Mijn vader was een Spiritistische Genezer, net als zijn moeder en drie zussen, terwijl zijn vader en zeven broers een beetje bang waren voor het concept. Mijn moeder geloofde in de principes van Spiritisme, maar haar ouders waren katholiek en waren er extreem tegen.
Mijn vader vertelde me echter altijd dat mijn moeder een heks was, en ze gaf vaak toe een witte heks te zijn. Mijn vader zei dat haar moeder ook een oude heks was, maar ik denk dat dat kwam omdat ze niet met elkaar konden opschieten. Toen mijn ouders trouwden, woonden ze bij mijn grootouders van moederskant, en nog een korte tijd nadat ik was geboren.
De basis voor alle verhalen in de Megan-serie vinden hier hun oorsprong. Mijn moeder vertelde me veel verhalen over mijn babytijd, dus ik ben de baby waarnaar ik verwijs, hoewel de rest van de serie naar mijn moeder verwijst. Ik heb ons tweeën samnegebracht omwille van het verhaal. Grrr de tijger was ook mijn vertrouwelinge, hoewel mijn beide ouders haar konden zien.
Blijkbaar droeg ze Grrr op voor me te zorgen wanneer mijn moeder me voor een korte tijd moest verlaten, bijvoorbeeld terwijl ze naar de WC ging. Ik herinner me dit alles maar heel vaag, maar ik kende mijn moeder eenentwintig jaar voordat ze op tweeënveertigjarige leeftijd overleed, en ze was volkomen bij haar verstand.
Advertising on Megan Publishing Services is possible and not expensive, but the type of promotions that we will accept is limited to books and artwork in general, although if you have broader requirements, we may be able to help there too, as long as the ads fit in with the site’s content.
Books and Artwork can most easily be promoted through the bookshop button on the Title Bar above as this method is automated in that the advertiser can set up the promotion and pay for it without outside intervention.
However, there is another alternative too – banner advertising! This is not automated, but is easy to achieve if you have a existing banner, say from a company that you are affiliated to, or one that you have made yourself. This latter type can also be used by authors and artists to promote there own work in a larger format, from which one would expect more impact.
Prices for the banner ads are also available from the Title Bar.
If you are stuck trying to create a banner, perhaps I could help, or you can get one made on Fiverr for $5, and you will own it outright. It will probably be more professional too. (I may get one made for myself, thinking about it 🙂 )
There are prime spots for all the common size banners, but in general, there is only one spot for each size of banner.
So, if you have specific requirements, get in soon.
You can find the sizes of the banners and their prices for promotion on Megan Publishing Services here:
Have you caught the recent bug for audiobooks? Or is it audio books? The trend is so new that the jury is still out on the nomenclature, but I am going to use ‘audiobooks’ until it becomes ridiculous to continue to do so. Enter Megan’s Free Audiobook Club!
Anyway, I didn’t even realise that there was a fad for audiobooks until the beginning of 2018, when an article caught my eye and I followed the thread for an hour or so.
Now, I have four audiobooks of my own work and eleven more in production, and I have established a club where other enthusiasts can meet up. Well, more than that actually as I plan to hand out free copies of my audiobooks to members, and perhaps I will obtain audiobooks from other author friends to give away too.
The group is free to join, is called ‘Megan’s Free Audiobook Club’ and is hosted on Facebook here:
The details are explained on the group’s page, but basically, I will publish a list of the books I have to hand out with a reference back to a fuller description on this website. Then if you want a copy, just ask for one and you will receive a code to download a free copy.
Audiobooks often cost upwards of $20, so that is a pretty hefty saving. The only thing that I will ask of you in return is a short, honest review and that it be completed within a month.
NB: I am not even asking for a favourable review – just an honest one!
If you have never written a review before, don’t worry about it! I am not expecting a Sunday Times quality 🙂 Just in your own words…
In fact, I will put up a short template that you can follow to write your review to get novices started. Here is the link to that:
The Ultimate Promo Package is Megan Publishing Services’ prime advertising deal, which is designed to give a three-stage boost to the book or artwork that you want to promote.
NB: The Ultimate Promo Package is subject to limited availability because I need to read each book in order to provide a review – no more than one package a week (not per person – in total)!
