With no paid promotion at all — As someone who has been involved in the self-publishing world for well over a decade, I consider myself to have picked up a fair bit of knowledge over the years. While I’m always nervous about calling myself an expert (because if I was, I would be a millionaire by now!)…

Actually, there were a few but this was the biggest — I first self-published on 30th November 2011. I was two weeks away from going back to work after almost a year on maternity leave. I had spent three and a half years of my life working on a book and I self-published it without even attempting to get a traditional…

Some of it was really funny! — On 27th June 1993 I closed a time capsule for an English class project. I was twelve years old at the time, so I couldn’t possibly imagine some of the things that were going to happen in the 30 years that followed. The capsule consisted of two empty 2 litre…

It really wasn’t that scary — I believe I did it for all the right reasons. At least, I didn’t do it for the wrong reasons. There was no attention seeking or attempts to titillate behind posting the picture. There was no, “wait until they get a load of this!” when I hit the post button…

And what I earned and learned — Month number four — the month when it all started to make sense to me. That’s right. I got clarity, which was something I thought would continue to elude me, even three weeks ago. After Medium Day, I started thinking it was all really random, this making money on Medium…

They weren’t what you would expect! — Before I left the rat race to be a full-time carer and writer, I was a paralegal. I had spent over a decade working in the legal profession, first as a secretary and then I trained to be a paralegal. The bizarre thing was that once I qualified in two…

Or any autumn for that matter — Over the weekend, my little dog, Rum, was ill. I woke to the sound of him crying, which is unusual. He was desperate to go outside and do his business which also isn’t like him. He had tummy problems and wouldn’t leave my side, shaking like a leaf with his…

The Viking raiders are coming! Over the last few days, the Largs Viking Festival began. To me, September is synonymous with this event and strangely enough, so is excellent weather. It always seems a little strange to me that galas and pageants usually happen in Scotland in June, July or…

People are saying goodbye to summer — Sometimes it isn’t necessarily nature and the natural world that tells you the seasons are changing. It’s human behaviour. With the arrival of September, people are changing the wreaths on their doors where I live, even though it’s technically still summer until the Autumn Equinox later this month and it’s…