Joanne hook

Artist

www.joannehook.com

JoAnne is an Australian artist and has been drawing and painting from childhood. Basically self-taught, she learnt her craft from trial and error and many, many hours of practice. She started with her love of horses, drawing them in pencil and then experimenting in paint and colour.

JoAnne spent time in Art Colleges in Shepparton, central Victoria, and in Melbourne, where she learnt the basics of design and printmaking, but gained the most knowledge and experience from working in design studios, then freelancing in advertising and illustration in Sydney.

In 1979 she moved from Sydney to tropical Far North Queensland to discover and establish her own style as a painter, and lived near Cairns for 13 years. Here she found her inspiration in the vibrant colours of the flora and fauna of the lush rainforests and the nearby Great Barrier Reef.

She gained great success with her work, and opened her own gallery in 1988, followed by more galleries at the Gold Coast near Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Her work was also very popular in Japan, and she spent many years exhibiting there, doing tours sometimes 2-3 times a year.

In 2001 she discovered the beautiful Cote d'Azur and eventually bought a property at Cap Martin in 2005, and so, for the past 10 years has been dividing her time between here and Australia.

She is now enjoying her life in two totally different worlds, concentrating on improving her French and learning Italian, as well as painting landscapes of France and Italy.

If you are interested in seeing more of her work, you can go to www.joannehook.com

Martin Smith.  nom de plume martin lake

Author

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I’ve always been a writer, writing stories, plays, and many unfinished novels. But now, at last, I think of myself as an author. I have twelve novels and five collections of short stories on sale, I’m published by Lake Union Publishing, as well as independently, and I’ve been in the top five best-selling authors a number of times. My books are available as e-books, paperbacks, audio books, all over the world. So how did I get here?

I wrote my first poem when I was eleven and began to realise, that, although I found maths, woodwork and football difficult and boring, in my English classes writing was easy and fun.

I was one of the first from my school to go to college to do A levels and then to university. My ambition to be a writer continued but life got in the way a little. I became a teacher, then a college lecturer, got married, moved from Nottingham to Somerset, raised a family, did many of the things most of us do – though never DIY. See my comment about woodwork.

I continued to write, had one short story on the radio and, like most aspiring writers, had lots of rejections from agents and publishers. One publisher was interested in my novel but eventually returned it saying that the plot was too thin. I was elated but didn’t know how to make it thicker so the manuscript gathered dust in a drawer.

Then, in 2011 two things happened which changed everything. I read an article about self-publishing on Kindle. And I also realised I was tired of getting my manuscripts returned, sometimes unread. My work was being rejected by kids in their twenties with names like Miles and Hortense so I decided enough was enough. I didn’t need children to judge my books, I would leave it up to readers.

I self-published my first books in April 2011 and sold 230 books that year which earned about £130 in total. I knew I was never going to get rich but I loved doing it.

I continued to write, consistently and persistently. That’s the real secret to becoming an author. Writing every day, if only for a short while. I get up early, usually between five and six, and aim to write a thousand words. Sometimes I write less, sometimes more. It’s the regularity that counts more than anything. I complete the first draft before I start to edit, otherwise I’d have countless unfinished versions of the one book.

I was very happy self-publishing and then I had a lucky break. I’d just finished writing a novel about the Crusades. I didn’t want to start another novel so I started to play around with a sentence or two. To my surprise, I found myself writing in the voice of a young woman who, I soon discovered, decided she was going to become a mistress of Henry VIII. A year later, Alice Petherton made her first appearance in A Love Most Dangerous and my sales began to rocket. In the first month I sold 100 copies, in the second 500, and 1000 in each of the following months. And then my real lucky break came.

I had an email from a Senior Editor at Lake Union Publishing in Seattle asking if I would like them to publish the novel. I thought the email might be spam and almost dumped it in the trash. It wasn’t, it was genuine, from one of the new Amazon publishing companies.

Strangely enough, I took a few days to agree because I worried that I might lose my independence. Not a bit of it. Lake Union is one of the best publishers for authors, offering a much better royalty rate and, with the power of Amazon behind it, some of the most astute and sophisticated marketing available.

My editor engaged a team of editors to work with me to improve the book. I edited much of it in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing Room, courtesy of the Fellow for that year, and it was re-published six months later.

Since then, Lake Union have published a follow up book while, with their agreement, I independently publish those books that don’t fit their customer base. What a life, a writer in the south of France.

You can find Martin’s books on Amazon and also order them from your bookseller.

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