Stage One: Lift off provides a powerful push to get your work noticed. Within a month, but at your own pace, we will produce an author interview, a book review, and a book sales’ page, which means that it will receive a random share of 30,000 banner adverts on MPS (Megan Publishing Services) a day and I will promote them on at least a dozen of the top Social media platforms
Stage Two: After-burner consists of creating six Tweets based on, and so uniquely relevant, to your work, which will be promoted across the Internet. The book review will be posted to Amazon US, Amazon UK and Goodreads. The Amazon US review will be available on ALL Amazon franchises around the world.
Stage Three: Cruising means promoting your work using three of your Tweets posted to my ever-growing band of 75,000 artistic reading and writing Twitter followers three times a day (every eight hours) for 365 days, which means that they will be seen potentially 82,125,000 times. Note that posting the Tweets every eight hours means complete global coverage within peak periods (due to the various time zones).
In short, the Ultimate Book Promo Package includes:
A review of your novel on my high-traffic website, Amazon and Goodreads (permanent placements).
Six Tweets based on your novel for you to use. I will send three of these Tweets to 75,000 of my followers three times a day for 365 days or at least 82,125,000 potential impressions.
An author interview about yourself and up to three of your books (permanent page).
A sales page for one of your books on Megan Publishing Services for one month.
Random banner ads out of approx 30,000 per day for one month (linked to sales page above).
Promotion of all website pages to more than a dozen Social Media accounts, including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Plurk, Digg, Diigo, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Blogger, Surfit, Favoritus, Folk’d, G+, Favoritus and more.
First come, first served due to limited availability (I have to read the books myself, in between writing my own) – no more than one package per week!
Site Overview Update:
August 11 2015:
Megan Publishing Services
Quite a lot has been happening at Megan Publishing Services over the last few days culminating in the following changes. Today, I want to report in this Site Overview Update that I finished:
1] transferring dozens of pages of useful information over from the now defunct site: kindle vs book RIP, I had that site for about five years.
2] listing all my books (novels, novellas and PLR niche content – 38 novels etc, and 95 PLR niche content ebooks. A total of 133 books)
3] writing and publishing a new PLR niche content book on teenagers’ second most favourite topic: acne and its treatment. I also listed it for sale on Kindle, Lulu and Smashwords. This book has not yet been approved (but it will be today), so if you want to get the content for your website, get it first. It is such a common subject that I expect demand for this booklet of 15 x 500-600-word articles to be high. The content has come from one of my own websites that I have just taken down because I no longer have the time for it. The cost is $7.99
4] writing an article on Amazon book reviews which was picked up by ‘Modern Indie Books’ and displayed prominently. In fact it has the joint biggest slot with an article from The Guardian. You can see in on this website or in the paper (today only) here: http://smarturl.it/indie-books?IQid=MPSpost
5] our new virtual assistants service and received our first enquiry.
That is the end of all the changes that were forced up me to comply with Google and Amazon’s on internal developments, plus a few ideas of my own to centralise the services that I have to offer.
All you busy writers and webmasters, check out the new virtual assistants’ services we offer along with advertising on this site and the PLR content.
While on the subject of this site, in the first ten days of August, it has received more visitors than in the whole of January and June already and is set to be the year-so-far’s top month with a margin of more than 30% over the second month (July) percentage-wise – there have been 49,000 pageviews so far already! (So why not get yourself a banner ad and sell your stuff? Starting at $4.99 p/m with photo).
That concludes the Site Overview Update. What shall I do now? There’s still half the day to go 🙂
I’m not really sure why they are called virtual assistants or VA’s because there is nothing virtual about them. They are real people who provide a really helpful service, although often from a great distance.
If you have never heard of virtual assistants, then the clue is in the last part of the above sentence. Virtual Assistants provide assistance over the Internet.
On the lowest level, this might be Tweeting (or Retweeting) a list of interested parties, which does not include writing original material, and at the top end it would or might involve writing and posting on behalf of the employer.
I’m sure you get my drift by now. Anyway, the point is that after talking with a friend the other evening, I thought that I might see how much support there would be if I launched such a service.
How many people might require such assistance, and how many people would like to be considered for the role?
