I promised myself I would not do this so now I really need to explain why here I am putting pen to paper to promote the book I have spent a large part of my life living in. Ok, if the previous sentence does not adequately explain it maybe I should stop before I start.

I have a personal mission here. I firmly believe that good writing should not depend on finding a publisher willing to spend money to promote a book. On the face of it the very act of finding a publisher should act as a natural sieve sifting through the garbage and delivering the gems but publishing, unfortunately, has rarely been just about that. It is also a business and it needs to bring out books which means it needs to have a physical product to sell on a regular basis irrespective of whether it is of real value or not.

Now you might argue that good books are written all the time and you will be right but it is simply not possible for every book that is published to be good. Books are published because they found the right person at the right time, because the marketing angle was right, because the agent (if one was involved) knew the right editors and had the right connections, because the publisher had received such atrocious offerings that month that the drivel they published was actually better than what was on offer.

Any of those reasons, all of them are valid and let’s not forget here that J. K. Rowling was rejected by just about everyone, that Tolkien was considered unlikely to sell more than 1,000 copies and that, improbably, Jeffrey Archer sells!

Which brings me now to this: why? Why am I trying? Why do I not either give up or choose to find a publisher? Well, we are in the age of the web and on this site you can try an entire chapter of my novel before you chance your money and buy it.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Has all my hard work and ingenuity gone into that one, single chapter? Have I poured everything into it to the point that what follows is an anticlimax?

Well, before I answer that question I will say that I know the publishing industry and I have worked inside it and when I was there the pressure was to cut down on editing time because it was expensive and did not directly contribute to book sales and mistakes always slipped through anyway. But the one area where an editor’s time was never compromised on was on his working that opening paragraph and the first chapter and the reason for that was that the publishing industry knows that readers who browse through a bookshop are either hooked or lost within the first three minutes of reading the opening page of a book. Yes, that’s right! We are (and I include myself in this) either lost or gained based upon that opening sentence and the few pages behind it and then either we are disappointed and blame ourselves for the wrong choice of book or we become so thrilled that we forget even how we chose a book and congratulate ourselves on making a brilliant find. The thing is that the publishing industry does not care either way because a sale has been made. It’s that simple. They know we will come back and try others and buy more, so there is no impetus to either satisfy us or turn us off after that sale is made. After we buy a book what happens, really, comes down to the fire and skill of the author.

And this brings me to… me. I could, I suppose, easily write such a compelling first chapter that you would feel the book is perfect for you and you’d buy it. You might go for a download (minimising the risk) or actually purchase a paper copy. Either way I would have achieved the same degree of success in compelling you to buy it as the publishing industry does.

Except I won’t, because I am the author and I do not just want sales, I want readers. I want fans, not for me, because, as you realise by now I am self-effacing and retiring and really despise publicity and I am, by nature, a recluse. But I really, really want fans for my book. Fans for my story. Fans for those characters who live and breathe and have lives inside my head and whose story I know and discover and uncover like post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks.

I see them as I walk in the quiet fields bounding my home. I hear them speak as I read the paper or have breakfast in the morning. They talk to me before I go to bed at night. They compel me to write the story, tell the tale, make their world real. And I obey.

So, here we are.

I am now promoting the book, though there are limits to what I will do. Now, I hope that if you are reading all this what brought you here is the heading of this blog post: ‘The perfect gift for the discerning fantasy novel reader’ in which case I will be straightforward. This is a hard-hitting multi-layered cipher which reads like a simple story.

If you do buy it and give it to someone as a present they will be genuinely surprised. They will have not yet heard of me or the book or the series I am now writing. They may not even have heard of the website. In terms of uniqueness I can guarantee, for a while anyway, that they will be impressed by both your thoughtfulness and your ability to ferret out a good read.

This now brings us to the quality. Ok, here this is like beauty right? Technically I am really good, experienced and have already produced enough non-fiction books and short stories to know about the mechanics of writing so I am not an amateur or first-time writer. Technically the novel is as perfect as I can make it.

Whether the story appeals and my unabashed adult take which is not usually done in fantasy fiction where everyone plays nice and those who die do so in an almost peaceful fashion that makes you want to yearn for death depends entirely upon you, the reader (or the person you will give this book as a gift).

You see here you must understand that reading, like film-making is a two-sided contract. I work hard to make you suspend your disbelief, you buy into my world-making long enough to suspend your disbelief and live the story. But (and it’s a huge BUT) unlike film-making, even my most detailed description leaves enough space for ambiguity so that you, the reader, whose mind and imagination are fully engaged in the novel, can add your own experience and imagination and take on the sets I use and the way characters look, walk, breathe and live.

That bit I cannot control, though, I hope, I have put enough of the right kind of ‘code’ in there, for each reader to decode the book in a way that makes it belong to the them and special only for them.

Choose this book as a gift and well, I can guarantee that the person who receives it will not be unresponsive.