It was little over a year ago. Dauphy and I were bored during lockdown, so we reached a joint decision to resurrect my childhood love of writing poetry, and start our own blog, Hobbo’s Poems. Now, I am less technically minded than Dauphy, but eventually we cobbled a site together and began posting poetry. To my initial amazement, our number of followers steadily increased, and still does, although we now realize that there is a huge difference between followers and readers.

Since the beginning, we have posted an average of three original poems a day and now have quite a large and growing collection. Because of our limited I.T abilities, the site is not very dynamic, and little changes, other than our daily posts. Despite this, we now have a small number of readers who comment regularly and seem to get genuine pleasure from reading our stuff. You know who you are, and thank you, from both of us.

Encouraged by these readers, we wanted to have a go at getting published. We have such an aversion to all things technical that self publishing was not a viable option. After careful research, we have now found an independent publisher prepared to take us on for what we consider is a fair contributory fee. Now I know that there are some who will say this is just vanity, and maybe it is, but surely it is worth taking the risk. The advantage from our point of view, is that they are a multi-national company with expertise, and they will handle the typesetting, the printing, the cover, the publishing and the marketing. All me and my pal have to do is carry on writing poems.

If the project is a success, which at this stage we would define as breaking even, then we have a series of several books planned. The first one, due out next year, has the working title Hobbo on Life. Thank you for your support and we will keep you posted.