My wife and I had been in the city together one day and were taking the train home to Hastings when I received a message from someone claiming to be a publisher and wanting to talk to me about publishing my work. Initially, I ignored the message as I didn’t know if it was a scam or even if I wanted my work to be published. After some nudging from my wife, I made an appointment to have a conversation with the publisher.
As it turned out, they weren’t a scam and were a real publishing house. I half-heartedly set about preparing a book for publication as I still didn’t really consider myself a writer. I was a company director and this was a side project, nothing more.
The side project turned from one book into two and I started to learn a lot about the publishing world. At that time, I wasn’t ready to be managed by a publishing house and after those two books we went our separate ways. But I didn’t stop writing. Taking my newly honed skills, I wrote a mystery book with the intention of self-publishing it. I’d worked in business and marketing for years and knew you could pretty much learnt to anything with a quick Google search and some time in front of YouTube.
I was right and within a few months Huntress was born. My first self-published book that later went on to win a Lambda award.
From there I started to hand over more control of the marketing agency to others and focused more on my writing. I’d found something I enjoyed and something that came relatively easily to me. It was a career that allowed me to use my creativity, my imagination, my marketing, and could be done anywhere in the world.
Somehow between 2017-2020 I self-published fifteen novels. I achieved best-seller status in America, Germany, France, Australia, the UK, and more. In addition to my Lambda award, I was shortlisted for the mainstream Selfies 2020 award for my novel Going Up, as well as being short-listed three times for the GCLS Goldies. In 2020, my heart-warming romance novel Fitting In, which explores autism, was named a finalist for the Amazon Kindle Storyteller award.