The job would suite those who would rather work from home or need to. You will know whether that is you without my having to spell it out. The skill most required for virtual assistants is knowledge of and access to the Internet, but a close second will be an ability to read and write in English. It may be more difficult to find positions for those who only speak other languages, but not impossible, I think, but that will depend on how far I can publicise this venture. The more interest from buyers and sellers, the more encouragement I shall feel to put more time into the project.
So, if you are vaguely interested in the concept, please let me know using (preferably) my contact email, or the comment box below. Registration is open to people of all nationalities and is non-committal.
If this is not for you, but you know people who might be interested in being virtual assistants, please pass this message on.
In any case, please take a minute to LIKE and SHARE this page below.
Our family gathering is not in my mother-in-law’s this year, but in her sister-in-law’s next door but one. In Thai villagers, or at least in the ones around here, families tend to occupy an area or even a street sometimes, so all our lot live within a hundred yards of each other.
That would sound unusual to an average Brit, but when you understand that villages in Thailand were often caused by one or two men cutting down a patch of jungle and building a home, it becomes logical. As their children got married, they would cut a bit more of the adjoining forest down and so on. As in-laws joined the throng, the patch became a village and every family had its own locale.
I enjoyed myself too much to post yesterday, if you know what I mean. We, the whole extended family, went to a Muay Thai boxing tournament in the Watt in a neighbouring village. It’s not really my thing, but my wife likes it and so do most of the men in our family. Sitting at the back like I was, I didn’t see a single punch thrown, but I did enjoy the atmosphere.
I think we got back at about midnight, but I’m not sure, and went straight to bed.
The same is probably true for many people, as the village is unusually quiet.
July sales were the worst for thirteen months, and, even stranger than that, I didn’t sell a single copy of any of the five volumes of Behind The Smile in the USA in the whole month, and that has never happened since I wrote volume one in April 2012.
It is hard to believe that I couldn’t persuade even one person out of 300,000,000 to buy just one book out of that series over thirty-one days…
Aweber’s usefulness to me for delivering a series of emails has come to an end, I think. I have well over a hundred sign-ups on my mailing list, but many are Chinese and take no active part in the website. One wonders why they joined the mailing list and the only reasons I can think of are to pinch any good ideas I may get (I’m still hoping for one), pirate any books if I give any away free, or to send spam through my account if Aweber’s security is sloppy. I can’t think of one good reason, since they don’t try to participate.
Of the rest, about twenty percent actually respond, which I think is poor, since they are getting free, a service that I have to pay for, although I’m sure that Aweber is more flexible than WordPress. However, I don’t need that level of sophistication.
Therefore, I am going to rely on the ‘new post’ mailing list delivery service built into WordPress, which is free to all of us and is much better than it was even only recently.
The main benefit to the readers is that the messages they receive will concern brand-new posts, whereas on Aweber some of them on the mailing list were two years old by the time some people signed up, and the savings to me are money and I will not have to preload the autoresponder with messages.
I hope you will try the new mailing list out by entering your name and email address into the box at the top left of this page. You can unsubscribe with a click at any time and you will not be spammed by me, WordPress or any other company for joining up.
I have become aware of a problem with the mailing list service – it was collecting emails that mentioned my blog, posting them to the blog, and then notifying everyone that there was a new post. I have turned this dubious benefit off now.
∞
I heard something that disturbed me yesterday. A visitor, Mike, was telling me about the large protest marches in London after the election demonstrating against the Tory victory. I’d never heard about them. But how can that be? I listen to BBC Radio Four for at least twelve hours a day and there has been no mention of them. Is this censorship? Is it what we would call censorship in other countries?
It makes me ashamed of poor old Blighty, or at least, what decades of crappy politicians have done to her. It becomes more and more difficult to reconise Britain. It’s a crying shame.
∞
Oh, by the way, forty-five degrees Celsius today, but still no sign of the monsoon that everyone is waiting for to cool the country down.
For centuries, it did not require much more education than ‘average’ to stand out head and shoulders above the ‘average guy’, because the ‘average guy’ had no education at all. Standing out from the crowd was as simple as having money or being a priest.
