There’s a stigma around self-publishing. All writers are aware of it.

Really though, it’s no different from a musician pressing their own CD’s and selling them outside the shows.

The stigma, though, comes from the ease with which anyone can upload any old hastily written and shoddily edited ‘work’ and publish it via Amazon KDP, or whichever means of self-publication they might choose.

Two years ago, I set myself the task of releasing six novellas over the course of 2015 via KDP. The first three, The Motel Whore, The Vampire, and The Boy, are a loosely connected trilogy set in the same unnamed American town and featuring recurring characters. The latter three are all standalone works – The Mess, The Pitbull, and Three. These stories contain hitmen, heavies, and dog-fights.

I studied self-publishing for about a year before I committed to going ahead with it. I studied formatting and fonts. I read each of these six works at least ten times apiece until I stopped making changes and edits to them – and you know what? There’s probably, most likely, still a couple of overlooked mistakes in there.

The thing is, I wrote those stories and I wanted to get them out. I’ve never taken drugs, but I imagine writing is like an addiction. You grow restless, you get an itch inside your skull – you need to get stuff DONE. You want the world and you want it now. It’s about legacy, about building up a body of work you can be proud of and leaving it behind.

But you’ll never be proud of it. You’ll never be done.

The goal with these six was always to put them into print. Originally I figured I’d have to do it with Createspace, to set up a new account and get to it via them, but the time got away and then one day I’m on my KDP account and KDP are finally offering a paperback service. The time had come.

Now here they are! The Motel Whore & Other Stories features the three of the trilogy, along with two previously unpublished pieces called The Shoot and The Painter. The Shoot is based on an article I read in Bizarre magazine years ago about a photographer who would take pornographic shots of junkies while they shot up. The inspiration for The Painter came from a story I read about Marilyn Manson, how he would pay his drug dealers with oil paintings of his own creation.

Anyway, links for the paperbacks are below:

The Motel Whore & Other Stories:

Guns, Drugs, and Dogs:

Will I self-publish again? Probably not, but never say never.

The stories in their original form will remain available on Kindle, each for the super low price of 99p/99c, whilst the compilations are paperback only.

So as it stands, my body of work now consists of these six Kindle novellas, their paperback compilations, forty-three short stories, An Eye For An Eye published by Near To The Knuckle, and Fatboy which is due from All Due Respect on May 1st.

Onwards!