South Branch Scribbler: Guest Author Seumas Gallacher of Abu Dhabi

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!

Links are listed below.

…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!