Olives - The Book Goes To Print

It's an odd feeling, there's a strange finality sending my novel Olives to the printers. I've sent dozens of magazines, yearbooks and other projects to print over the years, but nothing quite equals sending something so personal off to print. And a book's somehow different to a magazine - a 'literal' in a magazine is an annoyance, but usually something that you live with because it's transitory. I once printed a yearbook with the immortal words 'Midddle East Buyer's Guide' across two pages in 24 point print and it was two years before anyone noticed. I put this down at the time to the SEP field (first proposed by Douglas Adams, the SEP field renders objects invisible by the sheer scale of the incongruity they represent, therefore making them 'Somebody Else's Problem. In Adams' case, a spaceship that looked like an Italian bistro).

But it's different with a book. A book is graven, as it were, in stone. This particular book, Olives, has been edited to death. It's had structural edits, line edits, readers' edits, a professional edit and then I finally got my author's proof from Amazon's Createspace and, to my horror, managed to dot said proof with little red line corrections. Quite a lot of them. Sloppy writing, slapdash phrases, clunky bits. And a few honest to goodness literals in there, too. How did they get through?

But that's it, now. If you buy a copy and find a literal, I don't want to know. I'm done changing it. This is the finished product. This is my statement.

The Middle East edition of Olives launches at TwingeDXB - the first Dubai Urban Festival on the 10th December. It'll be in UAE bookshops from then onwards and I'm working to get it into Lebanese and Jordanian bookshops as soon as I possibly can after that.

If you can't wait, or if you're based outside the Middle East, you can get a print copy of Olives at amazon.com, linked for your clicking pleasure right here.

Olives Book Pricing Thinks

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How do you put a price on a book these days? Many authors are selling Kindle books for $0.99, many others $2.99 but mainstream publishers are putting prices at $5.99 and more - all of Iain Banks' books will cost you $8.02, for instance, while Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche will set you back a cool $16.05 - his backlist is set at $8.02.


Amazon pays publishers/authors either a 35% or a 70% share on sales. The 70% share only applies to books priced between $0.99 and $9.99. So the mad thing is that while you pay double for Deaver's Carte Blanche compared to his back list, the publisher only gets the same as selling it for $8.02. Go figure.


So how do I price Olives the novel wot I have writ? I decided on $5.99 for the e-book, equivalent to £3.99, which is the UK price (and €3.99 for Europe). I actually make less from a US sale than a UK or European one because of the withholding tax. How did I decide on that price? Purely on an average price of novels I scanned that were from published authors. I can't really say that I'm in this for the money, although it'll be nice to break even. But I'm not selling my work for less than the cost of a couple of pints or a t-shirt. It's worth more than that. And this is really where my pricing strategy is at.


Other writers have proper strategies. Poster child for Kindle success Amanda Hocking, for instance, sells each book in her trilogies for different prices with a low entry level, typically $0.99 rising to $2.99. Interestingly, now she's signed to a publisher, her new books seem to be priced at $8.99 - I've seen no sign of any great outcry about that yet, but would expect one to come!



Finding out book prices in the Yankee Dollar isn't as easy as it first appears, BTW. Amazon works out you're an Amazon UK customer and 'games' the dollar prices to make them equivalent to the Sterling prices - super sneaky, huh? This must at least in part be due to the appalling disparity in Kindle prices - the entry level Kindle in the USA costs $79, while in the UK it's an unjustifiable £89 ($133!!!).


The same is true of the international print edition of Olives- the amazon.com price for the printed book is $15.99, which is about equivalent to average book prices for this type of work as far as I can tell. With the Amazon edition of Olives the booky book, I make varying amounts of money from each copy sold depending on the platform its sold across. And again, I lose 30% to Uncle Sam. This is painful to me as a resident of the gloriously Tax Free UAE even though, as I say (and will keep saying until everyone believes me), it's not about the wonga.


The Middle East Olives book price is based on the Amazon price and again is based on an average price on the back of books, with slight reductions for Jordan and Lebanon based on anecdotal evidence of street prices for books there (I asked pals on Twitter, in other words).


And that's it. The whole brilliant Olives the book pricing strategy laid bare.

Permission To Print

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It always reminds me of the Black Adder sketch in which George is requesting 'Permission to speak' with increasing desperation, said permission denied by the wily Blackadder.