However, not only that, but there were few books to read outside monasteries and universities, so it was pointless learning how to read anyway, if you could find a teacher. Only the clergy and the rich could afford the time and the money to learn.
A man, for women were not eligible, who could read and had access to books, was a genius, even though most of the books were wrong anyway – standing out from the crowd was that easy.
Move forward to the 19th Century and things improve slightly for the poor, but the quality of knowledge in books was still pretty low and all the well-educated were from the upper-class or the new class of ‘nouveau riche’ industrialists and adventurers in the colonies.
Even in the early 20th Century, most of the ‘geniuses’ came from the educated upper classes not from the working class, which was exploited so much that they had to work all week just to keep their large families alive.
The old order had to start adapting after the Second World War, when soldiers, returning from the war, expected what they had been promised: ‘a land fit for heroes’. However, it was not. They were expected to just pick up their hammers and shovels and get on with where they had left off.
However, it was not to be, and Baby Boomers were the first generation of working class children ever who were given a decent education free of charge. One of the consequences of this was that children from rich families could no longer expect to become ‘bosses’ just because they could read, which had been the case for a very long time.
Being able to read was becoming normal and working class kids resented being passed over just because someone’s family had money. It was becoming too difficult for rich kids their better jobs and their parents did not and do not like it. The consequence of this has been the running down of state education and the re-emergence of a two-tier educational system in the UK and probably elsewhere too.
Another consequence is that working-class kids see that they have less and less chance of rising to the top, so they crave celebrity as a short-cut to riches, which is obvious from the plethora of so-called ‘reality’ TV shows, which allow kids the chance to dream that they may be ‘spotted’ as a rising star and be swept off to Hollywood or at least Pinewood.
Being outrageous is now an acceptable way of seeking fame and fortune and standing out from the crowd. However, the desire for celebrity is cruel because very few can obtain it, so it leaves thousands of dissatisfied, ordinary kids in its wake who can hardly speak English, while the children of the rich get on with learning French.
If you would like to read more by Owen Jones, please click on his Bookshop link.
My first novel as a ‘real writer’ was called ‘Behind The Smile’, but it was not my first experience in self-publishing, since I had already created over 150 web sites and a hundred-odd ‘How To…’ manuals plus a book of my father’s automatic writings.
However, I did feel that publishing my very own first novel was something entirely different. Or at least, it was for me anyway, because I had always created a web site or a ‘How to…’ book and slipped them gently into the world without any fuss, just hoping that they would be noticed, which, in general, worked on a small scale.
However, as I said above, a novel is something entirely different. A novel is something personal. A writer expresses a lot of personality in a novel and so, it needs to be promoted in a more personal way.
Not only that, but there are millions of novels (self) published every year, so if an author does not make a superhuman effort, it will be hard to sell even a few hundred copies. You need to express yourself in your ad campaigns or you will miss your niche audience.
It is also true that people tend to like to read new novels, so you need to hit the public soon after publication. In general, it is only ‘old masters’ that sell well years later.
Now, two years after my first novel, I can see that I was hugely naive when I started. I actually thought that starting and then finishing the book was the problem for a would-be writer! Can you believe it?
In those far-off days, it had never crossed my mind that actually selling it would be harder. It took me five years to write my first book and when it was done, I thought: ‘Well, what now?’
Look around for an agent and / or a publisher, I thought and then it is job done!
What an idiot!
I went down the traditional rote of a writer and received three refusals. I could have lived with that, but it took 13 months to be refused! I could see my life slipping away before me without my getting anywhere. So I decided to go it alone.
It was only then that I realised how many other writers there were out there and it was scary. There are thousands and thousands of us! And all with the same problem.
What a lot of broken dreams and wasted talent!
So, I self-published. Not the old-style vanity self-publishing though. I used Amazon’s CreateSpace and Kindle and another one, Lulu, as well as others.
That was a huge learning curve too, but not insurmountable by any means.
I was as pleased as Punch. People could now buy my book in both print and ebook formats from at least two sources. Yes! I felt on top of the world. I even had hardbacks enabled through Lulu – hardbacks!
I sat back and waited for people to buy.
