Without expert help Who Stole Grandma? would still be largely unseen on my Facebook blog and sitting unpolished and unread on my laptop.
Fortunately for me, the support of friends and of complete strangers encouraged me to self publish and (absolutely crucially) to seek that expert help. In my case the expertise came in the shape of Ameesha, the friend of a friend of a friend.
Ameesha is the founder of The Book Shelf (https://www.thebookshelf.ltd/) and, through her team, provided the guidance and impetus that I needed to get WSG out into the world.
As a novice writer, I had a book that I believed in but no idea what to do next. Ameesha took me from that point of unknowing past the point of self-publication, the point of accepting that I am now an author, with people reading turny-page copies of Who Stole Grandma? or the e.book version.
Crucially for me, Ameesha is a great communicator – a superb listener and a clear speaker. She showed interest in my book and my motivation for writing and took note of my strengths, weaknesses and needs, and we agreed to work together.
In the weeks that followed, she guided me through an action list to prepare my book for self-publishing with KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). She explained, nudged, reminded, and encouraged me empathetically and constructively.
The first task was to load my book from Word A4 pages to Reedsy Editor, which gave me the format of the book and, incredibly helpfully, access to online support. I began firing ‘Help!’ questions to Dari, who I thought, at first, was a Siri-like, AI ‘robot’, fount of all knowledge, until Ameesha assured me that Dari is a real person.
Then she coordinated the input of her excellent designers to deliver key elements that I could not: creating the cover I had envisaged and creating a perfect graphic solution to a unique formatting request.
I had mocked up two ideas for the front cover: one using a bright, colourful piece of art created by a dear friend on the other side of the world and the other based on a favourite colour photo of Moosh on one of her favourite nights ever. Ameesha’s designers came back with a black and white cover using the photo in a range of gradations of greys and with script layouts and font choices. We batted ideas back and forth with never an ounce of impatience shown at my newbie queries or my pernickety insistence on details that were important to me.
I had already set my heart on a launch date and Ameesha was coordinating her designers and our conversations to realise it, even when my inexperience threw stumbling blocks into our path. As my dreamt of front cover was delivered, Ameesha also pointed out a blindingly obvious fact that I had neglected, that a book’s cover is also the spine and the back cover (derrrr!), but she had matters in hand and already had her designers on the case, and delivered that too.
The graphic solution that I needed in the body of the book hinged around Scrabble, the board game. Scrabble featured hugely in mine and my mother’s last few years together and I felt a need to illustrate the frustration she experienced on one particularly significant day, when she could not orientate her letters. I had tried and tried to manipulate fonts and symbols and even photographs to depict her situation, but all in vain. I never actually asked for The Book Shelf team to solve this problem, but one evening a WhatsApp message popped up with the solution in Scrabble tile font. It is a tiny fragment of the book, but it finished it off for me in a far better way than I had ever envisaged.
I was both gratified and stunned that The Book Shelf would not take money from me for proof reading services that they knew they were expertly placed to provide, but knew also that, with my anticipated book sales of less than 1000 books, I simply could not afford. Understanding this, Ameesha suggested the strategy of recruiting a team of willing and capable friends to undertake the task: 33 of them did, in anonymous pairs, each pair taking a minimum of four chapters . . . and it worked, brilliantly! Without Ameesha’s prod, I would never have dared to put out an appeal to friends, or been offered support by people I have never met, or their partners! I am incredibly grateful to each one of them.
As the launch drew near, Ameesha spoke to me in detail about my book to identify Amazon keywords and categories, which were an unknown mystery to me but are vital to the marketing of a book. The success of this element of The Bookshelf Ltd’s service was evidenced in my book (entirely unexpectedly, but rather gorgeously) spending part of a weekend at #1 in six of the categories that we identified.
As a technophobe, I was pleased (and utterly relieved) to have The Book Shelf team upload my book to KDP, secure additional Amazon categories, and coordinate marketing strategies such as free promo days on KDP.
At each step, Ameesha ensured that I would be able to attempt it next time myself. Out of lack of innate interest in that part of the process (or innate idleness), I might still ask The Book Shelf team to handle things for me, but she has trained me, so that I don’t need to.
The ‘after care’ has been a residual bonus, with congratulatory messages from Ameesha about reviews, and Twitter invitations to take part in writing lifts to publicise Who Stole Grandma?, and the shared knowledge that the promo days that Ameesha set up for WSG have helped me to raise over £3000 for Parkinson’s UK, a charity very close to our hearts (https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/WSG4PUK).
Mark Lanyon Storyteller 