Republic

I'd love to be able to say I don't get the time to do as much writing these days due to the workload involved in stuffing padded envelopes with copies of Booker's World and sending them to obscure corners of the globe. But the time for writing has not been eroded due to that fact, it continues at a pace as I'm assuming other writers don't want to be envelope stuffer's either, though a few now and again never go astray.

I attend a writer's seminar laid on by an imprint of Maverick House publishers late last week at the Irish Writers Center in Ireland called Book Republic. They are open to new writers and seem to want to be on the fore-front of ebook publishing not only in Ireland but in markets as far flung as Asia.
I managed to slip a copy of my book to someone. Although I now have a full appreciation of all it takes to take a book from idea to cover, publishing is never going to be my thing. I think to do things with passion and if you love them. From the day I had to do proofing-editing and formatting, none of which I had any sort of experience in, I was drained day after day.
So over the next two months I want to find the right publisher, one up on all the technology available and work getting Booker's World ready for the ebook version.
I have a strong marketing plan to go with it, but when you don't get that face-to-face fifteen minutes with people, no matter how well you sell yourself over email, you are really not going to be able to convince people to take a small risk.

The unfortunate thing here in Ireland, and it was stressed on the night, is we seem to be very slow on the uptake when it comes jumping on the technology advances in many respects. Apart from housing the likes of Google, Facebook and EBay here on low corporate tax , there is little or no support for new start-ups which, who knows, may have the potential to one-day mix it among the technological heavyweights.
Ireland unfortunaletly seems to want to lag behind, happy and content to play fiddle to other heavyweights and probably the reason why a hundred thousand of our young and highly educated have scattered across the globe again, with no attempt what so ever really being made to entice them to stay. It's one thing not being able to see a bigger picture, but to have no picture to view at all, well, I guess they are the smart ones to go. I might not be long after them the way things are going on this little isle of yours. Bigger world might mean bigger opportunity, who know?

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Book marketing article that I had recently hosted on the blog of Kate Evangelista can be read here.