My First Ever Royalty Payment

I received my first royalty payment today from Amazon.

Yay!

I haven't stopped laughing. Thank you e-book reading public for your donation to Green Wizard.

I'll certainly use the four digits for a passcode or something. I've put the four digits on my mobile phone for posterity  and I shall never forget them. Those four digits are burned into my consciousness, the molten brand of a Texas rancher on the hide of a Longhorn steer.


Hah!


I wrote a short story called "Hot For Teacher" when I was twenty four and it was published in Knave Magazine. I still have it somewhere. It's very dirty. It predates most popular Sapphic fiction by at least fifteen years and its 2,000 words long. 


I got paid three times what I got paid for my FOUR opening e-books. Combined wordage 325,000.


I co-wrote - and won - a bid worth £4.25m and turned a company from a minor outfit into the fifth biggest company in an Industry. I got paid virtually nothing for doing it, but it was still more than this royalty.


But you know what, gang.


I've loved every minute of it. The best year of my working life since 2000. 


I'm living the dream. I'm living, loving and loafing it. Eventually, I've got to make some money, but hey, money comes to he/she who deserves it.


Anyway. The Royalty. What did you do with your first cheque?

I'm going out on Saturday morning to pick up my beloved son and I'm going to do the following things.

Smash box white jacket

a) I'm going to Walk into a bookmakers in Nottingham. 


Those who've read Carla will know the one I mean. The most ethnic bookmakers in Nottingham. 


I'll be doing a load of high fives with all the bloods in there.All the gang. Hip hop. We'll be talking paper, and cream, and beefs and I shall use the connective "Innit". 




We'll be getting down on the hypnotic machines and talking about Snoopy Dog and that. Then I'll check the greyhound race on the big Fly's Eye sports screen. Horses, virtuals, cricket, football, poker.


Greyhounds.


Romford and Crayford on a Saturday morning. I'm going to take the royalty and put seventy five percent of it on Trap 3.  Blind. No form. No sectionals. No trainer analysis. Trap 3. The Smash Box. Bang. Gone. 


Thank you very much, madam. I'll buy THAT for a dollar.

b) If it wins, I'm going to take Matt to the Red Hot World Buffet. There, we will munch course after course of piping hot cuisine from around the world. Plate after plate, dish after dish, until our cheeks burst, our eyes water and our tender bellies cry enough. All of it washed down with Magners for me, Coke for him. 

Top Nottingham Buffet

http://www.redhot-worldbuffet.com/redhot_nottingham.html

c) If the greyhound loses,  we can eat Greggs. Steak bake for me. Double sausage roll for him.


With the remaining 25% of the royalty, I'm going to wander about the town until I bump into a tramp. A really sad hairy one who has had a hellish life on the drugs and the booze. He can have the remaining quarter for a good drink at lunch. 




Or maybe a long refreshing, energising hot pipe of bubbly crack. 

Bournemouth Fan

I've developed a friendship with a Nottingham tramp who camps out near the old Radio Nottingham building on Mansfield Road. She's lovely. She tells me jokes and likes a laugh. Cracked up to the eyeballs, toothless, and a bit smelly, but lovely nonetheless. She can have it. If I see her. I tried to find her last Saturday but I think she's been arrested again. As she often is.


This is an appropriate way to spend my first royalty payment as an e-book publisher. 
Amanda Hocking, EL James, the fellow who wrote SOBB, I salute you. Yet, salutations apart, I am coming to get you. 
The road is long and hard and there are big scary monsters with big gnashing teeth behind every giant cactus, but I shall make it and I shall never forget my first royalty payment and what I spent it on.




Next: An interview with Suzanne Van Rooyen. Brilliant, she is. 

Suzanne Van Rooyen