SEUMAS GALLACHER escaped from the world of
finance seven years ago, after a career spanning three continents and five
decades.
As the self-professed 'oldest computer Jurassic
on the planet’, his headlong immersion into the dizzy world of eBook publishing
opened his eyes, mind, and pleasure to the joys of self-publishing. As a former
businessman, he rapidly understood the concept of a writer's need to 'build the
platform', and from a standing start began to develop a social networking
outreach, which now tops 30,000 direct contacts.
His 'Jack Calder' crime thriller series, THE
VIOLIN MAN'S LEGACY, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK, SAVAGE PAYBACK and KILLER CITY have
blown his mind with more than 90,000 e-link downloads to date. His fifth, DEADLY
IMPASSE was launched in late 2016.
He started a humorous, informative, self-publishers
blog three years ago, never having heard of a 'blog' prior to that, was voted
'Blogger of the Year 2013' and now has a loyal blog following on his networks.
He says the novels contain his 'Author's Voice', while the blog carries his
'Author's Brand'. And he's LUVVIN IT!
…the
loneliness of the long-distance scribbler…
…even the shyest of people need company
from time to time… hermits, real hermits, measure less than 0.00000648
percent of the WURLD’s population… cloistered monks and sisters
of the cloth in their monkeries and sisteries at least have the presence of
their own ilk round them on a constant basis… the brooding G.
Garbo and H. Hughes had lots of M. Money around them to alleviate their solitary exclusion of the rest of the
planet… which makes it apparent to me, Mabel, it is abnormal to ‘want to be alone’… yet, hundreds of thousands of
quill-scraper Lads and Lassies of Blog Land choose just such a devoted pathway…
yes, yeez can point to the Web, and all its SOSYAL NETWURKIN trappings… where at the click of yer mouse, yeez can be in touch with
twenty-five trillion people simultaneously… but, and it’s a big ‘but’... it’s not the same as being with people
in the flesh… the myriad virtual candlelit garrets wherein the scribing
successes of the future literary generation reside hold their own special
importance… being a writer is lonely… no-one else can sculpt the characters,
plots, nuances of yer own story-telling… it’s unique to each and every one of
yeez… I know I bang on occasionally here about the real WURK starting after yeez’ve finished yer masterpiece, in
getting it accepted in the Big Bad WURLD out there… that doesn’t detract from the
beauty and the adrenaline rush of actually typing ‘THE END’… yeez can try to share that feeling with
others … but it’s impossible for them to feel what yeez feel yerself at that
precise moment of conclusion… and all the heartache, all the pain, all the
angst, all the suffered loneliness of the long-distance Author, all
the alls… are worth every nano-second of this peculiar labour of love…
and then, fools that yeez are (me included), what do yeez do then?… yeez start
another one!… here’s a wee bit of this ol’ Scots Jurassic’s journey on that
solitary trail… eight years ago in Abu
Dhabi, where I was living and working, it struck me that it was just ‘time
for that book we all have in us’ to emerge from what’s left of my wee
grey cells… and of course I had a full story and narrative ready to leap onto
virgin pages, right?… wrong!... not a hint of it!... I decided to go walking
for an hour and a half, ten evenings in succession, along the water’s edge of
the Corniche in that excellent city, thinking of what kinda masterpiece I
should produce… after the first couple of nights, an ending crystallized… it
gave me a target toward which to write… and that’s how I’ve done all of my
books since… the expected route to that ending changed several times as, first,
a main plot theme, and then a secondary, and a tertiary began to interweave and
push themselves into the frame… being the oldest self-confessed computer
Jurassic on the planet, I purchased my first ever laptop at the age of sixty
(my age, not the laptop’s), and perfected the one-finger-from-each-hand typing
technique… it hardly encourages smoke trails from the keyboard at that speed,
but hey, it does give me time to mull what I’m typing as I go along… positivity
in everything, Mabel!... in a few months, THE
VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY was ready to breach birth into the heady universe of
publishing… in due expectation of a million-dollar contract by return post, I
packed off forty solicitations to agents in the UK, and sat back, envisioning
the Ferrari salesmen, and Caribbean vacations that this soon-to-be iconic
author would have to indulge…
...however, with that twisted sense of humour
and perfect balance that the Literary Gods seem to possess, back came precisely
forty rejection slips… it mattered not a jot to my ego… because by that time,
the second book, VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
was marching its way across the laptop… around the same time, a friend
suggested as a self-publishing option, I should consider the Amazon
Kindle channel… I instantly responded, ‘Great… but, what’s Kindle?’…
I hadn’t a clue… but learned very quickly the how and what of becoming an indie
author… and for emb’dy reading this who’s just starting on this wunnerful
mystery tour, let me tell yeez, if this ol’ fella can do it, emb’dy can… go for
it… as it happened, by the time the second novel was ready to launch, the first
baby already had attracted 8,000 downloads… and that just blew my mind… now,
how did that happen?... by the best coincidence, I was following then nouveau
indie authoress Rachel
Abbott’s blog
in which she advised to treat the writing as a ‘business’… recognizing the
scribbling as the comparatively easy part… the rest of the ‘business’ entailed
marketing and promotion, budgeting time and whatever money yeez wanted to
invest in it, cover art, proofreading, editing, and the whole nine yards… as a
businessman, all of that made superb sense to me, and I embraced the philosophy
with both hands… I began to ‘build the platform’ of
relationships to support the ‘business’… being present on the SOSYAL NETWURKS is mandatory for modern
authors in my not-so-‘umble opinion… but harvesting such as Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ ‘followers ‘ and ‘friends’ who relate to
the writing, reading and related publishing fields… and not just acquiring
these links for the sake of numbers… my links totalled a mere 400 when I
started to develop that ‘platform’… they now exceed 30,000…
the next epiphany was the value of having a blog… I write a regular blog which
was basically the mumbled sharings of a new writer, bumbling and stumbling his
way into the industry… it branched out to cover other light-hearted elements… I’ve
found that the blog posts of others which I enjoy are those which entertain,
educate, enlighten and often empathize with me… I loosely modelled my own blog
after those… and here’s the real beauty of that… all of my blog posts are
automatically linked to every one of my SOSYAL
NETWURKS, meaning that each post is sent out to more than 30,000 potential
readers… the blog is also a marvelous way of inviting Guest Blog Posts from
others, be they writers, or otherwise… and an absolute tenet is to help other
authors wherever I can… giving back some of the unbelievable support and love
that has been unconditionally shown to me… so, in that sense, mingling, even in
the Webosphere, offsets the solitary trudge of most of we penspeople… however
the creative
Muse operates best for me in that isolated environment of my own virtual candlelit
garret… pass me my candelabrum, Mabel, I’ve my next masterpiece to write … see
yeez later… LUV YEEZ!
Please drop by Seumas' website here
The links where you can purchase Seumas' novels;
Thank you Seumas for being our guest this week.
Dear Readers, please leave a comment below, love to hear from you!
Please drop by Seumas' website here
The links where you can purchase Seumas' novels;
THE VIOLIN MANS LEGACY
myBook.to/theviolinmanslegacy
VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
myBook.to/vengeancewearsblack
SAVAGE PAYBACK
KILLER CITY
DEADLY IMPASSE
Thank you Seumas for being our guest this week.
Dear Readers, please leave a comment below, love to hear from you!
It's really nice to see Seumas featured here, Allan ...
ReplyDeleteIt's a treat to have him on the Scribbler Tina. I'm looking forward to having you as our guest very soon again.
ReplyDelete