The first hero on my list and the newest addition

I don’t know why, but I have a yen to talk about heroes, so here I am.

My first ever hero was Doc Emmett Brown from the Back to the Future films. I was a strange teenager – everyone else went to the cinema with me to watch Michael J. Fox whilst I only went for the Doc. I adored him (I still do actually) and one of things he says in the film stuck with me: “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Characters can be powerful people. (I said ‘things’ first but my cast of characters protested so loudly I had to correct it!) Who would’ve thought that a very useful part of my personality would have been moulded and inspired by a supporting character in an 80’s Hollywood film trilogy.

(The first man I ever had a crush on was Indiana Jones, but he wasn’t my hero, per se. I didn’t want to be like him exactly, I just wanted to cuddle him – it was all very innocent.)

So I could talk about what a hero is, but I’m not going to. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. I have several heroes, each one meaning something different to me. So let’s not go there. Instead, I’d like to tell you about one of my heroes right now, if you’re happy to listen.

This is my most recently acquired hero actually, I only found him at the end of last year.

If there is such a thing as synchronicity, this was a good example of it.

So, I had spent an evening ‘researching’ self-publishing options. It was desperately frustrating, as I have moaned about here and I felt lost and confused by the differing opinions. I have no idea what possessed me to do it, but I went to YouTube (which I do very rarely) and searched for self-publishing.

That’s where I first met my hero. He’s called Darryl Sloan, and he posted up a video containing his thoughts on self-publishing. I watched. I liked him and what he said about it. I loved his accent too! So I went looking for his site. I found out about his self-published book, Chion. I read an excerpt. I bought it.

I bought my first self-published book.

People considering self-publishing are often asked by the doubters “So when was the last time you bought a self-published book?” If the question is met by a silence, it’s transmuted into a spear: “So what makes you think you could sell your self-published book if not even you have bought one?”

Now I have my shield for that one! I can happily reply “December, 2008. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it in an afternoon and completely escaped. The story carried me along, I liked the characters and felt satisfied at the end. That’s more than I can say for some books sold to me as ‘bestsellers’.” Nuh-nuh.

So this is why Mr Sloan is the latest addition to my stable of heroes:

He went and did what I want to do.

He did it very well.

He is very positive about the experience, and frank about the reasons behind his decisions.

But most of all: he didn’t let me down when I bought his book. It is just as high quality in production values as any bought from a traditional publisher, and I enjoyed it.

When I bought it, I felt like I was taking a higher risk than normal. I worried about whether it would be “good” – the ghosts of those negative industry bloggers were close at hand. Now I realise that it was the same kind of risk I take when buying any book. No book is perfect for me, I’m a fussy bugger. There is always something that annoys me, or dissatisfies me, sometimes it’s massive and destroys any chance of me loving the book. Sometimes it’s small enough for me to shrug and carry on. Yes, I shrugged a couple of times during Chion, but hell, two other books I started last year (and still haven’t finished) are very commercially successful but I may never go back to them. They didn’t grab me like Chion did. They didn’t carry me elsewhere. They haven’t changed the way I’ll look at snow for a long time to come. But this self-publisher did all that for me.

So that is why he is one of my heroes.

P.S. He has put the video blog on his site, you can see it here.

Tagged as: Heroes, self-publishing