Welcome to my Website. I am so excited about this first step into social media as a writer. I hope you will make visiting me a regular habit and recommend it to your friends. Not only will I keep you updated with my progress in self-publishing “A Spanish Love Affair”, I will put blogs, snippets from my book and photos to pique your interest. I will also let you know when and where I’ll be launching my book and speaking about it.
Writing “A Spanish Love Affair” has been a long haul – it’s taken me 10 years. I sometimes compare myself to Geoffrey Smart, the artist, who couldn’t help dabbing at his paintings on exhibition much to their current owners’ horror, decades after he’d sold them. I could keep dabbing myself. But the time has come.
Over the past year I have been submitting my manuscript to publishers – albeit without success. I’m 68. Time is running out. So I decided that I would bite the bullet and self-publish.
As it is my first book, I’ve chosen to work with Joel Naoum from Critical Mass Consulting who has a decade of experience in books and writing. Joel is making the whole process a lot easier. But easy it is not. A lot of big decisions have to be made, and once effected, I’m stuck with them.
DECISIONS DECISIONS DECISIONS
One of the first stumbling blocks has been the cover. The three concepts submitted to me were all fantastic! But none of them, I felt, encompassed all the book’s themes – love, Spain and tennis.
Each cover represented an aspect of the book:- the first one tennis but no Spain except for the title, the second and third ones Spanish, but no tennis. I sought input from friends but that only served to confuse me further. The background of the book is a tennis one because that’s how I got over to Europe in the first place, but the main part of the book is about Spain and what happened there. Lots – trust me!
In the end after considerable deliberation I decided to go with the first one. Joel pushed for it – said it was more commercial which means more people are going to read my book and that’s every writer’s wish. A photo of me on the front cover is probably appropriate as “A Spanish Love Affair” is after all, my story.
