Feather's Miscellany: My Kindle Venture
John Waddington-Feather, whose stories, articles and poems have been appearing in Open Writing for a number of years, has now ventured into the wonderful world of Kindle.
‘My Kindle venture all began last June. I’ve been very ill over the past two years and been in and out of hospital for major operations as well as three nights a week on dialysis till midnight. I’m also approaching 80 so I said last June to my eldest daughter, Sarah, who’s a doctor in practice near here and monitors me, that I was stopping self-publishing in pasperback, as it was all getting too much for me. She suggested I keep on writing but put my work on Kindle and she’d place it on Kindle for me, being more computer literate than I.
Last June she placed four of my detective novels on Kindle and they sold 20 copies. We thought we were doing well, as they wouldn’t have sold 20 copies in a month as paperbacks. In December they sold 720 copies. Since then sales have exploded as the Americans have taken the Yorkshire detectives, the Revd Det. Insp. Blake Hartley and his Muslim sergeant, Ibrahim Khan, to their hearts. They sold 2,501 copies in February.
I’m having to revise most of my work as it’s over 30 years ago since I wrote some of my fiction. Then I pass the revised versions to my sister-in-law, Diana, in Brussels and she edits my work (She was a translator for the E.U before she retired and is multi-lingual) Then she passes them over to Sarah, who puts them on Kindle.
Since last June several of my novels have had the maximum five-star reviews on the internet and Amazon certainly gives them fine publicity – something I could never have afforded when publishing in paperback.Yet though I have one, I’ve never used a Kindle device. I’m too busy writing! And I now have five of my six mystery novels and two of my romantic historical novels on Kindle.
All my Quill books will be put on in due course and my plays; one of which, “Garlic Lane”, had its London premiere two years ago; though it was first produced at Leeds Civic Theatre in 1973 and elsewhere throughout the country since. It was staged here in north Shropshire by a local drama company only last December. I was hoping that my play, “Edward, the Uncrowned King” (about Edward VIII and the abdication crisis in 1937) would have been staged in New York this year, for an agent there who saw “Garlic Lane” in London was very taken by it. However, sadly the theatre was destroyed in Manhatten during the hurricane last year ‘
