General – Page 124

What can I do that’s different from other fund-raising ideas? How about donating the proceeds of all sales from my novel and series of poetry books? Sound good? Okay, it’s a deal – and for the cynical among you, no, I’m not joking!

“I pledge that for a limited period, the proceeds from sales of my novel ‘Ten Days’ and my series of ‘Rhyme Scenes’ poetry books will be donated to the Comic Relief 2013 fund.”

Now we need some parameters to work from. 1. The figures will be calculated from Monday 14th January 2013 up to and including Friday 15th March 2013.

2. All monies will be added to the funds raised by other Ryman Limited employees. I now work for our local branch on a part-time basis. The Ryman stationery company is owned by Theo Paphitis, entrepeneur, millionaire, philanthropist and all-round good bloke.

On alternate years the company sponsors Comic Relief or Sport Relief as appropriate. Cash is raised by selling sponsored items like ‘Red Nose’ pens. ‘Comic Relief’ T-shirts are bought by the employees to increase the funds. Hundreds of thousands of pounds is raised by individual employees and groups within the Ryman company – some of whom do very strange things for sponsorship.

If anything particularly eye-popping comes up I’ll mention it here. With the best will in the world I could put my hand in my pocket and make a moderate donation, but I would much prefer to give more and with the help of my e-Books and the generosity of lots of other people I can do that this year. Sales of my e-Books would be nice, but it would be more gratifying for me to be able to build a sum of money to donate to Comic Relief 2013.

So, what do you, my prospective fund-raising buddy need to know?

1. In order to make it easy I intend to maintain the individual prices of the novel and three of the poetry books at only $1.99 each. It seems fitting that the first poetry volume, ‘Humour’ is a mere $0.99. Any cash payable to me (after the tax man gets his cut), will be donated to the fund. At time of writing $1.99 is approximately £1.30, which to most of us, is not a lot …

2. The novel, ‘Ten Days’ is a romantic thriller, but can be enjoyed equally by male or female readers (honestly, I know).

3. The four books of poetry are: ‘Humour’, ‘Love and Romance’, ‘Natural History’ and the latest release, ‘Military Matters’. There will be more books to come, but at the time of writing these are available immediately for download.

By using Smashwords to publish, my novel or poetry books, they can be downloaded as: .mobi (for Kindle), Epub (for Adobe, Nook, Sony, Kobo, iPad, iBook), PDF (for PC or Laptop), RTF (for wordprocessors), PDB (for Palm readers/apps).

Direct link to the eBooks on my Smashwords homepage: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TomBenson

We can reduce this .... — We can reduce this ….

No pressure, but please remember, all the money paid for my eBooks between Monday 14th January 2013 and Friday 15th March 2013 will be donated to Comic Relief 2013.

Thank you on behalf of those who survive to become the eventual grateful recipients of our fund-raising. Tom

Hello one and all and welcome to 2013 – our New Year. As my freshly produced graphic would suggest, I’m setting off into this new year with a positive attitude to what it might bring. We all have the choice of starting out positive and letting that attitude slip away over time, or we can maintain that same effort throughout the year.

Early last year I decided to cut back on my retail work and increase my writing output. I managed to write a novel from scratch and publish it as an e-book, which in itself delighted me. ‘Ten Days’ is that novel, which has now sold into double figures, so although it hasn’t enabled me to retire from my support job completely, it’s nice to know it’s out there. At present my novel is published with www.smashwords.com – but if there is insufficient sign of movement in sales, I’ll move the book.

Before the old year reached it’s end I managed to do three things that had been ambitions since the Summer months. First, I discovered that I could work with my portfolio of poetry to produce a set of at least 6 volumes in different genre. Second, I established a personal website: www.tom-benson.co.uk in which I display both my writing and artwork. Third, and importantly for the financial side of things, I invested in a Desktop Publishing (DTP) programme so I could produce my own artwork for book covers.

I can now report that I have published my first three volumes of poetry as e-books on Smashwords. The main title of the series is ‘Rhyme Scenes’ and I am producing the cover designs myself. I’m now well on the way with the next in the set. ‘Rhyme Scenes, Volume Four …’ which is subtitled, ‘Military Matters’ and will contain a collection of fact, fiction, supernatural and observation. I will of course be writing a blog post to support the e-book when I publish, which I’m scheduled to do in mid-January.

My aim is to follow up immediately by working on the next category, which is: ‘Thrills, Spills and Chills’ – a collection of thriller, adventure, fantasy, fact and anything that doesn’t fit neatly into the other genre. My final category is ‘series’ poetry which may be issued as a single volume or spread into two – which I haven’t decided about yet. Among the series are a host of topics but again, I’ll post about them when the book is published.

By the Spring I’m aiming to have all my poetry volumes published and then I can start to work seriously on my next novel. I had been considering a sequel to ‘Ten Days’, but I have two other options. The first is to go back to work on ‘Hawk’ which started life as a series of poetry and then was written as a novel in a month for the NaNoWriMo in November 2011. My other option for a novel is to go back to my first attempt at novel writing. The working title is ‘A Life Of Choice’ and was in it’s original draft my autobiography. In light of what I’ve read, written and learned over the last couple of years the story will become a fictional tale of a young man who leaves home and enters a voyage of self-discovery in a military career. The tale will bring into play his successes, failures and constantly changing mindset.

On the traditional side of life I’ll be completing a final edit of my short story, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ for inclusion in the next anthology to be released by the Inkerman Writers, our local writing group.

My new three-day working week should afford me the luxury of working on all of these projects and more besides. I want to improve my website among other things and to increase my potential readership with a more aggresive marketing campaign and a greater web presence. Any comments here or on my website are greatly appreciated, as are any reviews of my e-books.