Book Reviews Anyone?

Well, I am now officially homeless - until Friday anyway. We moved out of our house last week and I am presently sitting in my sister’s cottage in Somerset finishing the editing of my new book, How To Know If You’re a Medium. As regular readers to this blog will know, I sent a proposal to a publishing house to see what would happen. Even though it is said three months is the time scale advised to wait before hearing from them, I feel if they were at all interested they would have indicated they were considering it by now.

As I am not ‘well-known’  or a celebrity as they expect authors to be these days, I don’t expect they’ll accept the book for publication and so I have, therefore, decided to self-publish it as soon as possible so that you won’t need to wait much longer. Whilst I am staying in the middle of the country in an empty cottage with total peace and quiet, it seems a good time to finish the editing and get the formatting done in preparation. All I need then, is to design a book cover and the book can be sold.

I am hoping it can all be done soon and that the book will be available for purchase sometime in early September. In the meantime, I have a favour to ask of those who have read my other books. Amazon Kindle have reviews under each book sold. Whilst I have some reviews, they are very few and don’t reflect anything like the number of people who have read them and sent me lovely emails.

Amazon Kindle sales are often based on the amount of reviews each book has, how many stars they received and by word of mouth. People will often look in the Mind, Body Spirit section to see which books have the most reviews and which of those have the most stars. They will then go to the pages where these books are to take a look at them with a view to buying. As I only have 5 reviews, mine do tend to get overlooked in favour of those written by more well-known people or those that have up to a hundred reviews – often written by their family and friends so I’m told!

I would much rather the reviews I got were by genuine readers who had actually read my books and liked them enough to recommend to others rather than by cheating with lots of fake reviews by people who hadn’t ever looked at them. I would, therefore,  be really grateful to any of you if you could leave a review stating what you thought of any of the ones you’ve read. I thank those of you who will do that for me. They don’t have to be professional, just a truthful statement of what you thought of the content.

For anyone who would like to do it for me, you can click on the links below to take you to the book/s concerned.

My books:

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B004PW4YLA   UK

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004PW4YLA   US

To Buy on German Amazon CLICK HERE

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/ascepticalmedium  Paperback or download

A Guide’s Guide to Mediumship and Healing

Yesterday I made a decision about the above named book I wrote  over a year ago. It was the first book I wrote and is inspired by the world of spirit. It has been with my literary agents for the last year and they were to send it to publishing houses hoping for traditional publishing. Our contract expires next month and I won’t be renewing it as I hear nothing from them ever and have no idea what is happening with my work. It is for this reason, I have made the decision to self-publish it.

I will be finishing some editing to it in the next couple of weeks and then it will be published and available to buy. Those who have read my other books will see a huge difference in the style of writing and will see it is not me speaking. It starts off with an introduction written in my style and then the wording changes totally. It is what some have called ‘more flowery’ in its manner and the most obvious thing about it for me, is their gentleness in how they teach and admonish. I could never be that tactful. No matter how much I want to be, the words never come out as gently as they manage and I do tend to shoot from the hip – as you’ll have noticed!

One of the reasons I have made this decision, is not just because I don’t see anything much at all having been done with it in the last year, but because the publishing world is notoriously slow. Even if I got a deal tomorrow, it would be at least 15 months before my book saw the light of day. I have so many people asking question about mediumship and healing, how it should be done and by whom and this book answers most of those questions. It is, therefore, time it was available to buy.

I am of the opinion these days that self-publishing doesn’t have the stigma attached to it as it did years ago. It is totally different from vanity publishing and people often get confused by the two. Vanity Publishing you pay extortionate sums of money up front and often get maybe twenty books if you’re lucky for sometimes thousands of pounds. With self publishing and print on demand, you don’t pay a penny. The only time money is paid to the one who prints it is when an order is placed and paid for. They take their percentage out before they send you your royalty cheque – no different than any agent or publisher then.

It will probably be about a month before the book is available for purchase and in the meantime, you can see a couple of sample excerpts from it in both of my other books, A Sceptical Medium and A Sceptical Medium 2. There is no doubt in my mind that self-publishing will only be the first step to this book being read around the world as publishing houses do now ‘pick up’ books that sell well and take them on. I hope this will be the case with mine. Time will tell, but in the meantime these words need to be out there and I now intend to make sure they are.