, all their lives begin to spiral out of control.’
The last week or so seems to have been ridiculously busy. All my own fault, of course. I’ve become exceptionally good at realising I’m doing rather a lot…and then starting a new project to add to it.
I’m making good progress on my current work in progress, A Good Place. Check.
Totally irrelevant photo, but one of my favourite shots. Small boy carrying dead sharks on a donkey. As you do.
Now that I have unpublished both of my books from Amazon, I have submitted Making Friends with the Crocodile to a publisher who will accept work that has been previously self-published and am waiting on a yes or no from them. Check.
I have edited two of the poems I wrote last month during my Poem-a-day-for-a-week experiment, and my talented friend Mark Prestage is including them in a pamphlet / zine / chapbook /call it what you will with some of his superb linocuts and photos. More on that when it’s out.
And while I’m thinking about that, perhaps I should have a go at another Poem-a-day-for-a-week soon, it worked quite well, really.
What I haven’t yet done is put my short stories and poem book, The Night Bus, up on a new platform. This will probably be Lulu, and I really ought to do that soon.
I haven’t been very good at visiting blogs recently, as you might have noticed. I need to do a bit more of that.
I was going to start a painting, which I haven’t managed to do yet. Really, I do sometimes set myself too much to do.
So, a new project? Really? Well, yes, actually. Forty years or so ago my father began a family tree, which I occasionally helped him with. It has sat in a cupboard since he died thirty years ago. And now I’ve had the urge to take it up and do some work on it, partly because I’m aware that there is a whole branch of my family which has died out, and only myself and one cousin would still remember any of them. And, we’re not getting any younger, you know. So I’ve begun researching that.
My thanks to those who commented on my last post. I have now unpublished both books from Amazon, although Amazon won’t delist them on the grounds someone might want to sell them second-hand through their platform. I can’t do anything about that.
Making paper by hand, Kalimpong, West Bengal (2)
I will shortly re-publish The Night Bus, probably on Lulu, although I haven’t definitely decided on that platform, yet. I’ll do a little more research, first.
As for Making Friends with the Crocodile, I am persuaded to have a go at finding a publisher for it. We’ll see how that goes.
I have three questions for everyone out there who has self-published a book or books.
If you used a platform other than Amazon, which one did you use, why did you use it, and how do you promote and sell?
I have published two books, both on Amazon, and I used that platform as it seemed the easiest and is obviously popular and sees lots of traffic. Yet I would now rather not use it. I actually avoid buying anything on Amazon if I can, feeling there is so much about it (and its founder) that I do not like. But equally I would not like to be a hypocrite, so I need to find another platform which will work for me.
Irrelevant-ish photo – making paper by hand in Kalimpong, India
Well, that’s it. I’ve done it. It’s finished. Somewhere around mid-morning yesterday, probably just before eleven o’clock. And in the end it wasn’t too difficult; not too painful, anyway. I thought I was going to have more problems than I did, actually. Fortunately, though, it all went quite smoothly in the end. In fact, I’m not sure what all the fuss was about.
Oh, I do beg your pardon. I was quite forgetting.
I’m referring to the book I’ve been working on for the last three or four years: A Good Place. Having thought I’d finished it around a year ago, I ended up binning the last third of the book and re-writing it. And although I’ve ended up with what I feel is a stronger narrative, and with more believable characters, there was one chapter towards the end that was just refusing to play ball.
Until yesterday.
So hopefully, I’ve now completed the final draft. I’ve sent it to my beta reader to go through, and as long as she thinks the story works I’ll put it to one side for six months and then begin what I hope will be the final edit. And if I’m still happy with it then, I’ll look to pass it to three more beta readers for their comments. If they think it worthwhile, I might then have a go at interesting a publisher in it.
Although I’ll probably just think Oh, to hell with it all and self-publish it, anyway.
And if she thinks it’s no good, I’ll hide it somewhere and sulk.
What’s it about? It is set in an Indian hill station in 1988. An English visitor arrives, bringing with him a mystery concerning his childhood, the key to which he suspects may lie with the remaining English inhabitants of the town. And like many expatriate communities around the world, these inhabitants have a complicated and, at times, difficult relationship with the other members of their community. As the visitor gets drawn further into the life of this community, he finds his own relationships with them becoming unexpectedly complicated and difficult, with tragic and unanticipated consequences for several of them.
Anyway, after all that palaver, I decided to go for a walk in the woods nearby. Up until that point, it had been a dry, if overcast, day. But as soon as I reached the woods, the rain began pelting down.
It was dark and gloomy beneath the trees, and the rain was soon drawing out the peculiarly woodland scents of autumn. There was a rich, thick, puddingy smell, as rich and thick as the deep and increasingly wet humus soil I was walking on. Soon my feet were squishing and squelching through the mud and dead leaves, the fungi and conker husks, the rotting wood and the mildewed berries.
The rain burst through the branches and leaves of the trees, hammering on my head and shoulders, running into my pockets, and down my legs. Although it was mid-afternoon, the light had the quality of a premature dusk, and the few other people I saw seemed to slip between the trees like unhappy ghosts.
Allow me to introduce a new joint venture, a magazine (or zine, as I’m informed we hip youngsters now say):
The final poem in my recent collection, The Night Bus, is a poem called Vikings, and it is reproduced in this here zine with a series of super illustrations.
This is a collaboration between myself and my talented friend Mark Prestage. As already indicated the poem is mine, while Mark designed, cut and printed the linocuts.
Mark also did the hard work of putting the zine together, while I just sat around and drank beer. The zine is printed on 16 pages of high quality paper, in a preliminary edition of 40 numbered copies.
In the UK the price is £4.50 including postage and packaging, and it can be ordered from my Etsy site: here, or directly from me (just email me) using Paypal. Unfortunately the cost of postage overseas makes it impractical to offer outside of the UK (typically doubling the cost of the zine, or even more).
If people make lots of approving noises, we have ideas for similar projects in the future.
Hours of pleasure for the price of a cup of coffee in Bigbucks.
Like any other worker, you pay for my time. Only unlike the decorator, say, you only pay for a tiny fraction of the real time spent creating your book.
And what do you get for this investment?
Why, I bring you a whole, newly created world to explore!
I introduce you to people you never expected to meet, without the inconvenience of having to make small talk with them.
Heroes and villains, fools and wise men.
Perchance I will take you on a perilous voyage, yet you will return safely to the shore.
Encounter your deepest fears, and overcome them.
Know love, and disappointment, happy ever after and abject failure.
See through the eyes of the cruel and the eyes of the kind.
And all this for less than the price of a coffee.
And unlike the decorator, I won’t come and tread paint into your carpet, disappear for two weeks to do another job, leave your kitchen a complete mess, eat all your biscuits or drink all your tea.
Mick Canning 