Permission to print is something I bet few writers have to seek on their road to publication. Here in the UAE, it's a must-have - no printing press here will touch a book that doesn't have a Permission, much as no garage will touch a crash repair without a police report.

The permission is granted by the National Media Council, which has to read the work. I was extraordinarily lucky in that the gentleman who manages the English language section of the Media Control Department was very struck with Olives - A Violent Romance and actually went off leave to go into the office and sign off the MS and grant me that all-important go-ahead. It's taken until now for the news to trickle up the Abu Dhabi highway to the NMC offices in Dubai so today I went off to pick up my Permission.

There's a fee of Dhs25 to pay, which I slid onto the desk of the Relevant Person. 'Ah, no, you have to have e-dirham.'

You're kidding me. For Dhs25? Oh yes, she said, handing me a gnarly-looking form with all sorts of requirements, labour cards, passport copies, authorisations, countersignatures by authorised persons. Worse, you have to go all the way to the Ministry of Finance in Bur Dubai to apply in person. For a Dhs25 fee? Yes, this is mandatory.

I left the NMC after vain protests, my head in a spin. I looked at the e-dirham website and found there was an easier way - you can pick up a pre-paid e-dirham card at any branch of a number of banks! Yippee!

A number of banks later, I realise this is total bunkum - the banks at the immigration department have these cards, one chap told me. Sure enough, they did. I dashed back to the NMC all eager and happy. They were having a reception for their colleagues from Abu Dhabi and the place was filled with plates of food and oudh was being burned - so much it set the fire alarms off.

Despite the carnival atmosphere, my own little firework display was to suffer the fate of micturation. She wouldn't take the e-dirham card. 'Only this card from Ministry of Finance I can take.' But it's the same card, look, e-dirham, it's precisely the same card, it just has a different picture and doesn't have my photo. 'No.'

That's when I lost it. I'd printed out two 280-page manuscripts and given them to her, I'd printed a third and sent it to Abu Dhabi, I'd been back and forth to the NMC and the Ministry of Youth and Culture. And now, at the end of it all, I was being made to jump through even more hoops for Dhs25!!! I asked for the mudhir. But he, of course, was closeted in a meeting room with the guests from Abu Dhabi. My gatekeeper managed to mask a look of triumph, but I knew it was there anyway. I left in a high old temper and dragged my way down to the Ministry of Finance.

Who were wonderful. Friendly, smiling and bright, young Buthaina had me sorted out in a few minutes, even transferring the balance from the pre-paid card I'd bought to my new photo ID card. It all certainly lightened the old mood as I set off once again to the NMC, my new e-dirham card sparkling in my pocket.

The long and the short of it all is that I have my Permission to Print in my sticky little fingers. So now I'm going to do just that: print Olives!

Rejection. An Author's Guide

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The very nice piece about me in The National last Sunday did  contain one or two teensy-weensy mistakettes, one of which was that Olives - A Violent Romance had been passed up by 250 agents and 12 publishers. That's not actually the case, that's my total rejection count, not just those notched up by Olives.

It's mostly my fault - for the first few years I pursued my writing goal in secret and flung myself repeatedly against the same wall, the Dunning Kruger Syndrome coursing through my veins. I'd send off batches of manuscripts, four or five at a time, convincing myself that all sorts of things were possible. That it was a numbers game. That agents further up the alphabet would be easier. That this edit was the one that'd make it through.

My first rejection was from an agent at big agency Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD to you), who had made a big noise online about how he loved to help new authors. I remember cursing and shaking my fist at him (from 4,000 miles away) as his form rejection showed me how little he, in fact, cared for us unsung geniuses.

I've already said several times that I now consider my first book, Space, was badly written. It was funny, but really lacked the technique to cut the mustard. I realised that in 2007 when I finally 'came out' and made contact with other writers. I was still 'shopping' Space then, hopeful that whatever quality had got it to the 'Editor's Desk' on Harper Collins' peer-review site Authonomy would be seen by someone who would take it on and get it a nice editor. It was not to be. I had finished Olives and started submitting it to agents before then, but Olives too had been notching up rejections from agents, some of whom had said odd things like 'The British public isn't interested in the Middle East' and 'We see enough bombs in the world without wanting to read about them.' I took these statements seriously at the time, but have since learned not to - literary agents and editors alike will cast around for the nearest glib phrase to decorate a rejection, these aren't thought-through guidance, but a brush-off. They do an awful lot of rejecting, they reserve their time and effort for the stuff that gets through.

