An Intriguing Title
The instinct to write a book based on the theme ‘How to talk to your robot dog‘ was in retrospect well placed. The central themes included Artificial Intelligence and canine cognitive potential. After all, why base the persona of an Artificial Intelligence creation on an inconstant human persona that’s never that transparent? Why not choose a canine model based on evidence of such strong and constructive links that can be established between humans and the canine fraternity? This was indeed what was undertaken in writing the book. The actual idea for such a book arose – mid sentence – when discussing such issues with my wife.
An enabling factor behind such a venture was the route to publishing made possible by KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing. No need to write to 50 publishers or literary agents to inform them of your marvellous book idea and receive 50 rejections. Just write a very large Word file and get on with it. Initially a template for a paperback file was structured and then this was modified for a Kindle edition.
The cover illustration showing a hopeful digital dog was created by my daughter who includes within her batch of skills that of a graphics designer. I used the Adobe Illustrator package to ‘shoehorn’ it into the correct formats for paperback and Kindle.
It is indeed true that I published the title – but then all the activities of marketing and promotion such as press releases, social media presence, copy printing and distribution and the like were entirely absent by the way of this route of self publishing. Amazon itself offers advertising though I have little experience of using this mechanism for promoting titles in KDP publishing. I was hoping that my specific title would spontaneously publish itself where a small core of interest would be established, grow organically and be sustained. This, however, was being hopeful in the extreme.
I have subsequently taken extracts from the text of the book ‘How to talk to your robot dog’ and published these as posts within various groups within Facebook. These posts being taken from my WordPress site – a subject also worthy of some introspection. Generally the posts are well received – in particular those relating to the dog Judy of World War II fame and also the subject of the interest shown by Sigmund Freud in dogs.
I would indicate, however, that the exercise of KDP publishing was been generally constructive. Writing around 55,000 words is in itself some kind of achievement. It provides, also, a mechanism for publishing ad hoc material- such as the instruction manuals for two board games WANCHANCY and GAME OF PRIMES that I have developed. Such manuals can be produced for less than the cost of a high street coffee.
It would seem, therefore, that publishing is a long term process where it is prudent to be engaged in both writing content and also be on the lookout for appropriate publishing channels. via social media.
