My career is a mish-mash of books published, reprinted, remaindered even, gone out of print, from a variety of publishers, mostly small Scottish publishers, few of whom had much promotional spend. Consequently, my career has lurched from book to book, publisher to publisher, to self-publishing to… nothing much. And yet, I’ve had a career, won prizes, well, A prize (that was 23 years ago now!) and eighteen books are out there, some in several editions, paperback, hardback, ebook, even one audiobook. When I started out, I was using a portable typewriter, though I’ve been an earlier adopter of tech, have had a website for around twenty years. Not that it’s done me much good. Anyway, I’m still at it, book after book, though now it’s getting harder to see where I’m going. Which of course starts to impact on my writing, negatively. If only… I had got an agent in those early days instead of sending to publishers and bashing away on my own! Because that would provide many good things, regular feedback for one, support, some order in my career. It’d be great and I remain hopeful. But, a funny thing, I’ve seen the beast that is the publishing world change, or mutate over these years. Now there are publishers that look different to Publishers and some that aren’t really publishers at all. In the same way, there are Agents and agents. I’m trying to contact these (agents and Agents) in the conventional way about my recent work but, hell, why not put an ad on here, I thought. Can’t do any harm. You never know who might see this. Probably nobody but…
SCOTTISH WRITER