D-Day

It’s D-Day. Or, more accurately, P-Day. That’s P for Publication, by the way, not Pay or Party or any other P. (I’m sure you can think of some of your own.) It seems no time at all since Thank You For The Music was nothing more than an idea in a coffee cup on a holiday in Majorca and now it’s available for anyone with an e-reader, for less than the price of a magazine.

P is also for promotion. These days publishing isn’t enough. I suppose that’s progress, and maybe it isn’t a bad thing. We aren’t in the Victorian era, when individuals published interesting monographs at their own expense and circulated them widely among their friends. There are so many books available now - self-published or otherwise - that if you want your work to be noticed you have to tell people. And we all want our work to be noticed. We want our work to be admired.

Times change and we move with them. To tell l the truth I’m a little bit scared of promotion. There’s Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, and author pages on Facebook and Amazon and Smashwords. There’s blogging. But actually I like blogging; it’s just like writing a diary.

When I stop and think about it, digital media are the way I find out about books I want to read, even if I go into a bookshop to buy. They’re the way I find out about other things that interest me, such as whether my my team conceded the usual last-minute goal or what the current state of thinking is on the rogue wether we’ve been having. And it’s how I find out what my friends are doing too. And if I don’t want to know something I don’t follow it through - but I can’t say it isn’t there if I ant to see it.

In fact, if I want to know something these days, the chances are it’s digital media I turn to first. If I use these sources to pick up information, why not use them to communicate it? What’s left to do but embrace it?

You’ll find me on Twitter as @JYnovelist, on Facebook, on LinkedIn….