We are delighted to announce that Welsh Icons has launched its first eBook. With the success of devices like the Kindle taking market share and the decline of conventional books we decided last year to dip out toes’ into the electronic publishing pool.
Dom Stocqueler, editor of Welsh Icons told us:
“We’ve been kicking this idea around for a while but we were just looking for the right material. I got passed a manuscript last year that really grabbed my attention. Most people know that I have the attention-span of a goldfish, but this book really hooked me and I stayed up most of the night reading it”.
“I did try and tout the manuscript round a few of my publisher contacts, most of them were very positive but they were all talking about long time scales and maybe doing something for the Christmas market. We don’t work like that at Welsh Icons and I just wanted to make it available as quickly and as cheaply as possible”.
He continued:
“Little did I know that it was written by our art director Norris Nuvo, I just thought that he was passing it on for someone else.”
Norris Nuvo is the pen (and ink) name of the art director of Welsh Icons and when he is not contributing to the site, he is busy producing artwork and videos for bands such as the infamous Sicknote. Under his family name of Purnelli, he has penned a semi-autobiographical novel telling of his childhood in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales.
Norris/ Purnelli told us:
“In 2006 my father, my mother and her brother, my uncle died just months apart. Mud On A Young Boys Clothes was originally intended as a couple of short incidents from my childhood to be read as eulogies at their funerals. However the following spring I decided to expand the eulogies. It began with ‘A day out at Barry Island’, a short story which won me second place in the short story category at the online E-steddfodd in 2007 run by the national museum of Wales.
“The story lay idle for another year until in 2008 my mobility became impaired and I became housebound. It is strange that no matter how old you are, you still miss your mother most when you become ill, and so I picked up the story and began to write because it made me feel closer to those who brought me up.
“As I wrote it began to dawn on me that the focal point of change in my life was our family’s acquisition of a TV, and to be more specific, watching the first episode of Dr Who. Strange as it may seem, the man in the blue box opened up my imagination and changed my life….
He added:
“I am not a disciplined writer, sometimes months would pass without me adding a word, but at other times the words tumbled out as fast as I could type – I tend to write more during winter – eventually I brought the book to a conclusion at a point where I felt I had been at my happiest, a point where my first adult awakenings had begun, a point where my world changed and would never be the same again.”
The book is available to purchase from http://www.amazon.com/kindle/dp/B007NO5SLC for well under a fiver and is available for Kindle, Android, iPad and iPhone devices using the free Kindle reader application.
Dom concluded:
“We hope this is the first of many. To be honest it is a bit of an experiment. If this works, then we have a large back-catalogue of works to make available as well”.
