charles barrow's writing

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

I started writing this post, in draft, way back in January. After several posts in the closing months of last year detailing the progress of Book 2, The Darkening Days of John Mann, I suddenly leapt to a post declaring it finished and published without me having said anything about the very last part of that process. That is what the bulk of those January scribblings were concerned with, so rather than let them die a quiet death I post them here now.  I published The Darkening Days of John Mann on 26th December 2014. I self-published it in ebook format, on Smashwords.com and was very happy to see it ship quickly to Barnes and Noble. I'm thinking though that I could have chosen a better time of year to launch it, and wonder if its impact wasn't blunted by putting it out at Christmas. At the time I just chose a moment when I had a bit of breathing space in the mad dash that is the festive season. Two weeks prior to launch day I had drawn up a list of some 20 tasks I needed to...