You live in Switzerland now. How much influence does New Zealand have on your writing? New Zealand has a large influence on my work. I started writing because I had a story to tell, the story of The Spanish Helmet. This is New Zealand's story. Admittedly, I wanted to inject some Switzerland into it too, so part of The Spanish Helmet is set over here. You say The Spanish Helmet is New Zealand's story. Are you suggesting that there is more to ...more»

The official story is that the Spanish didn't reach New Zealand's shores before the Dutch, right? Well, kind of. In actual fact, there has been plenty of suggestion to this theory long before most Kiwi's would imagine. Here follows some excerpts from a 1949 publication of Joseph Angus Mackay (the good bits are often quotes of famous NZ historians - be warned, you may be shocked). All of these excerpts are licensed with a Creative Commons NZ license and are available ...more»

A tree in Spain sparked some debate about the possibility of Spanish having travelled New Zealand before Cook and rightly won a mention in The Spanish Helmet. The tree in question is a large pohutukawa that the locals believe to be 400-500 years old. That would fit in well with a discovery by Francisco de Hoces in 1526, don't you think? The original Landcare Research press release about the tree can be found here: http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/news/release.asp?Ne_ID=33Since I don't trust NZ government agencies to adequately ...more»

UPDATE: Buchhaus.ch (the website of Lüthy) is also selling The Spanish Helmet. In fact, the price is so good that even I can't beat it. Just CHF 14.20 with free economy delivery. Get your copy today. It is my great pleasure to be able to advise my Swiss readers that The Spanish Helmet is now available at the Lüthy book-store in the Glattzentrum Shopping Centre, Wallisellen, Zürich (rrp. 16.90 chf). Lüthy Buchhaus The Glattzentrum is Switzerland's biggest shopping centre and offers a special shopping experience. The Lüthy ...more»

It takes some effort to get your book in the EPUB format. Sure, it is made much simpler with great free software like Calibre but it still doesn't happen by itself. So when you discover that you have a handful of misprints in your document and you want to clean them out (you want the best possible for your readers, right?) the last thing you want to have to do is go back and edit your original Word document and go ...more»

So many self-publishing gurus tell us that we need to have a book trailer, so I made one. But what do you do with the book trailer after production? Upload it to YouTube and forget it? Do that and a week later all you are likely to have as a return on your investment (be it time financial or time) is a handful of views. No, a book trailer needs to get out there, to as many places as possible. ...more»