So Olives must have racked up another 100-odd rejections (in batches, in between major editing runs and re-writes) before one request for a 'full read' came back with 'it isn't dramatic enough'. I stomped off with gritted teeth and the determination to give them dramatic if they wanted dramatic. Beirut, an insane, pumped up international spy thriller on crack, the result of that particular temper tantrum, was certainly dramatic.And it was also rejected time and again before a cheeky correspondence with the very kind agent Andrew Lownie resulted in my getting a professional reader to look at the manuscript - his advice taken, I resubmitted to Robin Wade and it was Robin who signed me up and took Beirut to 12 of London's Finest.

Who all rejected it.

It's certainly a remarkable tale - 250 rejections is quite a tally. Many of these are completely my own fault - for going it alone, for thinking this was a numbers game, for sticking with it and for beating my head repeatedly at the same wall. But a good number of them are the fault of an industry in its death throes. Agents are gatekeepers for publishers, filtering out anything they don't believe is a dead cert winner. Agents get paid 15% of authors' revenues and like nothing more than a nice, fat advance. If you can land a £100,000 advance once a month alongside some strong residuals, you're in the moolah, no? So there's a strong trend to support the well-trodden path, to be mainstream and not take risks. Added to that, the sheer number of hopefuls submitting to agents means manuscripts will be rejected for the most arbitrary reasons - bad formatting, an unconventional beginning, a difficult topic. And then there is the faddishness of safe publishing - if African Memoirs are this year's Big New Thing, then they're not going to be too open to a Sweeping Russian Drama. Sorry, Leo.

In the UK today, books are going straight to paperback and straight to discount - 3 for 2s and half price deals stacked up in supermarket bins as publishers try to find new ways to hit the popular pocket for money as they struggle with a public becoming ever more indifferent to full length linear narrative. People today are consuming so many streams of content and entertainment in such easily digestible media - and of course, e-readers are now part of that world, which rather confuses those used to thinking of the dynamics of publishing in terms of percentages of the hugely inefficient wodge of dead tree that is a booky book. E-book sales are going through the roof as the prices asked for by authors are going through the floor - publishing is finding it ever harder to map out its relevance in this scenario. And so only the very safest, most obvious decisions get made.

I'm sure someone in publishing will drop by and say, no, that's not the case - we just back quality. But I don't think the protest will carry much conviction these days.

So how can an author today handle rejection? First, remember it's not personal. Second, take any feedback as a hugely positive thing (remember, they're focusing on the stuff that gets through, so if they spare you a comment or two, they've done you a big favour). Third, don't let 'em pile up to 250. If you notch up just ten of those nasty little photocopied slips, assume the next ten won't be any different and get your ass off to www.kdp.com and sign up to Kindle Direct Publishing.

Because that, my dears, is where the party is.

So You've Written A Book. What's It About?

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The first question anyone asks you when they find out you've written a book is 'What's it about?'. This is a natural byproduct of human curiosity, but comes with a built-in conundrum. You have about fifteen seconds before their eyes glaze over and they suddenly remember they had to be somewhere else like really fast.

How do you sum up your 80,000 words of lovingly crafted prose in a few seconds? You can't just read them the blurb (you could maybe have it printed onto index cards to give to people. Hmmm, that might be an idea), but you need to find a way of getting the scheme across to them because if writing books does nothing else, it transforms us from thieves into salesmen.

Thieves? Yes, everyone wot writes books steals moments, traits, expressions and gestures from the people around them. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He's got a hangup about being called 'Gerry', it's always Gerald. He's spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn't wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. Believe it or not, the spy in Olives used to be a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books.

Salesman because all I want to do is sell you my book now. When you ask me what it's about, I'm going to take the chance to tell you enough to make you want to pick it up when you see it in the bookshop, beguiled by Naeema Zarif's stunning cover art, and take it to the cash counter. I want you to click on the book cover on the right, go to the the Kindle store and send the data flying over Whispernet to populate your reader.And I want you to be curious enough to click the 'Olives - A Violent Romance' link on my blog and find out more about it so you can be ready to buy it when it comes out in December. At least you know what's deep in my black little heart now, the next time we meet. And don't think it stops there, by the way. I want to talk you into reviewing it on Amazon and GoodReads too. I've become quite shameless.