It soon became apparent that having books for sale did not mean that people knew that or would buy them. The publishers and distributors want to sell books, but they will not favour you over anyone and best sellers come first anyway – certainly not a ‘who was that again?’
Another hard lesson. So I created a web site and a blog for the book and for myself as an author, which gave me two chances of being found and also allowed future books to be linked to me as a hub.
That tactic increased sales a lot, but not enough for me, so I wrote articles on the background of the characters and posted them to the sites. It all had beneficial effects, but it was still not enough.
So, I started accounts at Facebook and other social media sites and linked them all together. I incorporated apps (custom LIKE and other buttons) into my Facebook pages which further helped and then a newsletter with an autoresponder and several (legal) Twitter accounts all funneling people who might like my book to read the first chapter free of charge.
It was a long, bumpy road for me, but I hope that it will be a smoother one for you.
I have started a bookshop, called Megan’s Bookshop, selling my own books. The books will be downloaded directly from me and payment will be guaranteed save through PayPal.
I have put all ten of my books online in Megan’s Bookshop, but I have created bundles of the two series as well, so now you can buy the trilogy ‘Behind The Smile’ at a reduced price, or you can buy the first novel ‘Daddy’s Hobby’ at have price.
Likewise, the first three novellas in the ‘Megan Series’ have been bundled together for the unbelievable price of $5.99 for the three. Their original novella has been reduced to 99c too.
All of the books are in formats will allow them to be read by most e-readers and computers, but if you need them in another format, please let me know as I can convert them to most file types for older machines.
If you would like to add your book to Megan’s Bookshop, it can be done easily for a one-off payment. Please send me an email for more details or look on:
If you place your books in Megan’s Bookshop on my site, they will be downloaded from your website and all the money wil be paid directly into your own web site.
There are other services for authors on my publishing web site at:
where there are about 100 books of ‘private label rights’ (PLR) with fifteen 500-word articles on niche subjects that you can use in your on line publications during periods when you are too busy to write such as during holidays and ill health.
Authors can use these three web sites to make writing, publishing, promoting and selling your books easier and will allow readers to get to know authors and their work better too. They will be able to support authors they like by buying directly from them thus ensuring that the writer receives all of the price of the book.
I have written and self-published more than a hundred books, so it came as quite a surprise to me the other day when a good friend and author of four excellent books told me that he found authorship in the form of self-publishing on his own daunting and confusing. It seemed so straight-forward to me, but it got me thinking.
If my intelligent, Internet-savvy friend found self-publishing on his own difficult, how many other authors must be having the same problem with self publishing by themselves as well?
I suppose it’s quite obvious really. We all have our blind spots, don’t we? Some people can’t even boil an egg, mend a car or write a book, so it stands to reason that some people won’t be able to understand how to self-publish a book on their own via the Internet too. I suppose the problem is a mixture of technology and terminology. If you don’ understand the instructions that you are reading, how can you do what they are telling you to do?
As it happened, I was in the final stage of writing a novel, so when it came to publishing, self-publishing, it, I described exactly what I was doing so that other writers could easily follow the process. When that book was published, I wrote the whole process down and followed the narrative to publish that manual on self-publishing.
I am happy to report that my instructions, help and advice allowed the publication of that reference manual to be achieved without let or hindrance!
So, there you have it, there is now a brand-new book on the market which will take you through the process of authorship and self-publishing step by step. However, there is not only one route to self-publication, since there are two sorts of books these days and two major printer/publishers for the do-it-yourself author. Not to mention the four of five major distributors that you must have your book with in order to have a chance of selling it to many people.
The two types of book are, of course, print books and ebooks. Before you pooh-pooh ebooks, let me say that Amazon reported in 2010 that it had sold more ebooks than paperbacks for the first time ever and that it could only foresee that trend increasing. The two printer/publishers available to self-publishing authors are Amazon and Lulu. Amazon creates and sells print books via CreateSpace and ebooks via Kindle, both of which are owned by Amazon.
The other major distributors of books and ebooks are: Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes and Noble, Nook, Smashwords and XinXii. All of these outlets require a different form of book or ebook. The format of print books and ebooks is completely different anyway, but Kindle, Lulu, Smashwords and XinXii each have different requirements for ebooks too, so if you want to be with them, you will need to know what they want.
