A single Award is worth a thousand Reviews !!! I decided early on to submit my book for two literary competitions. My application was sent in Feb 25 and the results were announced last week in Nov 25. I am thrilled to share that my book, 'Rat Race to Riches' has won a Best Indie Book Award (BIBA) and was a Finalist for the Best Book Awards (BBA) !!! The awards recognise Authors from around the world whose work demonstrates excellence in writing, originality & creativity, overall quality of...

Publishing the book had been tough but great fun, however it is only 50% of the work, the other 50% is marketing which I had parked up until now. I had started this whole process without a marketing strategy! Having zero marketing experience, I could have outsourced the work to a marketing 'expert' but decided I wanted to take up the challenge myself. I self-published, so why couldn't I self-market? More importantly, I wanted to retain control over how I represented myself and my brand. The...

Once I had decided to write a book, the first thing was to get everything, including the kitchen sink, on paper - a brain dump ! This took about 3 months and ran into 50k words. This phase was easy, it just flowed effortlessly and in no particular order. My childhood, my concepts, my visuals, just one big brain dump. Sometimes I would get up in the middle of the night 2, 3, 4am to write down my thoughts so that I would not forget them in the morning when I woke up. Sometimes, I would go out...