And, as you ask, Olives is about a young British journalist called Paul Stokes who goes to Jordan to live and work who becomes attracted to a Jordanian girl. He's blackmailed into spying on her family by British intelligence, who claim the family's involved in funding terrorism and he has to try to work out quite who the good guys and bad guys are as a series of massive bombings go off around him that seem somehow tied to his movements. With each decision he makes, things just get worse until he finds he has to betray everyone around him to survive.

Crazy Apeshit National Day

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It's already clear the United Arab Emirates is going to go crazy apeshit over the 40th National Day. Flags are decorating many of the bigger houses around and the race is on to see who can drape the biggest flag possible on their building. Pennants are fluttering in the warm winter breeze, sparkling lights are festooning hotels, tower blocks and residences and there are a growing number of cars in evidence wrapped in stick-on National Day themed patterns.

It's not even happening for another ten days. UAE National Day takes place on the 2nd December each year, but this year's celebration of forty years of founding of the nation - as well as independence from ze Breets - is clearly going to be very big indeed. Cynics might say the government is pumping things up a little - a touch of patriotic loyalty is only to be encouraged in this year of the 'Arab Spring', but this will be my 18th National Day and I can assure you the nationalistic pride and annual displays of fealty by crowds of UAE Nationals parading, celebrating and generally hooning around going mad with silly string and klaxons are truly heartfelt.

It's going to be interesting to see massive crowds taking to the streets in an Arab country in support of the government and the nation - a unique sight in the Middle East this year, for sure - actually, come to think of it, probably in the world. People all over the place have been taking to the streets to protest governments, from Athens to Oakland we've been feted with images of police pepper-spraying and baton-charging their people. I have to confess at being struck by the incongruity of governments lambasting countries like Syria for attacking protesters at the same time as their own police are beating the crap out of citizens peacefully demonstrating just down the street.

However, even the civil defence folks here in the UAE are undoubtedly preparing for problems - last year's celebrations saw a great many people charging around high as a kite on the excitement of it all and there was even talk of banning the parades because of the risk to life and limb that such a widescale and fervent celebration represented.

It'll be interesting to see whether the fact that the vast majority of UAE Nationals are proud to be Emirati and proud of their leaders comes through in the international coverage of the event, or whether we'll be hearing phrases like 'government sponsored celebrations' that will attempt to give 'balance' to what people on the ground know to be a true, if rare, display of genuine love by a people for their young Arab nation.

(Yes, I know, I'm going soft. And yes, it's a non-writing post. Back to talking about books tomorrow, don't you worry)

Reading

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I'm giving my first ever reading tonight and although I do lots of speaking at conferences and other public stuff, it's still a daunting prospect. Luckily it's to a smallish audience - the Community Corner at the Sharjah International Book Fair is a physically compact area, although it punches way above its weight on Twitter and other social platforms, a constant stream of updates, information and news on the #SHJIBF are available from @ShjIntlBookFair.

It falls, by chance, on the day The National did a very generous piece on me and the journey to Olives - A Violent Romance. It's linked here if you really need to see any more of me than you already do.

We've sort of dubbed it "Two Worlds Collide" because I'll be sharing the session with self-published Emirati author Sultan Saeed Darmaki, whose book 'Under My Black Halo' is available at the Fair.

Selecting a reading is not easy. You want something that presents the book, but it also has to be a relatively short passage (people start dying after four minutes) that has a sort of beginning, middle and end - it can't be just any random lump of book.

I sort of settled on the 'rain dance' scene, purely because it's how the book started and it falls physically (for no good reason, it was just an accident) slap bang in the middle of the book. I started writing Olives after listening to George Winston's 'Winter into Spring' made me think of a girl dancing in the rain - Winston's stunning piano compositions have a trademark 'double tap' that is quite distinctive and the percussive waves of 'February Sea' and 'Rain' are redolent.

I woke up the next morning with Olives in my head - all of it, laid out like ley lines. I have since changed a great deal of that original manuscript, but the central idea of Olives remains as it was that morning, George's arpeggios echoing in my mind...

