Selling My Grandmother. My short story collection is finally launched

“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” John Lennon

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The proof is in the eating – or in my case, on my bookshelves.

I’m super  excited today because I have just hit ‘publish’ on the print edition of my short story collection, Selling My Grandmother.

There is an almost year long gap between the publication of the ebook and the print book and this was due to many reasons, the main one being that ‘life’ got in the way.  It’s a long, sad story and I won’t bore you with the details but 2023 really was my ‘annus horribilis’ and I was heartily glad to see the back of it.

The other reason for the delay was the steep learning curve required to produce a print cover but thanks to Canva and some great YouTube tutorials I have finally cracked it – although it took four attempts to get it right.  Hence the embarrassingly large (and costly) collection of proof copies pictures below.

First of all I got the size wrong.  I wanted it to be the same size as my Much Winchmoor books (5″ x 8″) but I selected the wrong option (6″ x 9′) and the book looked more like a pamphlet.  Then I messed up the formatting and the cover was a complete dog’s dinner.  Attempt number three was slightly better but the contents page was all wrong mainly because I was following the instructions for the ebook and not the print version. 

(Memo to self: in future, read ALL the instructions… carefully!)

But finally, thanks to the wonderful tutorial from BookCoversDIY on YouTube, I totally got it and within a couple of hours produced a cover that I am really really proud of. So at long last I’m ready to send my newest baby out into the real world.

The reason I wrote this book

Before turning to crime I was, for many years, a short story writer and sold hundreds of short stories and serials to women’s magazines, back in the golden days when almost every woman’s magazine had a fiction department.

This book is a collection of just a handful of them and the thing the stories have in common is that they were all inspired by my family or friends -or sometimes both.  And what makes the collection a little different is that, at the end of each story, I write about what (or, usually who) inspired the story in the first place.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Whenever I give talks about my writing, that is one of the first questions I get asked, the others being Should I have heard of you? (Probably not) and  Do you earn as much as JK Rowling? (Absolutely not).  So much so that I began to offer a talk entitled “Selling My Grandmother and other family members” which has proved extremely popular. And it was after one of these talks that someone asked why didn’t I publish a collection of my stories? And I thought – why not?

My main problem (apart from the print cover mentioned above) was working out which stories to choose.  For an indecisive Libran like me this was agony.  

My original intention was to produce the book for my friends and family only, hence my decision to self publish it.  But I am so proud of the way it turned out, not just the cover but also the contents that I decided to release my baby into the big wide world – just in case there is someone out there who would enjoy a collection of  feel good fiction with guaranteed happy endings. 

Just the thing for a chilly February day – or any day, come to that.  

The link is.   https://mybook.to/sellingmygrandmother