Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Elaine Brown and I first met when she asked me what I thought of her first pony novel, Jackie's Pony Secret , then unpublished. I read it and loved it, and have watched Elaine's progress ever since. Elaine has followed up Pony Secret with another novel, and after several nearly-there episodes with publishers, has decided to go it alone. This is the story of how she did it. Elaine's books are: Jackie's Pony Secret The Ponies of Penstorran and you can follow Elaine on her website:  www.in-my-own-write.com ~  0  ~ Books were a large part of my childhood. My older sister and my mother used to read to me every night at bedtime - more, I think, in the interests of getting me to sleep than anything else as I was a poor sleeper. However, I was told that they would often fall asleep themselves but I would still be awake. It wasn’t long before I started reading for myself and I was able to read quite fluently at a very pre-school age. I was fascinated by words...

Karen Bush is a published author. She's written several very well-received non fiction books, including 201 Hints for Handy Horse Persons  which made it into Horse & Hound's Great Horse Books feature . She's also written some of the official ABRS manuals with Julian Marczak: The Principles of Teaching Riding and  101 Riding Exercises. In today's post, she talks about why she's turned to self publishing. Karen hasn't just published her stories - she also talks about the benefits of self publishing conventional books which have gone out of print. ~  0  ~ I’ve been writing for a while now: I started out doing articles for horsy magazines (and even spent a spell as an equine agony aunt for PONY and Your Horse), and then began to write books too. Unless you are Jilly Cooper or Dick Francis, horsy books don’t pay as well as magazine features, but I like doing them. It’s nice to be able to do a properly thorough job, to expand on subjects that you are forced t...

Today's guest blogger, Amanda Wills was a journalist, but it took her quite a while to start writing fiction. Like many writers, she tried the conventional route of submitting her manuscript to publishers, and then decided to go her own way. As you'll see, her self publishing adventure has led to a publishing contract. Amanda is the author of the Riverdale Pony Books, The Lost Pony of Riverdale and Against All Hope, both of which I very much enjoyed. ~  0  ~ I can still remember the exact moment I hit the upload button. It was spine-tinglingly exciting. With the click of a mouse I turned from frustrated novelist into indie author. As the TV meerkats would say, Simples! What could be easier? Knock off 50,000 or so words, think of a title, design a cover, upload it to Amazon, and hey presto - you're a published author. And so it might seem at first glance. The self-publishing phenomenon has given the world and his dog the opportunity to publish their own boo...

Today I'm starting a short series of guest posts from authors who've self published. Today's blog is from Sue Howes, who was one of the first authors I know who self published. She tells us what it was like to self publish then, and what it led to for her. Sue will be back in a later blog post to write about things to bear in mind if you're interested in getting libraries to stock your book. Sue is the author of The Bay Mare. She's a school librarian, and owns Jack, a Fell pony, and loans the very naughty Yoshi, with whom she does agility. Sue Howes'  The Bay Mare  is available via Amazon . ~ 0 ~ Some years ago I self-published a book, The Bay Mare . It was in the early days of self-publishing so it was an expensive thing to do. The book didn’t sell many copies, for two main reasons: it was not a very good book*, and I have no selling skills. My story is not all doom and gloom, however, as one of the copies sent out to various horse/pony magazines...