by Bill Keeth A personal guide to writing, self-publishing and marketing fiction by the author of Every Street in Manchester and Manchester Kiss 1st Edition - Published by Halterburn, May 2008. ISBN 978 9 9558863 0 0 - paperback. For information on how to buy this  book, click HERE

About the book

When Bill Keeth was looking to place his debut novel with a commercial publisher or a literary agent, not one of the firms he contacted wanted to know. Which is simply par for the course, as any unpublished author will tell you – certain published authors, too. Irvine Welsh, the best-selling author of Trainspotting, puts it like this: ‘I would never have been published if I started writing now. Publishing goes through cycles. It’s never been so conservative.’

So Bill Keeth, already at work on a second novel, opted to self-publish instead, whereupon his acclaimed debut novel, Every Street in Manchester, sold by the shed load, going on to be shortlisted for the prestigious Portico Literary Prize – which begs the question as to why no commercial publisher or literary agent wanted to know. Perhaps William McIlvanney (Doherty, Walking Wounded) has the answer when he says: ‘If literature is a testament to what it means to be alive, 98% of the witnesses haven’t been called.’

Are you a writer member of the aforementioned 98% by any chance? Do the foregoing observations chime strongly with your own experience of commercial rejection, to say nothing of your abiding determination to be published? If so, then Write It Self-Publish It Sell It is the book you’ve been waiting for. Because it explains in down-to-earth language exactly how Bill Keeth self-published and sold thousands of books – and how you can do so too.

Write It Self-Publish It Sell It supplies the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask about self-publishing. Why would anybody want or need to self-publish in the first place? Is your book good enough to self-publish? Isn’t self-publishing just another name for vanity publishing? Are there any famous writers who originally self-published, then went on to be commercially published? Should you self-publish with a print-on-demand company or a local printer? How much will it cost you to self-publish? How many copies of your book should you order for a first print run? How do you go about placing your book with bookshops great and small?

As an added bonus, Write It Self-Publish It Sell It provides specific answers to 3 very tough questions, each one of which is worth the cover price of the book on its own account:

1. Which mere handful of the hundreds of self-help manuals on sale is essential for writers of fiction?
2. How may you sell your book title via Amazon?
3. What is the simplest way of getting your self-published book into every public library in the UK?

Make no mistake about it, Write It Self-Publish It Sell It is an absolute must for every writer of fiction – unpublished, self-published and otherwise.