First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance
Lorna Page has bought a five bedroom house for £310,000 after securing a significant advance for her thriller.
Now she plans to move in a number of friends, but faces the dilemma of deciding which ones to accept, after receiving "dozens" of offers.
The independent nonagenarian widow said she simply wanted to help her friends enjoy the last few years of their lives in a sociable environment.
She has pledged to use all of her money from the proceeds of A Dangerous Weakness to assist her friends.
Mrs Page wrote the book in her one bedroom Surrey flat but has since swapped it for the spacious house in the pretty village of Weare Giffard, near her birthplace of Bideford, north Devon.
And get this:
Released by AuthorHouse publishers last month, A Dangerous Weakness follows a woman who becomes involved in a bitter power struggle after receiving an apparently innocent invitation by an old school friend to spend Christmas at her Swiss lodge.
Mrs Page wrote the book three years ago but made no attempt to get it published until her daughter-in-law found the manuscript and convinced her to send it to a publishing house.
She said: "I should have done it before but it got put away in a suitcase and forgotten about until my daughter-in-law found it and said it should be published."
Mrs Page said she had written throughout her life, but that A Dangerous Weakness was her first published novel.
"I've always written. I started as soon as I could hold a pencil - fairy stories, poetry, short stories, magazine articles. It seems I've been writing for a hundred years."
Emphasis added by me.
Sharp woman with a sharp wit too.
But really, what an enormous lost opportunity this is!
This is getting huge international play yet all I can think of are all the lost sales!
I immediately went to the Amazon Kindle Store, eReader, and the eBook Store from Sony -- and the book is not there!
How many people reading that item immediately thought, "I've got to read that?" How many of them will even remember the book tomorrow?
What could have easily generated six-figure impulse buys for an ebook ... has been wasted!
Now do you see why I say the future of writers must be in their own hands?
2 comments:
I confess I'm a little puzzled by the details of this news story. The book is published by authorhouse.co.uk: that is, self-published. Self-publishing firms don't give advances. And as you say, the book appears virtually unfindable: how has it sold enough copies to recover the investment and, as the newspaper reports say, make significant proceeds?
Thanks for that tip!
I'm following-up: First-Time Author Article Is Suspect
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