How I Got Into Publishing

Twelve years ago, I was the office manager of our family construction firm in South Wales. One day, my father came in, handed me a bag of papers, notebooks and drawings and said: ‘See what you can do with this lot.’

They were the automatic writings that had been dictated to him by Spirit over the previous forty years.

I had no idea what to do with them, although an uncle had given me his book to proof-read about five years before that, so I started with that. It was no really proof-reading though, those words were too precious to alter and I certainly could not correct them!

I was still stumped for what to do with them though.

For years.

Then one day, over Christmas, when I had nothing pressing to do and my job in the office had finished years before, an article on ebooks ‘came my way’. I was making web sites then – and still am – and the article suggested published redundant articles from demolished sites as ebooks on Amazon’s Kindle.

It gave a brief synopsis of how to do it and since I had time and had just culled three web sites, I gave it a go and published the resulting ebooks on Kindle. I had never heard of it before then.

January came and my job picked up again and I forgot all about Kindle, until sometime later, I received a cheque for $60 from Kindle for sales. I had to look up what I had sold, because it had totally slipped my memory!

This was great news, coming as it did, just after Google’s Panda update had all but wiped out my earnings, so I scrapped another fifty web sites and turned them into about sixty ebooks. Publishing was going really well and then I remembered Dad’s book and I had the solution – or a solution anyway.

I created my first ‘real’ book and put it on Kindle for his birthday, although he was no longer with us unfortunately. Then I finished writing a book that I had been writing myself on and off for years, but which I had kept shelving because I did not know what to do with it.

I followed the same procedure as with Dad’s opus and continued scrapping web sites and publishing ebooks.

This year, I have written the sequel to my first book and made them into a trilogy. I also published forty more ebooks from web sites and wrote and published seven other short books.

I still make the odd web site, like this one, and I still maintain 130 others, but I prefer publishing books now and I have 115 of those under my belt now.