How I published two ebooks and learnt to love Kindle.

It’s not that I have technophobia. No, really, I don’t. Honest. (Offspring, family and friends, please stop laughing so much. You’ll hurt yourselves.)

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It’s just that technology seems to have me-phobia. For instance, doctors now have clever little machines that take your blood pressure so they don’t have to use their stethoscope. Alas, whenever nurses try to use one on me, it stops working. When an actual doctor uses an old-fashioned sphigmomanometer, no problem. Anything with electronics and a silicon chip – it goes crazy, going from off-the-scale to dead and frightening people.

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All three of my childbirths were marked by machines going wrong, stopping or (on one occasion) bursting into flames. When I was having my third child I warned the nurses not to bring any machine they valued anywhere near me.

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“Yes dear,” they said kindly, “Don’t worry, it’s the latest thing.”

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And they wheeled in the great-grandfather of the dinky things nurses use now for blood pressure. The nurse attached the cuff to my arm and I said, “You really don’t want to do that.”

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“Yes dear,” she said, “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt,” and she switched it on and turned to chat to her friend.

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I swear I did nothing at all except lie there – and watch with interest as the cuff inflated… and  inflated… and inflated… Just as my arm went blue and the cuff looked like a balloon I coughed and said,

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“Is it supposed to do that?”

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The nurse turned to tell me it was fine, caught sight of the cuff on the verge of explosion, said a very un-nursely word and switched it off. Then she gave me a fishy look, took the cuff off and wheeled the thing away.

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I once talked about this to the intensive care nurse girlfriend of one of my husband’s colleagues. “Yes,” she said, “There are people like you. They’re really ill, they’re unconscious and full of drip lines and still the machines keep going wrong. You’d better not get into any bad car crashes because you’d probably die in ITU.” My husband found this hilarious.

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It’s a fact that my computer goes wrong when I’m in a bad mood (no, the mood comes first!) and my fancy digital cameras never work properly. So you’ll understand why I don’t yet own a Kindle or any kind of ereader. They’re apparently quite sensitive to static electricity.

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However. HOWEVER. With a friend - known as The Publisher – I have just started a tiny publishing company called Climbing Tree Books and we have published two short books of mine as ebooks. Tremulously, I downloaded the Kindle app for PC (so far so good) and looked at my two books…

“How to Beat Your Son at Computer Games.”

and

“Writeritis – the Novel Writing Bug.”

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Oh wow! I’m so happy. At last I can write and publish without having to deal with corporate publishers and especially not corporate publishers’ legal and publicity departments. We can market-test some splendid wheeze we have (like “How to Beat Your Son at Computer Games”  itself) with only the cost of a cover design and the work of writing the book. The Publisher is a brilliant editor so he does the editing and comes up with catchy titles and chapter headings and blurbs. I’m now waiting impatiently for him to finish rewriting and editing his extremely scary crime novel and upload it so I can read it again.

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I haven’t actually “done” an ebook myself yet and The Publisher feels it would be a better use of my time just to write things. Can he be afraid that I’ll crash the Amazon Kindle site? Surely not.