Frost: You’ve written a book of short stories for Christmas – tell us a little about them.
Tim: I actually wrote the stories a few years back, as presents for friends and family. There are four stories and each has a different feel and genre. One is a children’s adventure in the style of Enid Blyton, one is a comic farce told in “net speak”, another is a Victorian ghost story.
Frost: But they’re all linked in some way?
Tim: They all contain Dogs, hence the Title; “Christmas Tails”.
Frost: What made you think of publishing them?
Tim: I was encouraged to share them by the people who I’d written them for and people who they had shown them to. The positive reaction took me by surprise, to be honest; I’ve written a few scripts here and there but nothing like this. It was quite flattering so I thought “why not?”
I initially did a short print run of one of the stories, “Dreams”, for local people in Yorkshire. It sold out. I was later told that it had been used in a high school assembly somewhere in Birmingham!
Frost: And now you’ve put the collection on the Kindle Bookstore?
Tim: Yes. It’s also available as a PDF from my website.
Frost: What made you go down the direct publishing route?
Tim: Time and cost, mainly. As an actor chasing work, I’ve little time to be running around after publishers – it’s a bit of a chore, frankly. I thought that publishing online would be the simplest and quickest way of getting the book out there.
Frost: And how have you found self-publishing? Successful? Tricky?
Tim: More difficult than I had expected, to be honest. The trouble with self-publishing is that you’re suddenly responsible for formatting and type-facing the book for use with e-readers (which is a steep learning curve!) as well as marketing the book itself. And the market for e-books is a little different to the market for paperbacks.
Frost: How so?
Tim: It seems to me, having now been poking around the forums and the dozens of e-book related sites on the net, that there is a new culture developing around e-books. The audience is pretty open to new works and new authors but they’re also pretty demanding – pricing is tricky, for example, and they’re not scared of telling you if something doesn’t work!
That said, I’ve found the publishers forum on Amazon very helpful and wonderfully supportive.
Frost: And what about your decision to give 50p per book to Children in Need?
Tim: Well, as much as the money would come in very handy, the important thing to me is having the book in people’s hands and enjoyed. I always feel the tiniest bit guilty that I’ve not been able to give as much as I’d like to the charity over the years and I want to make up for that. It’s a great charity and, with government support ebbing away from many of the causes that Children in Need supports, it just seems like the right thing to do.
Frost: Any future publishing plans?
Tim:
Not immediately. But who knows? If it sells well enough, there may – just may – be a sequel.
Frost: You read it here first.
To buy Christmas Tails, please visit Tim’s main site at www.tim-austin.co.uk or buy it from the Amazon Kindle Bookstore here; Christmas Tails
is out now and is published by HarperCollins.