"Two Worlds Collide, an evening with Sultan Darmaki and Alexander McNabb" takes place from 7pm tonight at the Community Corner at The Sharjah International Book Fair.

I'm A US Taxpayer

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Of the many strange pathways that this writing thing has opened up, perhaps the strangest is that I am to become a US taxpayer. 30% of any money I make from selling the print copies of Olives on Amazon.com will be paid as a 'withholding tax' to Uncle Sam, because I am resident in the UAE.

As a UK resident, I could have filled in a mountain of forms and qualified for the 0% tax rate that applies across both countries,  but then I would of course be liable for UK income tax.

I must admit, the very concept took quite a lot of sinking in. I'm not terribly used to this tax malarkey, living as I do in the tax-free paradise that is the UAE. And I'm not sure I will always approve of how the US government intends to spend my money. But there's little I can do - the tax applies to any monies made on the US mainland.

Meanwhile I've found out that although Amazon.com will sell my book, Barnes and Noble won't. To use the company's PubIt! service (to upload books to B&N), you must have a valid US bank account, credit card, tax ID and address. That's pretty comprehensive, then.

I am increasingly furstrated at how US-centric this online bookery business is - particularly at Amazon.com refusing to sell copies of my book to people logging in from the Middle East. It's something of a puzzle to me as I specifically opened up international rights to the book when I uploaded it - I had always assumed that Amazon won't sell to the region because publishers haven't granted rights, but in my case I have specifically allowed for international rights so there's no earthly reason, other than an arbitrary restriction imposed by Amazon, why the book shouldn't be available to Middle East readers.

How To Self-Publish In The UAE

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Here's your own guide to the process, just in case you decide to write and self publish your own book. And before you start with all yer 'yeah, right, like that's going to happen', don't write the idea off. It can all be quite cathartic, believe me.

1) Write a book.
This is generally considered to be a good first step in self publishing. Of course, if you're self publishing a picture book, or a collection of your watercolours you'll have to approach things slightly differently but I'm going to concentrate on the novel form for now.

2) Get a professional editor. 
I use Robb Grindstaff. I've always heard good things about UK based Bubblecow but have never used 'em. Update. Worked with them and they're good/recommended. You need a professional edit for two things - a structural edit and a line edit. The structural edit looks at your story and how you've put it together, aiming to cut redundancies, tighten things up and keep you basically on the straight and narrow. The line edit gets rid of all those stupid little errors that litter every manuscript, no matter how hard you search for 'em. People like Robb are born with strange compound eyes that pick these up in a way we normal mortals can't aspire to emulate.

3) Make sure you understand what you've written.
That sounds daft, doesn't it? But you're going to have to sell the thing all by yourself, so you'd better have properly scoped out the subjects, topics and characters of your book and sifted through them to find the best angles to promote, the things that are going to engage people. You'll need a strong blurb, too. More posts on this later, I'm sure. (Are you guys okay with all this book talk or are you longing for me to go back to whining about HSBC and stuff?)

4) Decide on your platforms.
It's essential to be on Amazon's Kindle and for that I used Kindle Direct Publishing. To support other e-reader formats, I went to Smashwords. I also put together an edition using CreateSpace, which lets me offer a printed book through Amazon.com. Of course, e-reader adoption in the Middle East is still low because Amazon doesn't sell either Kindle or content to the region, which really doesn't help us writers, I can tell you. Because of this, you're going to have to print your own booky book for the Middle East market.

5) Apply for permission to print from the National Media Council.
In order to print a booky book in the UAE, you have to have permission. Importing a book is different and requires a different level of permission, which any distributor will sort out. But printing one here means you have to get this permission. How? By going to the NMC in Qusais (behind the Ministry of Culture building) and lodging two full printouts of the MS. One of these will stay in Dubai as a reference copy and one will go to Abu Dhabi to the Media Control Department, where it will be read and approved or not for production in the UAE.

6) Realise that Dubai is going to take its sweet time over this and send another copy direct to Abu Dhabi yourself by bike.
I am so very glad I did this.

7) Obtain your permission to print
I got mine in an unreasonably short time thanks to a very nice man at the NMC taking pity on me and accelerating his reading of my book. It helped that he loved the book, which delighted me more than you could possibly imagine.

