Hello - Deborah Durbin

Hello and thank you to the team for inviting me to contribute to the Kindle Authors UK site.

My name’s Deborah Durbin and I’m a Kindle Author.

In fact I’m also a traditional published author of 11 non-fiction books, ghost writer of three other books and my day job is that of a journalist and columnist for various glossy magazines and national newspapers.

I discovered the Kindle almost two years ago when I decided to buy four Kindle readers for Christmas presents for some members of my family and decided to keep one for myself – that particular family member didn’t really deserve it anyway:) and it was shortly after using the Kindle that I received an email from Amazon telling me that I too could publish my words on to Kindle for the world to see.

Having had a great deal of success with non-fiction books, I didn’t have quite the same amount of success with my fictional work – I’d manage to get to the part where you secure an agent, but after that, I couldn’t quite get that all elusive three-book-fiction-deal.

My novel titled, Oh Great, Now I Can Hear Dead People, is a story about Sam, a young woman who out of desperation to pay her rent takes a job as a psychic reader for a hotline to the heavens, despite not having a psychic bone in her body and soon discovers the voices she can hear in her head are in fact real dead people. As it was just gathering metaphorical dust in my My Documents, I thought why not just test the market and see if anyone would be willing to part with their hard-earned cash to read it?

And part they did! (thank you Mum!) I can officially say that I’m a best-selling novelist, (albeit Amazon’s supernatural category) – I have been listed in the best-seller tables since February this year when I put my book on Kindle Direct Publishing and I’ve already made more in royalties than some of my traditionally published books in the same time frame.

I recently added another title to KDP – So You Want to be a Freelance Writer which draws on my 14 years experience of working as a freelance writer (including securing non-fiction book deals with publishers) and whilst this particular book is not selling as fast as the novel, it is still selling.

Do I regret not holding out until the recession improved and a mainstream publisher beats a path to my door to buy the rights to my novel? Not at all. At the end of the day, publishing is a business and women’s fiction is one of the hardest genres to break in to. Being a trained journalist you learn quickly not to be precious about your work and the same goes for any writing that you want to get paid for.

Amazon has created a ready-made, world-wide market that anyone can utilise and at the end of the day it’s the readers that will decide whether a book is good or not.

Will I publish with KDP again? Probably, yes. Considering I do no promoting of my two Kindle books whatsoever, they are selling and selling well. I personally think that authors are biting back and realising that with a little bit of know how, they can cut out the middle man and publish their own books and if they are prepared to invest time in promoting them, they can make a lot of money and gain a loyal readership.

If you want to look me up my website is http://www.deborahdurbin.com/ or you can find both my novel and writing book here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Now-Hear-Dead-People/dp/B004PLMIGE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM&qid=1301906200&sr=1-1

You can even by a copy if you feel inclined;)