…the day it rained money… and we couldn’t laugh…

Seumas Gallacher provided us with a wonderful and funny memory. Thanks for the giggle, Master Gallacher!! We appreciate you let us have a peek into your past.

Seumas Gallacher

…I s’pose yeez would’ve had to be there… but I’ve been giggling away all morning at the memory of it… come with me, back more than 50 years… picture the young Master Gallacher, newly minted apprentice at the redoubtable Clydesdale & North of Scotland Bank Limited, Govan Cross Branch in Docklands Govan in Glasgow… the freshest Trainee Master of the Financial Universe... the personnel in the branch were great guys… the Manager, Mister George Galloway, the epitome of the pin-striped Scottish Banker, defender of his clients’ pennies and bawbees… bowler hat and constantly furled umbrella as much a part of his uniform as his distinguished manner of addressing staff and customers alike… his number two, nominally adorned with the title, the Bank Accountant,MisterWilliam (call me Bill) Melvin, was a man with the detachable banker’s daily stiff white collar on his immaculately white shirts and…

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…ssshhhh… the NON-secret of Author online self-promotion…

Seumas Gallacher has published a guide to successful author self promotion. It can be bought on Amazon. Thank you very much Seumas – and yes… I got it.

Seumas Gallacher

…as much as we storytellers dabble in fiction, fantasy and folklore, finding the elusive silver bullet that drives our masterpieces to the top of the bestseller lists is unlikely to be appear under our pillow like some equivalent of the tooth fairy’s offerings… for almost a decade now (my, how time flies when ye’re enjoying yerself, eh, Mabel?), I’ve derived more pleasure than ever I could have imagined by becoming a writer… Lady Luck has bestowed her blessings liberally in the sales/downloads column, aggregating more than 100,ooo copies across all my Jack Calder crime thriller titles, and my wee guide to using the SOSYAL NETWORKS as a scribbler, SELF-PUBLISHING STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL SALES…

http://amzn.to/2iIHwmR

…I’m often asked what’s the secret to the marketing and promotion WURK that goes into being a modern scribe… okay, I’ll spill the beans… ssshhhh… there is NO secret... but for what it’s worth…

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…when minor characters loom large in an Author’s narratives…

Seumas Gallacher shares some of his writing experience. Thank you, Seumas. You’re great. We love to learn how it’s done!

Seumas Gallacher

…there’s no doubt major characters in a novel carry the storyline to the reader-at-large… the confluence of their highs and lows (in the scribblers’ jargon – ‘the crisis – the solution – the next crisis – the subsequent solution, ad inforeverum’) are the meat and drink of most dramas… but, right here, I must ‘fess up… the delight in having lesser lights intrude is important to this ol’ Jurassic writer… it’s more than just the scrivener’s equivalent of wallpaper music in the  elevator, or the colour of the restaurant’s backdrop… the insertion of wee players at pivotal points in my books relieves the main characters from having do everything themselves to move the chapters along… more often as not, they can also provide much needed humorous interludes in an otherwise heavy-duty regimen… Master Billy Shakespeare was an expert in doing so… tragi-comedies are built on such techniques… but I…

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…Author, Frank Westworth reveals some of the dangers lurking for we scribblers…

Seumas Gallacher publishes a guest post, written by wise, unique and gifted author Frank Westworth. Thank you Seumas and Frank to provide us with this article of warning!

Seumas Gallacher

…any seriousHarley-Davidson rider, who also writes great books and gets playing blues guitar, automatically commands my attention… Author friend, Frank Westworth, is no exception in that regard… have a read of his WURDS of wisdom…

Unsafe Spaces

Frank Westworth’s new crime-thriller, ‘The Redemption Of Charm’, arrives at the end of March. In the meanwhile he ponders a topical peril of political correctness…

Writers have a problem. Readers. OK, so writers have many problems, among them … readers. What do readers do which is a problem for writers? Surely they’ve paid their sixpence, bought the book, and everyone is happy. What can possibly go wrong? What goes wrong is that readers sometimes read the books they’ve bought. No no, do not doubt me, for I know this to be true. It gets worse. After reading some of the book some readers write to the writer – to the author…

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…99,999… 100,000… yup, 100,000, Mabel !!!… 100,001… 100,002…

Seumas Gallacher has informed us about his MAGIC NUMBER! Please, celebrate his successful 100,000th sale! Congrats, Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

 

…there are many ‘firsts’ that occur in most of our lives… f’rinstance I remember my first kiss… it was more of a slobbery lick from my twice-the-size-of-me pet dog when I was about 5 years old… and it turned me off the idea of canine romance forever, I can tell yeez… my first day at primary school… as part of a howling choir of sobbing infants who wailed in concert at the mass departure of our mothers at the school gates…

…my first football team goal at the age of six… the ball hammered home from all of seven inches, attended by the triumphant raised arm a la Denis Law as I wheeled to trot back to the centre circle restart… my first monthly pay packet as a green fifteen year old Trainee Master of the Financial Universe at the noble Clydesdale & North of Scotland…

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…art covers for Authors?…there was a time, a time there was…

Thank you, Seumas Gallacher, for your blog post about book covers and art work! We’re always grateful to read your opinion about things in the writing world. It’s helpful!

Seumas Gallacher

…it seems not such an age ago that my frequency of trips from where I live in the Middle East to London was dictated by the need to stock up with physical copy books from Waterstones in Piccadilly… I was what’s prob’ly known as a ‘weight purchaser’…I bought books by the kilo… of course, like most of us, I have my favourite writers, but their offerings weren’t the only tomes to occupy the sales basket… getting ‘lost’ in a huge bookstore is an indulgence… and one that I savour… notwithstanding my attraction to the Kindle products too, which I’ve also come to know and LUV… but back to the sorties in deepest Waterstones country… much gets bandied about as to ‘yeez can’t tell a book by its cover’… that may well be the case in some instances, but here I have to partially disagree, on at…

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…where have all the bank services gone?… long time passing…

Seumas Gallacher on bank services… where he’s right, he’s right! Thanks for this phenomenal, humorous and true blog post, Seumas!

Seumas Gallacher

…’fess up time… in a different life, this ol’ Scots Jurassic scribbler was once a banker… a Trainee Master of the Financial Universe… I skulked around as a manager of treasury departments and headed foreign exchange dealing rooms for a coupla decades and threw in some service for another coupla decades as a customer-facing senior executive as well… however, it seems so loooooong ago, now, Mabel… and sadly, as most of us have also experienced, things ain’t what they used to be… I don’t wanna sound like the old generation ‘we did it so much better’ kinda thing, but let’s consider a few issues here: first up, there’s a permanent place in a burning hell awaiting the genius who devised the ‘customer call centre’ concept, where yer first response is a mechanical voice menu that takes yeez on a ten-minute (minimum) merry-go-round, waiting to talk to a ‘real’ person……

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