Update here - getting the actual document was a tad harder than getting the verbal go ahead!

8) Get an ISBN
This is actually a doddle. You nip down to the Ministry of Youth and Culture in Qusais and give 'em Dhs200 and a filled out form that gives the title of your book and some other details and they send you a fax (A fax! How quaint!) with your UAE ISBN number. By the way, ISBN numbers mean very little, they're a stock code and do not have any relationship to copyright or any such stuff. You need one to sell books, but that's as far as it goes.

9) Go mad trying to find novel paper, then give up and go to Lebanon.
By now you will have already got a quote from a printing press - all they need to actually print the thing now is that little docket. It's about here you'll finally make the decision that you don't want to use the 'wood-free' paper all the UAE's printers want to print your book on, but to actually use real book paper. It's actually called, wait for it, 'novel paper' and is a very bulky, lightweight paper. Pick up a book by the spine and it will tend not to 'flop', while a book printed on wood-free stock will.

Nobody's got it. It's as if nobody in the UAE has ever published a 'real' book, just books printed on copier paper. I'm not having it - I'm going to all the trouble and expense of producing my own book, it had better look like a book, feel like a book and, when you pinch its ear, squeal 'I'm a book!'.

So one goes to Lebanon - or Egypt, or Jordan. People write and publish books there all the time, so you'll find printers and novel paper abounds. Which means you never needed that permission to print at all, as now you're importing a book. Bang head repeatedly against brick wall and do Quasimodo impersonations.

10) Delay the UAE edition launch to the TwingeDXB Urban Festival, taking place on the 10th December 2011, where you're doing a reading and stuff.
I could have made it in time for the Sharjah International Book Festival if I'd settled for the other paper, but I decided to delay instead and get it done properly. So we're launching the online edition at Sharjah, with an open mic session where I and self-published Emirati author Sultan Darmaki will be doing readings and Q&A and stuff. That takes place this Sunday, the 20th November, at the SHJIBF 'Community Corner'.

On Kindles and Olives

Cover via Amazon

When I first started out on this whole book writing thing, to my ever-lasting regret, I kept very quiet indeed about what I was up to. It was to take five years before I told anyone I knew that I had written a book, let alone that I was submitting it to agents in the hope of finding a publisher.

Why? Simply because I have always loathed people who announce they're writing a book. If it ain't in print, it ain't worth a damn, was the way I thought at the time.

Although I had shared the MS of Space with a couple of close friends by the time I found authonomy, I had stuck to my guns. When I finally let the cat out of the bag, I was shocked by people's kindness and supportive response.

Not as shocked as I was by the goodwill and support from everyone around me yesterday. The day started on a high when I heard from the National Media Council that I have the go-ahead to print Olives in the UAE. The team at the NMC have been wonderful - quite the opposite of my experiences of their predecessor, the wittily named Ministry of Information.To come out of that process having won fans for the book was a complete and welcome surprise.

This means I can provide a Middle East edition of the book for all those here who can't easily get on Amazon (because Amazon doesn't support the Middle East). I have distribution sorted out for the UAE, Jordan and Lebanon. All I need do now is finish my quest for a printing press that has stocks of the right grade of paper (booky books are printed on a particular type of lightweight but bulky paper) and I'm on track to be in the shops for the beginning of December. My first job this morning is to go to the NMC building in Qusais and get me an ISBN number for the UAE edition.

But yesterday really hit its stride when I tweeted the link to the Kindle Edition of Olives. My heartfelt thanks to everyone for the messages, congrats and the like. Putting the book on Kindle was the first thing I did when I made the decision to self publish - there's a natty piece of freeware called MobiPocket Creator, which I've posted about before, that renders the process pretty simple. You then sign into Amazon as an author and select your preferred distribution channels and then it's pretty much hey presto!

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (UK)

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (US)

Now all I need to do is sign off my CreateSpace proof (winging its way to me thanks to Aramex' natty Shop and Ship service) to get the print edition up on Amazon and pack the UAE edition off to the printers.

I cannot begin to tell you how liberating it feels to finally get my work out there. I can't say I regret not doing it sooner, because I think we all have to take our own paths to things. But I'm very glad I've done it now.