It’s something of a worry when I do an Amazon search on my own name, and a page full of pigs appears. But, as fanfared the week before last, I am now firmly in the grip of piggy fever, as the next four editions of “Anti-Money Laundering: What You Need to Know” have hit the bookshelves. (Well, the servers: these are print-on-demand paperbacks, so there aren’t any physical stocks anywhere – apart from the piles under my desk, of course.) This is the UK quartet, covering banking, accountancy, insurance and investment, and I have sent press releases and announcements to everyone I can think of – please do let me know if you have any suggestions.
When I first started thinking about writing books, I had a traditional view of publishing: write a book, find a publisher, sell the thing. It has not worked out like that at all, and – from my perspective – I think it has been a totally unmixed blessing. For a start, self-publishing is so speedy – I can really react to current demand. But the real beauty is the print-on-demand-ness of it all. In short, I upload a text file to the publishing system, and when someone orders a copy of a piggy, it is printed especially for them (at a “brand-new facility” in the UK, apparently) and popped into the post to arrive the next day. So if the legislation changes, or I decide there is a better way to explain something, or (as has already happened) a case study is updated by a naughty person being sent to prison, I can simply update the text and upload the file again, and then whoever orders from that moment onwards gets the very latest version. So the piggies are always current – the very height of fashion, as you can doubtless tell from their shades.
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