So, a couple of days ago I published my book ‘Of Assassins and Kings’ on kindle and I thought I might start a blog, now I’m faced with the question of what to write. Well, the most appropriate subject would seem to be kindle, although that doesn’t give me much to write about since it really was very easy, so easy that I can’t help thinking that the days of new righters looking for representation are somewhat over. For those who’ve never tried to get published, which kind of includes me since I never actually sent the book to any publishing houses or agents, I should probable explain. The answer is that the road to traditional publishing is long, arduous and often unrewarding. It is so long in-fact that it is quite possible for publishing to take longer that the process of writing the book, up to 18 months for your book to hit the shelves, and that’s after getting an agent. It’s no better after publishing as limited print runs will mean that your book is off the shelves after only a couple of years. All this means that most authors never earn out of their advance, assuming they even got an advance.

By contrast, kindle direct publishing requires only a few hours on the computer to up load to amazon, then you wait twelve hours and there it is, your book on amazon, up for sale. To be honest I don’t expect to make any money off publishing, but to be honest I don’t care. I would if I had gone to the great bother of finding an agent and getting published, but I didn’t. I wrote the book for fun and any money I do make is simply a bonus.

My advice to anyone else who has written a book is, publish on amazon you might get lucky and find yourself rich. If not you’ll have lost nothing and had some fun writing. As regards the change I think this will make to publishing it’s quite simple. I don’t think kindle will kill it off; there will always be a place for traditional paper books. But I do think that there will come a time when new authors will simply not bother and amazon will become a proving ground for hopeful authors. Those who are successful in this arena will then find themselves approached by literary agents interested in their work. In essence, agents will turn into something more like head-hunters.

As regards the book, well, it’s on amazon, check it out and judge for yourself, at some point I’ll put the prologue up on this blog for people to read.