On being a (first time) writer in Wales: Rob Moffitt

Ten years into retirement I did not set out to be an author. I had a passing intention in my early teens, but along with cowboy, film star, fighter pilot and Nobel winning scientist it somehow never happened.

Now it seems to have come about largely by accident.

Nor am I sure how my experience of being a writer is shaped by the fact that I write in Wales. True, I’ve written about a Welsh chap, so without Wales there would be no story to tell.

And I live in Wales. Within a few miles from where my mother was born in fact and have done so for the last 40 odd years.

Nor would I choose to live anywhere else now. My mother’s father’s side of the family were all Welsh, from miners in the South Wales valleys right back to tenant farmers in rural Pembrokeshire.

Even a Brewery owner from Powys.

The rest of my ancestors were English, Scottish and Irish; usually a mix of several of the home Nations.

So I suppose I am a proper do-it-yourself UK kit! That was one of the things that started me off on my Family Tree, finding out where we all came from and managed to bump into one another.

Puzzles

What keeps me interested in genealogy is that it continually presents puzzles to be solved, and I love puzzles. So when any one asks for help to find out the who, what, where and when I usually try to help out. Then one quiet day I stumbled over a request from a Belgian chap. He wanted to find living relatives of a RAF man shot down near his home in 1942. He had discovered that his GG-Aunt had helped him to escape back to Britain.

Within a few days he had four of us helping him. We expected it to take a few days, maybe a week or two, a month or so at the most. It took us six months. Every hard won discovery along the way raised more questions than it answered.

That’s not unusual at the beginning of a search, but this became a permanent feature! After those six long hard months we knew more about this ordinary man who had been through some truly extraordinary times than anyone else on the planet!

To us he was a hero, one, like so many, many others, whose exploits remained unknown. We decided his story should be more widely told. So I wrote it all down.

The idea was that we would pass this on to a proper author and see the work published. I could find no-one willing to help with that. The only option was for me to do it, so I did. Well that is to say I spent four years writing and rewriting, refining, editing correcting spelling and grammar before I had a book.

That’s when the hard work started.

I now needed to find a publisher. The most depressing year of my life spent trying to raise a little interest. Most submissions were simply ignored and dropped into a black hole.

The usual rejection was on the grounds that I had not been published before. My answer in reply (and I always replied) was ‘What are you going to do after your final author dies? Just give up publishing?’ No answers to that either.

Minefield

I was left with no choice but to try to navigate the self-publishing minefield. Make no mistake it IS a minefield. Getting it wrong can cost a lot of time, effort and cash; and still end up with a book that never gets sold.

In the end I opted for Assisted Self-Publishing. To the uninitiated this involves paying someone else to do the bits that really need experience; formatting the work for printing, finding a printer, marketing, promotion, distribution and a dozen other things I never expected to have to do. Except in most cases they still seem to end up patting the ball firmly back into my court. I won’t make the same mistake with my next book. But I am, at last, published.

Then I hit another snag.

As an independently published author my book will not be stocked or even listed by any of the small independent bookshops who are part of Bookshops.org. Yet they loudly and proudly proclaim that they ‘promote’ new writers. Now I can understand them not stocking the book, I don’t accept ‘returns’. I have a good reason for that. The distributors do not actually do ‘returns’; they give the bookshop it’s cash back and I have to pay all of that plus an admin fee.

Pulped

They then send the books that have been returned to be pulped; that’s right perfectly good unread, saleable, brand new books. Of course they charge me the £20 pulping fee per book plus, (gold star if you guessed it,) another admin fee.

But they won’t even allow their shops to offer the book for order. That all seems a bit unfair to me as I support Bookshop by running and on-line storefront with them (It’s here: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/forgottenhero) and buying through them when I can. OK so I can (and do) sell on Amazon, though it pains me to put more profit in any billionaire’s pocket. I can (and do) sell through the High Street big multis.

But I like the small, friendly, knowledgeable often slightly quirky bookshop owners, our town centres would be much more dull without them. It’s taken me six long years of hard slog to be able to offer them this book. A book where they will make five times the profit I will for just unwrapping a package and putting it on a shelf. So come on guys, play fair.

Just A Forgotten Hero by Rob Moffitt is published by Publish Nation. You can order one from all good bookshops or you can buy a copy here. And as a last resort on Amazon.