Tag: Barbara Cartland

Self-published Authors! We are in Good Company!

peterrabbitIt was just a few short years ago that  being self published was a dirty word.  People would call your work a ‘vanity book’ or a ‘one book wonder’.  You would have to warehouse 10’s of thousands of inventory for your book and then schlep it around as far as you could.  All of that is in the past!  We can hold our heads up high, write our work and get it in the hands of our readers for, sometimes, as little as a few hundred bucks.  If you don’t hire a graphic designer for the cover, then publishing is literally FREE.

Now here’s the “Good Company” I claimed………….

How Beatrix Potter self-published Peter Rabbit
The aspiring children’s writer was fed up of receiving rejection letters – so on this day in 1901 she self-published a certain book about a naughty rabbit

So you think self-publishing is a 21st-century phenomenon? Continue reading “Self-published Authors! We are in Good Company!”

The Grande Dame of Historic Fiction was so much More!

romance, historic, fiction, Barbara CartlandYes, the snobs of the literary world might have scoffed at her pink signature Chanel suits, her poofy hats, her Pekinese dogs, and her silly romantic stories.   But, they can’t quite get around her fifty plus years of writing, resulting in over 1,000 million books sold, or the fact that she spent her life  making the world a better place.

Her name was Barbara Cartland.  I know I must have started buying her books somewhere around 1972 because one of her letters to me was dated 1975.  So I have been reading her historic, romantic fiction up until about ten years ago.  Collecting hard covers when I could find them!  I would send them to her and she would autograph them and always, always send a nice note and a little gift back to me.  Most treasured gift was a gold-gilded oak leaf from an oak tree on Barbara’s property.   The “Deer Oak”, which is said to have been planted by Queen Elizabeth the First in 1550, at the spot where she killed her first deer, is on the estate.

Continue reading “The Grande Dame of Historic Fiction was so much More!”