A different way to publish
I am enjoying writing but I do not enjoy going through the technical and financial intricacies of commercial publishing. Many publishing companies, except for the really big and important ones, are in the business of selling services (editing, lay-out, cover design and printing) to aspiring authors rather than marketing good books, so I decided to “break the rules” of the market – perhaps “before I properly understood them”.
Below you find a crime novel set in a UN context. Needless to say that it is complete fiction. It comes in a PDF format that you can download, print out, read it on screen or put on your e-reader. I tried the e-reader option on a famous brand and one less famous brand and it worked on both.
You could do this for free.
However, donations to the Geneva based 1 % for Development Fund – of say five Euro- are welcome. The Fund finances small development projects and was founded 40 years ago by a few dozen UN staff in Geneva. The idea of the Fund was and still is: If governments do not live up to their commitment to spend 1% on Development Aid, we can! Hence members donate 1% of their income on a regular and voluntary basis to the Fund. In the 40 years of its existence the Fund has successfully financed more than 800 small scale development projects. A few years ago Kofi Annan said about the small 1 % Fund in Geneva “The 1% for Development Fund demonstrates that every one of us can contribute to overcoming extreme poverty and supporting the Sustainable Development Goals. By donating 1% of their income and becoming directly involved in the selection of projects, its members have shown that each of us can make a difference.” See http://www.onepercentfund.net/about/.
The Fund’s website has a DONATE button on the page “Join us”. Please use this to make a donation.
Not going through a professional publisher does not mean that the book has not gone through content editing, copy editing and review by a group of trusted Beta-readers, but it still remains very much an “unplugged” publication. Despite all the help I got, I must have managed to leave dozens of typos in. I apologize. I simply did not see them. Polishing things was never my forte.
Enjoy reading, Michael
Writings with conviction 