This reference manual sets out the requirements of each of these outlets and describes, step by step, what you have to do to format your book’s text to meet them. Anyone, no matter how a-technical, can be a self-publisher on his own with the help of this book.
I am a birthday person in that I love to celebrate other people’s birthdays more than Cristmas and certainly more than new year, but I don’t like celebrating my own.
This has something to do with with not like being the centre of attention far, far more than not wanting to admit that I am getting older, but it is more than that too.
My wife, Neem, and we have only been maried for five years, insists that I have a party and she is very good at putting one on. I do’t begrudge her the pleasure of doing it or the pleasure that others may derive from attending, but I actually prefer to do what I did for thirty years before meeting Neem and that was to just go out alone on a pub crawl and see what happens.
Those days seem to be behind me now, but I would go out, sit alone in bars where I was not known and not mention that it was my birthday unless it came up in conversation, which it sometimes does.
Anyway, yesterday, in front of ten or fifteen people during the morning phase of the do, the postman arrived with a parcel. People assumed that it was from my family, but Neem and I knew better. In fact, it was from my printers and was two weeks early, but great timing. I opened the box and Neem handed copies of my latest three books around.
Everyone was suitably impressed. That happened several times throughout the day, until one Thai woman, at about 7pm, asked who ‘that lady in the book’ was. Well, I had not put any ‘lady’ in my book, so I looked, but I had no idea.
Between the pages of 122 and 124, where I had planned page 123 to go, was a book of 40 odd pages of poetry entitled ‘The Verse of Life’. I had never heard of the book and did not recognise the photo or the name of the authoress.
It is strange though. That section fits as neatly into my book called ‘Maya – Illusion’ as an interlude used to in the cinema.
I will have to have it removed from future editions of my book, but I am glad that I have four copies containing it too.
Another thing that happened on my birthday was my birthday give-away.
I decided to be magnanimous and give a free ebook copy of ‘The Misconception’ to whomever wanted it for the 24 hours of my birthday. I really pulled the stops out and promo’d it through a few clubs I am in, Twitter, Facebook and a 120-strong readers list of my own.
The result was that 24 people downloaded it and I was one of those! Twenty-four people out of seven billion!
Now, I don’t call that a disaster, because I don’t really see why I should give my work away anyway, but it is very odd that when I have done this give-away thing before,I never told anyone and always had 200-500 takers and this time I really tried and only got twenty-three (or four).
I have just about finished implementing a bookshop on this site, so I hope that you like it, because I can honestly tell you that I found it hard-going!
Anyway, it seems to be working now 🙂
Listings in the bookshop are paid-only, but I know what budgets can be like, so I hope that you will find the rates to list in our bookshop very reasonable.
They start, at most expensive, at $2.50 per month per book!
For your $2.50, you get to put one image up, a description and a link. The link can go anywhere you like, say, your own web site or to your affiliate link to your book-seller. I do not earn any commission from these links. I suggest that you use a link-shortener to prevent commission fraud.
The best deal, which will also suit busy people, and aren’t we all, is the Maxi-Plan, which allows four images (author and three book covers?) and lasts for two months in the bookshop. That costs $14.99, which I think you will agree is pretty reasonable – three books for nine weeks!
Anyway, that is not all you get.
There is a search box only dedicated to our bookshop and a random selection of bookshop ads on every blog page including the home page!
Adverts are restricted to books for the foreseeable future and advertisers will be informed when their ads are about to expire.
There are about a dozen genre on the system at the moment, but I will add more if an advertiser wants, free of charge. One quirk was that ‘Erotica’ came next to ‘Children’ in the natural order of things, so I had to demote it to the bottom of the list.
I hope that writers of erotica will not take it as a personal slur on their genre 🙂
A further limitation of the system is that I cannot enter sub-genres, so if you want to be more specific, I suggest that you put that in your blurb.
As far as the amount of traffic goes, the average amount of traffic per month is 50,000+ page views – in June 2014 it was 56,854 page views or 83,135 hits
I am quite happy to disclose traffic details to advertisers, but as a guide, the ad will show how many times it has been viewed anyway.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me – there is a contact form on the top Navbar.
