Calling All Traditionalists or Technophobes

Are you a traditionalist or technophobe? Do you prefer paper to electronic screens? In that case, how are you reading this blog?

Sorry: couldn’t resist it.

There are those people who prefer to read paperbacks. I make no apologies for being one. Before you write complaining that I’m quite happy to publish ebooks, but I don’t like reading them, the contradiction is not lost on me, but I don’t write and publish for me. I write for my readers, and like it or not, most of them prefer e-books. They’re (theoretically) cheaper and (theoretically) more environmentally friendly, and they have the advantage that you can carry hundreds of them with you on holiday without breaching the airline’s luggage weight limit.

This, however, begs the question, who would want to take hundreds of books on holiday? In a week’s worth of lounging round the hotel pool, I can usually get through a couple of novels, but hundreds…?

I digress.

It doesn’t matter whether you like or lump them, e-books are here to stay. But what about my readers who wouldn’t download an e-book even under the threat of being labelled “luddite”? What about those readers who prefer not to poppy up VAT?

To be fair to them, I have to put out paperbacks, and I’ve made a start.

The Handshaker is available as a paperback.

It’s an altogether different proposition to knocking out e-books. Despite all the hoo-hah and claims to the contrary, e-books are not difficult to format, and word processing packages like Microsoft Word will do it all for you. Paperbacks are a different pan of burning sausages. You’re working with materials that have finite dimensions, where the size of the font can’t be changed at the click of a button. You have to get it right, and The Handshaker took about 10 attempts before I got it right.

I should be able to reduce those misses as I work through my self-pubbed list, but that remains to be seen. I won’t be making a start on the rest of my titles for a week or three, until I have this novel in a week thing out of the way (and that starts tomorrow).

For now, if you’re a paperback lover, you can order The Handshaker from Amazon UK or Amazon Worldwide and enjoy.