Welcome to the newly minted, hot off the press Pete Morgan Books Blog! As a newbie writer and author, I have been avidly reading the How To….Books on getting yourself published and one of the key suggestions they all make is to have a web presence, such as a Blog Page, to help promote yourself and your books!

Obviously, I’ve decided to take their advice and here it is! The timing has also worked out nicely as I have just finished prepping my first book with Createspace, which will hopefully be available on Amazon fairly soon.

This first book was more of an experiment to learn the necessary steps required to get from a Word Document to an actual book on Amazon. I’ve just seen the proofs and am pretty happy with the quality of the book (although I would have preferred that the book had a title on the spine – that’s something I’ll look into for next time).

The book, What a Piece of Work is Man, is actually a collection of poetry that I’ve written and was ready to hand for this experiment. I’ll write a bit more about the various steps I took in a future blog in case anyone else is interested in doing the same thing.

I don’t expect that this book will be a best seller anytime soon but it was a great learning experience. There’s still a lot of learning to do, such as getting a properly formatted Kindle version of the book ready (Createspace did do an automatic conversion but I’m not too happy with the formatting when I read it on an iPad, so I need to look into that).

The next step will be to finalise a few other books I’ve been getting ready and once I have the whole process down, I hope I can share how I did it with like-minded writers. I’m also hoping that this will really help to motivate and encourage me in my own writing as its something I’ve been putting off for far too long now. E-publishing has really helped level the playing field for all those hoping to get into print without having to go through a traditional publisher and there’s no longer any excuse for not getting your work out there!

For now, thanks for checking out this new blog and do come back to visit again as I hope to be adding quite a bit of new material over time. Don’t be surprised if the appearance of the blog keeps changing in these early days, though, as I’m not yet sure how I want it to look.

Lastly, I’d like to wish everyone very best wishes for 2014! Happy writing!