I have been sending emails out to all my friends and business contacts in my bid to take this ‘viral’. I’ve had some lovely messages in response, one of the most helpful was from an ex-colleague called Alan Richardson who is an established author in the field of software testing. Apparently he’s working on two new books (!!!) and his advice included:

• Use twitter as a marketing tool (still thinking about that one as my comms workload is already high)
• Look at http://blog.publishedandprofitable.com/
• Check out http://www.thebookdesigner.com/
• See if the sites above and others will allow you to submit guest postings
• Once published, track with http://www.novelrank.com/

He also said, “Just get it out there. Once you publish as Kindle you can upload new versions and people will get updates for free.” I wasn’t aware of that but I think that while it’s a useful feature for technical manuals, I doubt many people will invest the time re-reading a story that was imperfect or incomplete the first time around.

Thank you for your time Alan! Alan’s work can be found at www.compendiumdev.co.uk/selenium

Thanks also to Cindy Vallar who read the fragment, Before the Ambush, that I posted a few days ago and wrote a long email to me (that must have taken a while) and gave me advice on perspective. Cindy has also shared her experiences of ePublishing online.