Tag: self-publishing

Indoldrum is once again available on Amazon!

12 December 2024

This year I have been redrafting all my work, as with the skills I’ve been learning and improving over the last few years, I know I can improve them. This is one of the benefits of self publishing.

Indoldrum is the latest to be completed and is once again available on Amazon, in both paperback and e-book formats. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Indoldrum-Arthur-Hofn-ebook/dp/B08DY91DL8

Indoldrum : Johann might be lost, he isn’t sure.

Battling Ménière’s disease and severe hearing loss is hard. Some of the strange new people in his life make him feel uneasy and he’s not sure why. Where have these people come from? What do they know about him? And is there something wrong with time itself? His in-laws have lost their cat, it’s an event which triggers unforeseen challenges and raises questions he’s just not ready to deal with. Johann loves his wife Harriet, she’d help him; but Harriet is dead and the world has ended in more than one way.

Just £2.75 for the E-book and £8.99 for the paperback, on Amazon and available in local currencies.

This Ian person lived at the far end of the road behind the bus stop and it took me a few minutes to get there.
The house was an old council style one and it wasn’t in the best of condition. Recycling boxes lay broken and full of rain water in front of the downstairs window. As I got closer I noticed the paint was peeling from the door frame and the grass had been in serious need of cutting several times over, it was now a collection point for the litter that had been blown across the street and had managed to get in the narrow gap between the also overgrown hedges on either side of the path that were blocking visibility to the road.
I knocked on the door, feeling a little trapped in this hidden front garden, and waited for a few moments. There was no movement or sound and after a while I decided no one was home. This was annoying as I didn’t really know what to do. I could just put the keys through the letter box but I didn’t feel right about that. I turned to go and got to the top of the path when the door opened.
‘Yes?’
A man around my age was standing the other side of the small gap that had been created by the opening of the door. I instantly didn’t like him, he was wearing a onesie.

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Beck’s Game Redrafted

27 May 2024

Simply because I have learnt so much over the last few years, I have decided I can improve my work so far – this is one of the benefits of self-publishing. So far, I have republished my first two novels Humanity and Framed of Rathgar, which are available here. I hope to complete Indoldrum later this year, but in the meantime, I have started work on Beck’s Game.

So far, on its original release Beck’s Game has now had over 33,000 downloads. Thank you all so much, for the last couple of years I’ve been a bit quiet promoting too. However, I have now removed the original documents from my website and from Ko-fi as shortly the redrafted versions will be available, once again free of charge for a while.

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Get Framed Of Rathgar For Free

03 May 2024

On Sunday 5th May, my novel Framed of Rathgar will be FREE on Amazon Kindle. You can get a copy from here, or you can get a copy in paperback. (From midnight PDT for some reason.)

Who controls your life? Dublin, Ireland. Cathal, Dean and Tomasz are three lads living in Rathgar, or to them Bedsit-land. They have good jobs, ok some of them do. All is well, or it was. City living gets harder as life throws the unexpected at them, including a find that will lead them to the centre of a gang war. Just how much control do they really have over their lives? And what secrets will come out?

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07T91FR93
or
US https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T91FR93
Rest of the world see your local Amazon, it will be available.

Set in Dublin over the course of a year it follows the lives of three lads who live in the leafy suburb of Rathgar. You can get a copy from Amazon or my website http://www.arthurhofn.home.blog.

“They walked in silence for the most part. Tomasz seemingly lost in a world of his own, and Dean himself, not feeling like saying much, assuming his partner felt the same. Dean generally walked in front of Tomasz on the right hand side of the road in case any other vehicles passed by; they did not.
The air remained wet and visibility was low. It was only because he knew there was a barren wilderness out there that Dean had any idea, there could have been anything lost in the mist and fog.
Occasionally they passed a fork in the road but they decided to keep on the main track, regardless of if the new road seemed to promise a higher elevation. Roads and tracks out here could suddenly disappear and they didn’t want to add getting lost to their heap of woes at the present.”

I lived in and around Rathgar for over a decade, it’s an important place to me. Sadly I no longer live in Dublin, but I was able to reconnect with it by writing this novel.

I hope you enjoy your free copy.

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Return To Rathgar

22 April 2024

My novel Framed Of Rathgar has been republished! Set In Dublin over the course of a year it follows the lives of three lads who live in the leafy suburb of Rathgar. I’m very pleased with it. You can get a copy from here.

‘I don’t understand what is wrong with the guitar,’ Tomasz commented as they walked away.
‘Normally nothing,’ answered Dean.
‘But the moment one’s brought out at a party,’ explained Cathal, ‘it sucks all the life out of it. Everyone has to sit there and politely listen, when instead all anyone wants to do is just kill themselves; or is that just me?’
‘You have strong feelings on this matter,’ replied Tomasz.
‘And the ego on him,’ Cathal continued, ‘does he think we’ve just all come to listen to his rendition of Black is the Colour or whatever?’
‘He does indeed have strong feelings on the matter.’

