Withiell's Waffle

A competition entry changed my life…and I didn’t even win!

My name is Barry Nicholson, and I write under the name of Nick Withiell. I am pensioner living in Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire. I began to write as an entry in a competition by a national newspaper (The Daily Mail) for first time writers who had never had anything published, to write a story… With time on my hands, I thought, “I can do that.” and so did.

This has now expanded into a series of five books, all published on Amazon Kindle. By now I had caught the writing bug, and at the concusion of the second book I still had not found a way to finish it properly – so I wrote a third book. The book ran to just over 300 pages, and I sent off the manuscript. I never heard anything more. Then it occurred to me that this story was not quite finished, so I wrote a second book to follow.After submitting the first book to various publishing houses I eventually received some very favourable reviews, but they would only offer a composite deal, which involved my putting up one third of the costs up front. There were also no guarantees despite the high praise they poured on to my efforts. So I looked for alternatives.

On the advice of a friend, I had to self-publish (With Kindle Direct Publishing) and now have a series of five books selling on Amazon .I have had some really wonderful comments from people who have read the first book, and are looking forward to the next in the series.

The bottom line to this is: You just never know what you might achieve until you try.