If you think finding a publisher is hard work, you should try publishing online. Although, looking at the statistics, you probably already have, since there are something like a million new books published online every year and there are a startling 20 million scanned books available online which is a nice round number matching exactly the number of e-books apparently read last year. 

After having six novels published in the last twelve years (along with a biography of John Britten and a couple of company histories) I naively thought it would be a simple matter of submitting my next work of fiction to Random House and waiting to hear their usual enthusiastic response. How silly was that? What I'd failed to realise was that in the intervening two years since my last novel, Head over Heels, was published, the books world had undergone a major reinvention, somewhat akin to the invention of the first printing press - or rather, the reverse. Printing presses are looking like becoming obsolete as the world-wide web rapidly begins to gobble up everything we once held dear - books, newspapers, films, CDs, photographs, even phone directories. Our books, songs and movies are fast being relegated to the subservient role of wallpaper for internet advertising.

My new novel, "In Her Mothers' Shoes", wasn't commercial enough to meet the high sales criteria that publishing houses need to meet today. Would I leave it in a bottom drawer to moulder away unseen? I did for a few months, but then I got a Kindle. What fun! And just the sort of platform that my sort of fiction is made for - paperback fiction it once was. Online fiction it is now. 

So this week I've joined the hundreds of thousands of authors who've managed to publish their own book and have successfully navigated the traps and twists of the Kindle Direct Publishing platform to arrive at a novel that looks pretty good and seems to read well too. The cover has been professionally designed by the extremely talented Alaina Rhind (thank you Alaina) and the inside has been carefully formatted by moi.

But I can't get over the feeling that something is missing. Something you can touch and feel, something you weigh up in the palm of your hand, something you can stroke and then flick the pages through your fingers.

I think I'm going to have to get some printed copies too.

Back to the drawing board and a new learning curve on Amazon's Create Space.