The end of self-publishing my books is now in sight!

I am having an interesting and challenging time at the moment re-reading my four books with a completely fresh eye.

It is more than 10 years since I wrote the Simple Guide, 9 years since my Handbook appeared, 7 years since the Keepers of the Soul and 4 years since I followed this up with the Pattern of Things.  And now there is my fifth publication, the Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture for Acupuncturists, which is hovering out there, so far unattached and unpublished in an English edition, but already photocopied in its Mandarin version for my Chinese students.

The reason for all this activity is because I have just signed with Singing Dragon Press for them to publish all my books (www.singingdragon.com).  I hesitated for a little while (but only a short while) before deciding, because I felt that I might to some extent lose the freedom I now have to do exactly what I want with my writing. But with some relief signed last week, persuaded, among other things, not only by the respect Jessica Kingsley, the publisher, has shown me, but, as she so succinctly said, the fact that I now no longer have to pack up and post my books myself!

In fact the feeling of freedom this signing has given me has been surprisingly releasing, as if a burden has been taken from me.  To my relief, only one of my books requires major re-editing, and that is the Handbook, and this is mainly because we are going to add my Teach Yourself Five Element Acupuncture to it as an appendix.  This has allowed me to look carefully at the whole structure of the book again, in particular re-writing the sections on point selection and, for good measure, adding a list of my favourite points.

When I have done this, I will have time to think ahead to what I want to write next.  Is it perhaps time to draw my blogs together into a book?

I hope, too, I will also soon have time to get down to doing something more frivolous, which is designing my long-announced, long-delayed coffee shop blog.  In the past two weeks I have found another café that I like and another one, which would be horrified to find itself called a café rather than a coffee-shop, that I disliked, so full was it of beautiful people in designer jeans and designer trainers and designer-looking faces.  It’s the little, unpretentious, privately-owned cafés that would never need to call themselves coffee-shops that I really like, and whose owners never fail to welcome me as a long-standing friend.