Once upon a time, a girl named Wilma Mayhem was chatting with her friend, Princess Twinkle Toes. She boldly told her that one day she was going to publish a book. The Princess laughed and told Wilma she believed she would achieve this goal one day.
Wilma thought that was a foolish thing to say, with thoughts running through her head: “I cannot possibly draft a book. I am not creative enough, and I struggle to write a small assignment of 2000 words. This will never happen. Bury the idea as another one of your fanciful ideas and do not bring up the subject again.”
Then, of course, the pandemic arrived on the doorstep. What should Wilma do? Well, her partner, Mr. G, had talked her into blogging, and she joined Iain Mckinnon’s writing classes to improve her style. While blogging, she was invited into the world of assistive technology. Wilma also decided to join the Open University. What was a better thing to blog about than the struggles with learning to study and use assistive technology to help her on her journey?
While going into her second year, an international artist contacted Wilma and wanted to chat. It was a strange time with everyone being stuck at home, so Wilma was polite and started chatting with this person. Then the same international artist contacted her on another social media platform, claiming that they were authentic! Wilma should have blocked the person she was talking to, as they were a scammer! Curious, Wilma decided to see the differences between the people she was talking with online.
As a student Criminologist, she had known from her first year that tattoos were important to individuals, and everyone had a story to tell about their tattoos. She set about testing this as one of her theories by asking them to explain their tattoos. This was when she found out that the person, she was talking with was false; they would say, “I love tattoos,” or “I will tell you later.” Wilma kept up her social science experiments. She copied and pasted them from Google Chat, put Dragon on, and dictated the conversations from her phone from WhatsApp and Telegram into Word documents. She decided to turn them into short funny stories and publish them in a book.
Everyone had said the best way forward was to self-publish. Wilma decided to investigate this and find out the costs for her project. She tried getting grants to aid her project with no luck, but what an interesting project. After asking for some advice, Wilma opened a crowd funder to raise the cash to go forward. Bolboa had approached Wilma with a good package; however, it was expensive. They kept phoning her with the hard sale, but she still could not afford it. She also tried getting sponsorship from assistive technology companies she loved promoting; the pigeon is lost with the answer!
Wilma settled with going for Amazon self-publishing, which she could afford. She had the script ready to go for the book. She uploaded this and was blown away by the lovely comments that came back from the team she was working alongside. Then the dyslexic issues came into play, such as proofreading; this was incorrect and needed sorting, which needed money. As Wilma did not have any, she asked for some advice, and ChatGPT came to the rescue.
Then there were multiple platforms to advertise your book on across the world. Then there is marketing your book across social media, setting up accounts to track how well your book is selling, and people getting in touch saying they advertise on your behalf for a cost. It is coming up for Christmas, an exciting time to start selling your book globally. Eventually, Wilma does everything, and the book is on sale on Amazon. People saying what an amazing achievement. Well done, exhausted, she slumps over the computer thinking, “I hope I have set everything up properly.” Then Amazon publishing, friends, and family get in touch saying, “Now when are you starting the sequel? OH CRIKEY!”