A greenhouse and a book.

The greenhouse frame is up, weighted in place with bags of sand because it can't be fixed down until the glazing is in. It's too windy for glazing today.

I'm amazed at the lightness of the structure. No wonder it has to be bolted to its base, which has to be fixed to the ground. Never mind windy weather, two people could lift and steal the whole thing intact! Not to worry, it's guarded by the compost bin which, this year, has a nest of bumble bees in residence. I can't get at the compost, but my fruit trees are doing very well.

I have also put nineteen short stories into a book on Lulu. It costs me nothing but of course, there'll be nobody doing any marketing for it. Most of those stories have already been printed elsewhere anyway so I'd be unlikely to be able to sell them again. It's just handy to have a non-digital storage medium for them.

I could have put in more but the book's going to cost £4.50 as it is so I'd be better to put up several small ones rather than one huge and ridiculously expensive one. The bigger it gets, the more they charge.

It's not available to anyone but me as yet. I've ordered one to check the quality first. When I make it available, it'll be as a printed book or as a free download. For some reason, the minimum price for downloads is £1.17 unless you make it free - and you don't make any money if you charge for it at that price so there's no point. So you can read it onscreen for free and only cough up cash if you want it in print.

It might be useful as a sort of practice marketing book. Some small publishers, who are currently looking at novel submissions from me, expect the author to do something to actively promote their own books. I have absolutely no idea how to go about this so I'll use this one to practice on. Better to make mistakes on the book that won't make me rich than on the ones that might!

If only there was a way to get free publicity as brilliant as this.

Count Mandelstein is no fool. He knows Labour are likely to be out of power for some time so he's written his memoirs and cajoled the rest of Labour into advertising his book - in every paper, most probably for days. That sort of publicity would cost a fortune if you had to pay for advertising.

So, how do I go about annoying Charlie Whelan? There's nothing political in the book, really.

Perhaps, if the smoking bloggers all got together and wrote a book called 'How to get the best out of smoking', the government would ban it. Furious Righteous would queue up to denounce us on every media outlet, every day.

Then we'd make a fortune.