Picture the scene, an Englishman abroad ... the wrong side of thirty coming out of retirement and dusting off his boots for a special game of footy in Drumchapel, Glasgow. With the opposition including professional footballers including a Motherwell striker (yes, I'm making excuses already) and me at centre-half alongside a man with a dodgy knee and bad back, we were always going to be on a hiding to nothing. The end result was a fairly respectable 7-0 beating. I'm pleased to say I lasted 90 mins without turning my ankle and thoroughly enjoyed the occasion.

EXCLUSIVE - The Positive Publishing website has now been launched.

I've basically set it up to help people try and avoid the barriers I've encountered over the last 3 years and brought everything under one roof.

Your one-stop publishing stop.

http://www.positive-publishing.co.uk

Digging Deeper has now officially been assigned an ISBN ... 978-0-9556090-0-8. You heard it here first.


It's been an interesting day all told ...
1) For those of you who knew I had an "appointment" today, the verdict is, I'll live. The nurse asked me what I did. I said I was an author. She said her cousin was Iain Banks. I felt 2 feet tall.

2) I had an email from Nielsen BookData who informed me that I'm able to use a sooper dooper service they offer whereby book shops and distributors will be able to order Digging Deeper through them ... NBD will then inform me ... and I will do the necessary. Brilliant! Theoretically this is great because it gets around the problem of having to have a distributor who generally don't appear to be interested unless you have 100's of 1000's of books to sell. The thriller's good, but we're not quite in that bracket yet.

3) Following my email from NBD, I rang them, to confirm that this sooper dooper "thing" was indeed sooper dooper. I'm pleased to report it sounds like it is. I therefore asked if I could have 12 months and Worlds Apart ordered through them on the same basis ... even better, they said yes. I asked what was currently on the system for the first two books, and she informed me that anyone wanting to order them would have to go through Gazelle book services. I've never heard of them ... and subsequently (although not surprisingly) found out when I rang them that they'd never heard of me. Having sent an email to NBD, this has hopefully been sorted through Positive Publishing (watch this space for further news)

4) It also may appear that I've found a printer ... again, watch this space

So yes, the book is finished ... reviewers, editors, proof-readers, cover contributors, ISBN's and the like are all being done/sorted and I'm hoping the book will be released in the next 3-4 weeks.

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch Liverpool lift the European Cup for the 2nd time in 3 years. Come on the Reds!

The news in brief? Well, Last weekend was spent seeing the folks down south and a good time was had by all ... I've bought a polaroid camera ... bought tickets to see Prince in August ... and had some success with editing the book and receiving contributions for the cover.

I'd like to thank the following people for their help to date

David Markoff - http://markoff.pl/

Meghan Colson

Clara Goodger

Laura Gregory

carmendevos http://www.polanoir.com/carmendevos