An October walk in the Ribble Valley.

At this time of year it's about the turning of the leaves from the greens of summer, to the reds and golds of Autumn. It's nature's swansong before winter finally sets in. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder, and the leaves are beginning to turn into the beautiful colours of autumn, as the chlorophyll, which keeps the leaves green throughout the summer, retreats for the winter.

This is a field maple, and like all maples is one of the most impressive of trees when in autumn colour. When you think of maple you think of maple syrup and the Canadian national flag, and of Japanese maples sold in pots for use in gardens, but we do have maples of our own,  as you can see.

I spotted this Virginia creeper growing up a farmhouse wall. It isn't strictly a native to the Ribble Valley, as its name  suggests, but then neither am I and we both seem to thrive here. Perhaps the climate here is not too dissimilar to that of Virginia.

Last month was about the berries, but this month it's predominantly about fungus, which is everywhere. This is a bracket fungus, it grows on the trunks of trees, and sticks out rather like a bracket attached to a wall. I'm not an expert on fungus but most fungi can be eaten, I'm led to believe, but without expert knowledge its a risk too far, as the consequence's of making a mistake can be devastating. 

Here are a few more I spotted.

Honey Fungus                                                       Cep

                                                   Shaggy Inkcap

Russila                                                            The Deceiver.

                                                                       I wonder why its called that?

I spotted this fox crossing a field, it was a long way away but I put the camera on full telephoto and placed it on a fence post for support. The depth of field is quite narrow but at least the head is in focus. I once went to Bournemouth for Easter and urban foxes were commonplace, but foxes in the countryside are more illusive and I was pleased to get this one. 

These are the seeds of the horse chestnut tree. As a boy we used to soak them in vinegar to make them hard enough to win conker competitions. A hole was bored through the conker and then it was used to smash someone else's conker before yours was broken. You received a few rapped knuckles but it was great fun. Playing conquers seems to be banned today as being too dangerous, like walking to school and playing outside with other children. Sad, don't you think?

Publishing your masterpiece on a shoestring

It's much easier to publish that book you always intended to write than at any other time in history, but it can be very expensive to do so. It seems to me that we have three options when it comes to publication, and I have tried them all. 

OPTION ONE

The first option is to use a conventional publisher, but interesting a conventional publisher in a book by an unknown author is about as likely as winning the lottery. My first two books were published in this way some years ago. I was asked to pay the cost of professional editing from my advance on sales. I'm not saying that professional editing is not a good thing, I'm sure that it is if you want the book to be the best that it can be, but unless you are confident that you have a best seller on your hands, the probability is that you will never re-coup your investment. 

My books were sold at £7.50 each, and my royalty share was 10% of sales, or 75 pence per copy. After tax that left me with 60 pence per copy if they all sold at full value. If the editing bill happened to come to £1000, which in this day and age is a very conservative estimate of costs, I would have to sell 1,666 of each book just to cover the cost of the editing. I resolved this problem by offering my editor a writing credit, and 2% of my book royalties. The publisher designed the book covers, printed the books, did all of the marketing, and I received an annual check for a decade.

OPTION TWO

When I retired from full time employment, and decided to try my hand at writing novels, I approached a print on demand publisher after responding to an advert. This method of publishing would have been described as vanity press not so very long ago, because the author is expected to foot the bill for pretty much everything. The publisher did produce the book at zero cost, except for a nominal charge for "administration," but I quickly discovered that this kind of publisher makes their money from selling services to authors, rather than selling books to the reading public, so I cancelled my contract  when sales dried up after just  35 copies had been sold.

OPTION THREE

  

This is the option which I currently favour, unless of course one of the conventional publishers would like to take a chance on an unknown like me. In this option the author is also the publisher, and marketer, so it involves a lot of time, work, and commitment to bring the book to fruition. 

How to get started? assuming that you have finished writing your manuscript, it will need to be edited, and edited, and then edited some more. You will be surprised how many mistakes you have made and some you won't even recognise as mistakes, but Microsoft Word will find some of them for you and there are other free download programs to help you to look for mistakes. Professional editing will  resolve these problems but at a cost. To avoid editing fees I employed the services of two of my friends to search for mistakes, and at the end of the day it only cost me two signed copies and a curry at the local Indian restaurant. Editing is more than searching for spelling and grammar mistakes, it includes context and running order, all kinds of things in fact, so I joined YouWriteOn, where you can submit your manuscript for a critical assessment, but to receive an assessment you must be  prepared to do the same thing for someone else. The feedback is very useful, if you are thick skinned enough to accept it, because some of the comments can be brutal. I learned from the process that I'd included too much unnecessary detail, and that my story didn't grab the reader from the beginning, and took too long to get going, so I took on board the comments, analysed my story, re-arranged it, and removed about 80 pages worth of waffle, which is the kind of thing that an editor might do. I am very happy with the result.

A book is no good without a cover. A cover helps to sell a book and could be the difference as to whether a book sells or not, so it must look professional. Book designers will produce a good cover but again at a cost, but it doesn't need to cost a fortune to produce a decent book cover. I bought the rights to use the photograph on the left  on-line, for about £30. My novel is about a band which crashes and burns after being connected to a series of killings, so the picture seemed to be appropriate.

On Microsoft Word, you can select insert from the tool-bar, and then Word Art. There you can choose your text design, and colour. Save the result as a PDF, in your Word document, which will easily convert to a JPEG on a free download. I use free PDF to JPEG converter. It's a bit primitive but it does the job. For the back cover  select page layout from the tool-bar in Word, and then select a page colour. You can use Word Art, or simply chose a text style to complete the cover blurb. You can now self publish your book as an e-book on Amazon Kindle, or as  a paperback on Createspace for free.

When I discover how to market on a shoestring I'll let you know.