In a world which seems to be rapidly splintering (I’m looking at you Mr. President and you Brexiteers and you Ms Le Pen amongst others) I would like to think that us Indie-writers can reverse the trend and come together. A lot of us, me included went into this story writing malarkey without much of a clue as to how difficult it is to get anybody to read the stuff we have been sweating blood over in an effort to entertain. Entertain? Is that what we do? Well, not all of us but I would say that those of us who write fiction (in whatever genre) are doing. We fiction writers are in the entertainment business even though some of it may have a serious (political?) point we want to make, like in my novel ‘Gone Missing’, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but its still our own creation. But writing, by its very nature, is a solitary activity, unless you have a cat, and we hope that what we are producing will appeal to somebody, anybody but we never know when we have decided we have finished. We all know, once we have immersed ourselves into this writing folly, that writing what we hope is a good story (or better) is actually the easy bit. We indulge our inner non-existent designer skills in producing an eye-catching cover and find a conduit to publish what we have done for all the world to see and buy. But, nobody does, not even family or friends, so then we realize the hard work has to begin. We have to become mercurial marketeers, which few of us are. I recently read a book of short stories by that most popular of storytellers, John Grisham, titled “Ford County Stories” and at the front of the book was this short passage which brought home to me the utter enormity of what we are all trying to accomplish. It was about the time when he published his first book A Time to Kill twenty years before this particular book of short stories was published in 2009. I soon learned the painful lesson that selling books was far more difficult than writing them. I bought a thousand copies and had trouble giving them away. Now everything he writes fly off the shelves. How did this happen? Bearing in mind that he started in a time before everybody had the internet and social media didn’t even exist. Answer: He commandeered the help of what he calls a dear friend. It was enough to slowly get the ball rolling and it got me thinking (always a dangerous thing). We now live in an age where the internet is omnipresent and packed by anonymous people offering their expert advice to us writers about how to build your email list for newsletters, how to write a blog and attract an audience, how to build your friends on Twitter and so on which we feel compelled to read and, if you’re anything like me, end up feeling totally inadequate at fulfilling. We rush to open accounts on every social media outlet from Facebook fan pages to Pinterest and Instagram and end up feeling overwhelmed about keeping them updated so we give up. Mainly because we’re doing it on our own and there are only so many hours in the day and all we really want to do is write. Now I like to think that I have made some wonderful writer-people friends through Facebook which I have found invaluable. We are all trying to find an audience for what we do and I think there must be a way for us to band together and support each other on the basis that a chorus of voices is more powerful than a solitary one. I think a small group would work better than an overly large one because it would be easier to reach a consensus on what to do and therefore more manageable (but I could be wrong). One of these internet contacts, who’s blogs I love and admire, Lisa Sell, together with Debbie Jinks has started a closed group Facebook page for people like us called ‘All Write’ which I hope will attract like-minded writers and I see an opportunity for those amongst the group who want to, to somehow, support each other to spread the word about each of us, a bit like the Canadian painters of the early 1900’s (actually 1920 to 1933) who became known as the Group of Seven. The Group of Seven weren’t well known individually but people began to hear about the ‘Group of Seven’ because it sounded like a movement, it sounded important, which meant that little by little they did become incredibly famous amongst those who were interested in art. Can you see where I’m going with this? It’s the reason I have links to other Indie-writers I admire on my website. If people like my stuff I want them to find my friends, even though we haven’t met in person and am not likely to meet any of them because we are separated by vast geographical distances across the planet but I support them and what they do. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I’m sure there are many other things we could do as a loosely knit group which could benefit us all so if anybody has any ideas I would love to hear them and I will take responsibility for trying to put them into action. In short I would suggest that we are stronger together than trying to plough a lonely furrow. What do you think? Over to you.