I'm Terry Morgan and TJM Books is my self-publishing platform.
I started writing stories and poetry while traveling with my own exporting business.
Having visited well over seventy countries - some so many times I lost count - I now try, whenever possible, to give hotels and airports a miss and live with my Thai wife, Yung, in the quietness of rural Petchabun, Thailand.
We still return home to Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds valleys in the UK occasionally, but all that business travel - to Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, across Europe and America - did give me something quite special. Many of my memories and personal experiences find themselves - together with a lot of imagination - in what I now write about. So, it's mostly international and covers business, politics, terrorism, crime and espionage plus a bit of science thrown in because I'm still a biologist in my heart. Sometimes it's serious and sometimes satirical and I especially try to write enjoyable reading for that largely under-catered for part of the population - mature men.
And you'll get your money's worth because most of my books are well above average in length and the Smashwords e-versions are free. Why free? Well, you can read my opinions on modern publishing below or on my Smashwords interview at:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tjmbooks.
MY CURRENT PROJECTS:
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"I'm still feeling my way with this one as I'm finding it quite a sensitive subject.
It mixes both religion and ethnicity with crime and terrorism.
I'm tentatively calling it "Bad Boys" and it's a story about two young men from a poor multicultural inner-city area - both fatherless, one with Pakistani parents, the other mixed race Pakistani-English.
It moves from the UK, to Turkey and northern Syria to Malaysia and Thailand and I keep on listening to this You Tube clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjPlFLMERQ
For some reason it seems to fit the story-line.
This one might take me longer than usual to finish.
"Four Men and a Wheelchair" has become my light relief from writing "Bad Boys".
It's satirical in that I've renewed my acquaintance with two characters from the past: Doctor Albert Sinnick and politician Quentin Kelp who once found Five Star fame with Spoof magazine. Quentin, though, has since been defeated at the last election and is on the loose. These two are now joined by two others - Paddy O'Brian who's desperate to retire to read Irish poetry, and Charlie McTavish who's desperately trying to satisfy a long-held passion to upgrade from his moped to real motorbikes and look like a Hell's Angel. Somewhere along the way, a wheelchair fits in as well but it's mostly a tale about the struggles of four late middle-aged men frustrated by a society increasingly dominated by women and political correctness. Here's the line-up:
It mixes both religion and ethnicity with crime and terrorism.
I'm tentatively calling it "Bad Boys" and it's a story about two young men from a poor multicultural inner-city area - both fatherless, one with Pakistani parents, the other mixed race Pakistani-English.
It moves from the UK, to Turkey and northern Syria to Malaysia and Thailand and I keep on listening to this You Tube clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjPlFLMERQ
For some reason it seems to fit the story-line.
This one might take me longer than usual to finish.
"Four Men and a Wheelchair" has become my light relief from writing "Bad Boys".
It's satirical in that I've renewed my acquaintance with two characters from the past: Doctor Albert Sinnick and politician Quentin Kelp who once found Five Star fame with Spoof magazine. Quentin, though, has since been defeated at the last election and is on the loose. These two are now joined by two others - Paddy O'Brian who's desperate to retire to read Irish poetry, and Charlie McTavish who's desperately trying to satisfy a long-held passion to upgrade from his moped to real motorbikes and look like a Hell's Angel. Somewhere along the way, a wheelchair fits in as well but it's mostly a tale about the struggles of four late middle-aged men frustrated by a society increasingly dominated by women and political correctness. Here's the line-up:
AND LASTLY: MY VIEWS ON SELF PUBLISHING:
Here is a transcript of the part of my Smashwords interview on self-publishing as I know the views are not universally shared.
Feel free to argue with me!
Email me at tjmstroud@aol.com.
The question I was asked was:
On Smashwords all of your books are offered free of charge. They are not short novels so each of them must have taken a very long time to write. So why?
My reply was:
It's a good question but I have my reasons.
Yes, each of my five published e-books on Smashwords are free even though all except one exceed 100,000 words. I charge for self-published paperback versions but never get time to market them properly and they never contribute to overheads and other costs.
Let me explain my viewpoint.
Writing was always a hobby. Twenty years of scribbling when I was quiet, alone and able to escape into my own thoughts for just a few hours. I could make myself laugh or cry or put into words serious thoughts that I knew would never get spoken aloud - deep thoughts, controversial, political, sensitive, very private ones. My first full length novel took me ten years to get it to a state where I was sufficiently confident to self publish.
Now: If I had charged my time at even a minimum wage for ten years at only one hour a day I reckon a return of 40,000 dollars might just be enough to break even. The arithmetic is open to challenge but it's either a bit less than 40,000 dollars or, more likely, ten times more - it depends how you value your time. My five subsequent novels have at least quadrupled the time I've spent writing. and quadrupled what I'd expect as a return if I was doing it for a living. But I expected nothing and got nothing because it was just a hobby.
There's an awful lot of published trash out there - a lot of it 'written' by established names, celebrities, politicians and sportsmen who actually get others to write for them. If you want to read it, feel free - buy it.
Likewise, if anyone likes my stuff enough to invest their time and money then good, go ahead, offer me a deal. That's when I'll start to negotiate a price that might offset some of my expense. On the other hand if mine is also trash then tell me. I still won't mind because I've enjoyed the writing.
The modern writing/publishing business is increasingly complicated, made more so because literary agents prefer the far easier job of promoting 'names' already known to the media. They have missed, and are still missing, so much good literature written by total unknowns.
The other reason is that books, like so many other commodities, are grossly undervalued because of the economics and the need for mass appeal. In UK I can buy a paperback in a Tesco supermarket at a price that barely covers printing costs. What is the point of writing good stuff if, just at the end point where you might expect to earn a reasonable return for years of time and effort, you are treated like the bags of Tesco's mixed vegetables on the next shelf?
I, for one, do not want to be treated like that. But feel free to argue with me!
Choosing to read and then enjoying a novel is a very personal thing so let me pose another really sexist argument:
Would the likes of John le Carre, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, Charles Cumming, Gerald Seymour and a few other male authors have done so well now, with the current domination of women in literary agencies and as judges for literary prizes? Go on - argue!