Fizz-books.com is my independent publishing vehicle.
Fiction | Comic fantasy: spirits, imaginary worlds, dark humour, that kind of thing. |
Paradise | Free! |
The Wheels of the World | |
The Sump of Lost Dreams | |
Explorations ‘twixt faith and doubt | |
More than Bananas | Free! (if you know where to look) |
Bread | Published Feb 2022 and available on Amazon and elsewhere. |
The Sandwich | Published Feb 2021. |
Missions | |
The Church in the Muslim World | A history of the Church in the Muslim world, updated to around the time of the Arab Spring, c. 2010, when things looked briefly more optimistic than perhaps they do now. It would be nice to revisit this sometime. Free! at select bookshops like Smashwords. |
The best thing about publishing via the independent route is price. Traditional publishers store excellent stuff but keep it well away from actual customers by hiding it behind high walls of cost.
Prices for books were OK when people were moving blocks of paper around the world. Pre-internet, it was remarkable. You only needed a unique ISBN and a friendly bookshop, and you could order any book to be shipped to you at any address on earth.
But the internet has disrupted this in multiple ways. It costs almost nothing to stock a book and deliver it to your phone, and so customers, all of us, can get our eyeballs on wonderful riches, the cream of human thought, rather than wasting our days scrolling through ephemera and detritus.
I’ve been fortunate to have had publishing contracts with several publishing houses and I loved having a publisher, who took me out for meals, made my books better, helped with marketing, and was a kind of father figure. Being published by a traditional publisher had a kind of cachet too.
So much has changed though. When my publisher, an 0ld man, died, it seemed for me that the traditional industry almost died with him.
Now, though, I can make books available at a low price, or free, and I can follow my heart in writing matters, and though I am not selling in six figures as I once did, thousands of books are still moving for me.
My earlier books, with various traditional publishers, can still be hunted down.