Introduction to One Among the Sleepless, April 2021

Hello listeners and welcome back to One Among the Sleepless, even though I'm sure many of you have never been here before.

This was my first novel written around the turn of the millennium.

So at the time of me writing this, the book which I self-published under my own seed publishing banner is 21 years old.

My only mantra when I was writing the book was write a book that you will enjoy writing and one that you would like to read and to hell with

trends and whatever publishers want. And so yeah I did enjoy writing it very much it made me chuckle a lot and actually

made me cry a couple of times too which was weird I didn't expect that but anyway

the downside of having a to hell with publishers approach is that you

end up with a book that probably won't get published unless you do it yourself. So I could have spent a lot of time, money and effort

mailing out crisp new manuscript copies to agents and publishing houses and what

have you, but I didn't want to do that because I knew it was just

going to be a waste of my time, money and effort and so instead I spent what

savings I had at the time on publishing it myself.

It sold well wherever it was on sale, but distributing the book, you know, going around collecting

the sales revenue, It was a lot of shoe leather, and if I'm

honest, kind of a waste of time. But then, you know, circumstances in the lives of my wife and I meant that we upped stakes and moved from Brighton over to Ireland, where I became an EFL teacher and just gave up writing altogether.

It was like a phase in my life and it was over.

Or at least it was until 2006 when a friend of mine who had stumbled upon something called

podcasting, specifically podcast novels of the kind that used to be on a website called podiobooks.com

contacted me and he said you should check this out it could be just a thing for

you and one among the sleepless so I did check it out and I thought, oh yeah, I can do this and so I did. I went out and I bought a cheap plastic Skype microphone, which was all I could find in Dublin at the time because this was

years and years ahead of the commonplace availability of podcasting microphones we have these days,

...