I have already wrote a post like this, I have already explained myself a few times, why did I set up a blog, why did I publish my free eBooks? Maybe you missed the post, maybe you are a new follower, so here is a quick review of how I got to this place.
If we go back to the beginning when I wrote Running River or something, when I used to work for Leyland Bus back in the day when manufacturing was an important part of the British economy ,I wrote down my ideas on anything from paper towels to recycled paper, there was obviously no internet for me back in 1988. My ideas were limited to being read by my work mates, and some pen friends and some geezer down the pub. I had bought a typewriter to type up my work and obviously with hilarious results and typos , letters out-of-place.
My first dance with the publishing world was with what is now Forward Press in Peterborough, they went through a series of names back then one of which was Anchor Books. In the end I had a lot of poems published by them and I am very thankful for them to help me along.
So basically I was writing, I waited for the newsletter to come back from the publisher giving me the subject for the next anthologies they were publishing and I would write something for that precise reason.
This means I was not writing “full time” maybe in a busy month I would write four poems hoping that they would be published , but even that fizzled out.
With the coming of the internet and all of its nice surprises I realized very late that my work could get to a bigger audience, my first blog entry for this WordPress account 17 December 2013 , just over three years ago.
The Poem Moonlight
From this point on I became a full-time poet so to speak, trying to write as many poems as possible, exploring my ideas, my passions and my daily experiences, mixed with a few stories. My first poem to be published was called Moonlight which could be a little note in a diary, describing one mundane evening in my life, now that little mundane evening is captured forever in my poem, in my eBook and even in a video.
Most of what I wrote in late 2013 and the first months of 2014 went into this blog and then I made a compilation of my poems to sell via the Bookrix self-publishing platform, I put a price on it and was very quickly brought back down to earth when I realized a nobody can never sell a book. To help promote my eBook I decided to publish another eBook, this time with less poems, a sort of teaser to show the world my art, basically my free eBook took off and the other one disappeared. Just the Beginning was cancelled, but Just for Free lives on, 2800 copies of it have been downloaded.
Feeling frustrated I kept writing and tried again and again to get my published work out into the open, Pushing my luck and Summer and other Horrors were published, failed and cancelled.
I found the Createspace platform and decided to regroup all my poetry and publish a real book with white pages, but still no luck, since it was published I have only shifted 29 copies. The follow-up Poetry Tails did no better.
Just paperback
I shifted my attention to the eBooks, I kept writing on a different amount of subjects and my now free eBooks actually got downloaded in all 18500 have been downloaded so far, well that is what they tell me.
My WordPress blog got left behind and used it as a publicity tool, all my heart went into my eBooks and my blog basically died, well just like my twitter account.
Now in 2017 I have decided to push myself harder, to give my blog account the material it deserves, maybe I will publish less eBooks this year but I need to build another type of audience, March was the month I came back to the front, gaining new followers and dusting down the site, April was a bit dull as I was ill and had a few things to iron out in my real life, but now I am back, to start over again, my ideas and passions are the same, I hope you appreciate my efforts.
Darren Hobson is a published poet who writes constantly and truthfully, mixing his palette of words with detail and enthusiasm, he writes about society, the general grind of daily live but also writes short stories about the supernatural and dark fairy tales. He has many eBooks and paperback books on offer why not delve deeper into this artists mind?
Darren Hobson Poet 