Bill Keeth lives in Middleton, Greater Manchester, in the UK, and he is already known to readers of this Newsletter*.

Bill has self-published two novels – Every Street in Manchester, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Portico Literary Prize alongside titles by two authors who are household names in the UK and beyond, and Manchester Kiss, a contemporaneous sequel. But his most recent self-published book is a non-fiction title – Write It Self-Publish It Sell It (pub. 2008), long-listed for the Portico Prize, which aims at supplying definitive answers to the many enquiries Bill has received about self-publishing subsequent to self-publishing his novels and selling on thousands of copies.

Writing a long-binned first novel back in 1977, Bill Keeth went on to become a founder member of a writers’ workshop at Manchester College of Building, where his debut novel was actually begun as a short story.

‘Much more recently,’ he says, ‘I got a yen to develop that short story into a full-length novel, whereupon it took me about eight months to do so, with Manchester Kiss following soon afterwards. And it was whilst unsuccessfully trawling the writers’ manuals with a view to placing Every Street in Manchester with a UK publisher or literary agent, I learned that best-selling Manchester writer Billy Hopkins (www.billysbooks.info) had originally been constrained to self-publish his debut novel.

‘So it was with my forerunner’s advice in the matter that I successfully self-published at long last, fulfilling my dream of foisting a work of fiction upon an unsuspecting public.

‘“Don’t pay it back, pay it on,” says Lee Child’s macho hero, Jim Reacher to a character he lends money to in Nothing to Lose, pub. 2008. (In my humble opinion, the best Jim Reacher book yet.)

‘And I will be happy as Larry if, in paying on via this monthly column of mine, I go some way towards helping even one aspiring writer amongst its readership to follow suit.’

If you need to contact Bill, you can do so via his website, http://www.novelnovella.com