After two days of intensive work at the prompting of ‘M’ (you know how you are!) I finally submitted my manuscript to Kindle last night!

 At last, I have written a book and sent it for publication.

 I’d like to say that it was easy but it wasn’t. Even going down to the last wire I discovered some formatting problems that I had not expected, but I got them sorted in the end…I hope!

 ‘The War Wolf’ is not sitting on my Kindle bookshelf with ‘Publishing’ written underneath it, even seeing that leaves me with a great feeling of satisfaction! It feels better than I had expected to be honest, but then I began this project with the idea of following the traditional route for publishing a literary work. That did not work out, got a lot of rejections to prove it, but as the book developed the idea of e-publishing became more and more attractive.

 Some might see it as an easy option but I do not think that that is necessarily true, at least not for the dedicated writer. The reason why I spent two days working until late each evening was because I wanted my manuscript to be right. I did not want to see any silly spelling mistakes or careless grammatical errors in the finished article. I wanted people to concentrate on what I got right not what I got wrong.

 As a result I feel more closely bound to my manuscript than maybe I expected. I am very proud of it. I think that it is a story that is worth telling; in fact I know it is. It no longer matters to me that I could not get a literary agent interested because I know that that really does not signify anything. A literary agent is just another person expressing a subjective opinion bound by the parameters of commercial success. If they did not see The War Wolf as being a commercially successful book then they are not likely to accept it. I understand this point and move on.

 The real litmus test is not the literary agents and, perhaps not even the critics, it is the reader. Obviously the critics can have a massive impact upon a book, I don’t discount that, but you have to stop and think who did you write this book for? It was not for the critics, it was people who enjoy a good story, empathise with your characters and want to know what happens to them. Of course critics are such people, so they figure in their anyway!

 Now I wait for Amazon to tell me that my book is out in the wide public domain, it’s like waiting for Christmas morning!