Made it!

Well - after all the trails and tribulations I can finally say that my book The Edge of Things is fully published on sale, and available*. Amazon.com finally got to list it yesterday night. I find, in fact, that its true publication date was 9th July, but since it's extremely difficult to buy from the publisher, Xlibris, the effective date is when Amazon list it.
So this is the end of one very instructive and often tortuous journey, just getting the book published - and the start of another one - selling it!
In my experience people either are, or are not good at selling. Every school staffroom I ever worked in always had one or two characters (where are you now, Phil Addy?)** who could be relied on to sell anything to anyone - and half a hundred like me, who curled up in embarrassment at the very thought.
And this is odd, when you think about it: after all, writing a book is an act of enormous egotism - let alone publishing it. So why should selling it be so different? Is it a form of residual, British snobbery - the aristocracy's historic distaste for "trade"? Or is it just that, like any other form of mollusc, writers are braver inside their shells, than out? Anyway Here we go!

* http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Things-Alan-Robertshaw/dp/1441530835/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249120479&sr=1-3

**Phil was a great teacher of Humanities who, as I recall, found selling so much more to his taste that he hung up his chalk and went off to manage a store in Paris: a life change I always marvelled at.