Earlier in the year I stated I had felt the need to redraft my existing novels, simply because I knew I could make them better. It’s always hard to do everything yourself, you’re too close to it all so see, therefore it’s natural to miss typos etc. However, I’ve now got some proper editing software and it’s a revelation! Therefore I’ve been slowly working my way through my books and making some changes and my second novel, Framed of Rathgar is now available once more, in better shape than ever and with an ever better cover, yet another thing I’m getting better at doing.

It’s already available, and I’ll do another free e-book day of this when I can and I’ll post about that then.

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Free Humanity! It’s Out Now!

30 January 2024

FREE on February 1st as a Kindle! Click here!

Middlestead is just a quiet, suburban English town, but when some residents form a local science fiction group, they discover they can manipulate their neighbours in ways they never realised. Soon plans are in place and something is brewing that will lead to disaster… and none of this is science fiction – it could actually happen… couldn’t it?

Have you ever just gone too far? Do you believe everything you are told?

Humanity – Out Now

To celebrate my reissue of Humanity I’m giving away Kindle versions of the novel on Thursday 1st February.

You can buy either a paperback (£8.99) or download for your Kindle (£2.75 or see above), or read as part of Kindle Unlimited. Click here.

‘That’s the point,’ said Tony. ‘We do all believe what we’re told by the radio, just as we’ve been talking about with weather reports. Each time they get it wrong, we complain as if it’s the first time it’s happened.’
‘Yeah, but,’ interrupted Allan, ‘the weather is different to an alien invasion. We don’t know how to predict the weather, the Met Office do. We also know that aliens are not about to invade.’

The 1990s are my decade, and so this is a book set during an era l love, it’s about science-fiction, a subject I love. I’m really proud of this novel and if you want to read something fun, dark and just that bit different, read Humanity!

As posted in my last blog, I’ve decided to re-edit my work as I believe I can improve on the content in various ways. If I’m going to ask for money for these things, they had better be as good as I can make them. One of the benefits of self-publishing is I can do this. What’s more, as a writer you never finish writing your stories. There’s always points that you think in hindsight could be changed, from small details no one else will notice to bits of continuity I missed.

Writing a whole novel is hard work and so at the beginning, during my first novel, Humanity, I had to learn a lot! And I’m still learning. However, during the process of doing this project at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I was really pleased with the improvements.

I was able to run the whole text through better spell-checkers and it found things which, although I’ve read the thing so many times, I’d completely missed! As a writer as good as you may be with English grammar and spelling, being so close to the text means your brain will tell you what you assume it says rather than what it does. I can’t afford an editor, and beta reading can be hard to organise, so it was up to me to do the whole lot, well me and the program I used.

It did make me smile when it decided it didn’t like turns of phrase I stubbornly refuse to amend, for example when a character “dashed hurriedly”, I love that even though half of it is redundant, it just sounds good to my eyes along with “cacophony of sound” (and reminds me of a Doctor Who story from the 1970s – The Deadly Assassin).

I’ve also redone the cover image and I’m so much more pleased with it than my first attempt at designing my own book covers. This is a book that even though it’s been over 20 years since I first wrote it, still has a lot to say about life today… in fact, I’d say it’s more relevant than ever. Happy reading.

‘What if a real scientific person calls up and says it’s all ridiculous?’ asked Allan.
‘Then another scientist will call and confirm everything we’ve just said,’ offered Scott. ‘They tend to do that.’

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Re-publishing My Novels

20 January 2024

Way back, when I decided to first self-publish a novel, I worked really hard and was proud of the results. This led to two more novels being self-published, before I undertook the behemoth that was Beck’s Game. In doing so, I’ve learnt so much, more than I realised I would at the beginning.

Because I self-publish, it means I have to do everything myself, and so from the vantage point I have from the here and now, means that when I look back on everything I have done, I feel I can make it much better. This has been in my head for most of last year and as I continued to pick up more skills in editing and proofreading I became anxious that my three novels needed to be reworked, simply because they were not as good as I was now capable of making them. If I’m going to charge people money for my work, and want them to devote hours of their life to reading it, not being as good as I was able to make them was not acceptable to me.

In addition, I’ve been trying to write a fourth novel (or whatever as Beck’s Game will end up in novel form at some point, possibly), but I’ve not had the same drive that I had before. I think the reason for this is that I need to scratch that itch and go back through my previous work with a fine toothcomb.

If my books had been published by conventional means, editing and proofing would have included the work of people more skilled than I, but it would also mean that I could not go back to them at a later date. Hence at the end of last year, I started this process with my first book, Humanity. I’ve now finished, it has been updated on Amazon and is available again, with a far better cover image! I’ll properly blog about this in a bit, however, I have also temporarily put my other two books on hold until I have completed what I want to achieve with them.

At some point later this year, I will also pull all of Beck’s Game from my site and reissue that! After 30,000 free downloads as a foundation, I feel I can go further with the possibilities of getting a readership for it (I might even make some money), but again I know I can now tidy the text in a way I couldn’t have before. In fact, it was all that work that has led me here, to pick up the skills, to know how to research and what to look for; that means, going forward, I can be even more proud of my books and have the full confidence that readers will enjoy them even more.

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