I decided to publish a book as my New Year treat to the world. Check out Cop Show Heaven. You can buy a PDF straight off the web site if you wish, or head off to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/118459 for a choice of formats.
The book was written years ago when I went through an anti-TV industry phase. Screenwriters often bury their head in their hands and groan at the way they are being treated and people say to them something like, “well if you don’t like the way producers and directors treat you, write something that doesn’t need them!” So I spent ten years writing three novels and perhaps a few more, but I’ve forgotten what they were exactly - and probably rightly so. The one’s I think are worth bothering with all went through the usual circuit of legitimate publishers gaining some positive rejections and many completely indifferent ones. Ultimately I realized they were unmarketable, though not unreadable.
The big publishers sell books that people recognize instantly as something they want to read. This usually means they are by celebrities of some sort, or fit in with established genres that people know they like. Being a new author in a specific genre is not a bad thing, but being a new author in their own peculiar category, is to be a new author who does not get published. (There’s the lesson for all you writers out there.)
Because I have no particular genre that I want to pursue, preferring to put my commercial hat on when writing screenplays, I thought I would have to wait until somehow people got to know who I was. I have been waiting for such a magical moment but it seems to me that the market has moved on so much that there is no such thing as a publisher. The publishing industry has become a free for all. Books with the strength of the publicity department behind them will still out perform everyone else, but the Internet and the E-book has opened up a space for the individual author to attempt to get to a broad audience. What that means for the novel, nobody really knows. But I thought it is a waste of time waiting for the perfect moment, and I might as well throw my book into the pile now and see what happens.
The sales for most individual authors in this anarchic marketplace are zero unless they get good reviews and lots of publicity. So if you, by some strange chance, purchase the book and like it, please post some reviews of it. If you think it stinks, keep that to yourself and console yourself with the knowledge that I am far too busy working on film projects to even contemplate sitting down and writing novels. It was a phase I went through. And now it has passed and the results were interesting, and strangely more interesting looking at them ten years after they were written. Some cheese ripens, and some just goes moldy... or is that mouldy? My American spell checkers have confused my spelling intensely and my years in China have confused my grammar even more. Hopefully, Cop Show Heaven will have few such confusions and if it does, look upon it as a colourful cross cultural phenomena.