I think I spoke too soon. Dai the dragon caused me a little trouble and then “poof” everything has gone wrong. The little trouble was that although I had successfully changed the front cover on Once Upon A Time e-book version, I could not get it to work on the paperback. Two phone calls to the States later and I had to get my new designer to tweak it a bit. That worked so the paperback is sorted.

However, Laura, said designer, now has a full time job and cannot do any more designs for me. That leaves me in a hole because Pratt, Pratt, Wally and Pratt Investigate (you know, Trouble Cross without the other bits) has no cover so I cannot drop it into the jungle.

I have found it a tricky balance between writing my new novel and trying to make the most out of my existing body of work. Obviously this website and these alleged blogs are one attempt. I was also in touch with a marketing company – Publishing Push – who I first came across some years ago. They seem to have expanded quite a bit and now take a hand in publishing as well as marketing. It was the latter I was interested in though and here I was dealt another nasty surprise. They can only market Once Upon A Week because Rewind and Trouble Cross were initially published in 2012. Part of their marketing strategy is to obtain reviews and no one will review something that old apparently. The only way would be to republish both.

Covers again are an issue. Technically, now I have added T is for… and Doctor, Oh No!, I have five books in the jungle and four of those have paperbacks too. PP tell me that only the covers for Rewind and Once Upon A Week work and the others all need replacing.

To republish Rewind and Trouble Cross and to remarket these two and Once Upon A Week would total over £5,000. It is too much of a risk bearing in mind I am already £10,000 in the hole with my writing exploits so far. To replace any covers would cost £300 each too.

And if all that is not bad enough, well just don’t talk to me about football. The new season has started and has there ever been such a load of tripe as has been served up at Old Trafford. At first it was because we were a week behind – so were City, Villa and Burnley and two of those teams won their first match back. Then it is being blamed on lack of transfer activity which is nonsense because that squad should be good enough. Yes, there should have been two red cards in the Spurs game for that incident so it would have been 10 a side but even before then we looked so very, very poor. I am ashamed to wear my shirt on matchdays.

All in all then not a good month. Roll on Lockdown Christmas!