Are you an established or wannabe writer of novels, stories or biographies – yours or someone else’s? Perhaps you want to rewrite history: the potential for revisionist writers is better than ever before.

Readers are gasping for an alternative to the tedious recycling of war victors’ propaganda.

Maybe you are a specialist in a certain skill; business studies, parenting, marketing, keep fit, sales, marketing and business matters, sport, history, relationships, romance; whatever, there is a niche for you and your experience or knowledge.

The increasingly popular way of selling one’s book is by self-publishing and marketing, usually via social media. Social media like Facebook, VK and Gab offer an ‘anything goes’ list of groups used by potential buyers of your books.

Alternative options to selling through bookshops include selling online, directly to schools, at talks, fairs, conventions and conferences; direct through magazine reviews and targeted advertising.

Although more books are being read today than ever before, the traditional bookshop has gone the way of the hat maker, haberdasher, and the cobbler.

A great way to offer your books Sale or Return (SoR) through local convenience stores, newsagents, bookshops, anywhere where there is high footfall; people calling in.

You simply ask permission to leave, say a dozen copies. You call back regularly, and the shopkeeper pays you the agreed two-thirds or half the cover price. You then replace the sold copies. This way, there is no outlay or risk to the retailer.

Most books are sold by Amazon, LULU, and best of all by Books.by. The latter, an Australian-based rival to Amazon, allows you to sell your books cheaper whilst receiving 70% more in royalties than greedy Amazon. NOTE: We publish your books for you.

A publishing insider tells us: ‘Literary publishers and reviewers are patronising and all in bed together.’ He adds, ‘they think they know what sells, but their sales are little better than self-published books.’

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane sold only 4,493 copies. Contrast that with sales of a Liverpool-based poet’s self-published anthologies: One thousand copies of one title sold out in six weeks.

Two thousand copies of a second anthology sold as quickly: This in one small city alone by an unknown author and on a subject that is hardly flavour of the month. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

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THE LEAVING OF LIVERPOOL Illustrated best-seller of a seaman’s life in the greatest Merchant Navy in history (1955-1975) by ex-mariner Michael Walsh. https://books.by/michael-walsh#the-leaving-of-liverpool