During my police career I worked in various areas covering Community Safety, Fraud and Financial Investigation, Youth Justice, Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit and Human Trafficking. As well as my operational duties I was also a member of the Police Search Team and held roles as a Wildlife Liaison Officer and an Officer Safety Instructor.

As you can see I came to the world of Publishing as a “new start”.

I first put pen to paper on Community Cop Colin some 20 years ago when I was a community police officer. When I retired I decided to bring Community Cop Colin to life.

Due to the nature of my previous job I was not on any social media for obvious reasons. I contacted a local company 'Coffee Cups Ink', a small company with a personal touch was what I felt I required. Being new to the industry and from experience I saw at the time nothing wrong with baby steps.

The first thing I needed to secure was Intellectual Property (IP). If Community Cop Colin had future series to come, then this was vital. Next was my website, which went like clockwork and was very easy thanks to Coffee Cups Ink.

The next question for me was; What do I want to achieve in the first instance? Always remembering 'baby steps' and for me the answer was 'FEEDBACK'. I am of the opinion that honest feedback is always best from people you do not know and from a broad spectrum within society.

This was where Troubador suited my requirements by printing off a small batch of books which were available to the wider community (Sophie and Joe thank you for your patience). Troubador were really fantastic as this was all new to me and worked with me especially in the design and cover process. The idea of having the chequered cover with the name of the book contained within a speech bubble was something I wanted and Troubador really nailed the concept.

Finding the right Illustrator was very important for me in relation to image rights and character depiction and Ian R Ward was very easy to work with. Now the difficult part, how to get honest feedback from Community Cop Colin?

The obvious answer was social media. Friends and family were on Facebook so I chose this platform and only this platform.

This is purely down to me, I didn’t know what was in front of me and I wanted to keep things very manageable. I entered the Facebook world and put a few posts on in the run up to publication and posted a brief video. The video had over 14k (fourteen thousand) views and the feedback from that was very positive. I have been very economical with how many posts I put on Facebook as I know I only have one product to promote so I don’t want to put on post after post. A good way around this and to let people know you still exist is to change you profile picture every now and again, incorporating it with a current topic such as VE Day, Easter, Christmas.

Once the website was up and running, I used Facebook to make people aware of its existence. Ian R Ward was great and sent me sketches of the illustrations, I made some of these available on the website so that they could be printed off and coloured in.

I have had lots of requests from schools, playgroups and nurseries to attend and do talks to the children. Obviously, this has been thwarted due to Covid but I cannot wait to carry these out as I absolutely love doing these presentations. I know many people can find such presentations a daunting task but just remember 4 simple steps when giving any presentation

• Introduction

• Tell them what you are going to tell them

• Tell them

• Then tell them what you have just told them

I also found local radio and press very receptive to the concept of Community Cop Colin. Thank you for reading my very brief guide to getting started in the book world and wish everyone a very happy, healthy and safe