Don't Get Eaten

The honest and critical guide to publishing

The water's full of sharks.

Here's how to swim.

So, you want to get published? Welcome to one of the most rewarding, and most shark-infested, journeys a writer can take. Vanity presses with glowing praise and hefty invoices. Agents who reject 95% of submissions.

Platforms full of jargon, and "experts" only too happy to take your money and give truly little back.

Dave Palmer learned the hard way. His first novel cost him thousands with a vanity publisher and came back riddled with errors, wearing somebody else's cover. So he rebuilt it, published it himself, and turned it into the first book of a successful London gangland thriller series.

Now he shares everything he learned: honestly, plainly, and with a healthy dose of humour.

INSIDE YOU'LL FIND:

• The truth about agents, hybrid and vanity publishing
• Editing, formatting and covers, and what they really cost
• Step-by-step guides to Amazon KDP and Nielsen ISBNs
• The legals every independent author needs to know

A hands-on workbook to plan, publish and market your book

Put your big pants on. Let's get your book out there, without getting eaten.

The Business of Crime

Rehabilitation, Reoffending and the Justice Economy

This book grew out of rooms most people never enter. For years I have

visited prisons as a guest speaker, at Wandsworth, Brixton, Pentonville

and Wormwood Scrubs, and I have worked alongside drug and alcohol

rehabilitation centres. In those rooms I have met men who were trying,

often against every obstacle the system could put in their way, to become

someone other than the person their record describes. Many of them

succeeded for a while. Too many came back.

The question that stayed with me was a simple one. If the stated purpose

of the criminal justice system is to reduce crime and to rehabilitate those

who commit it, why does so much of it seem arranged to produce the

opposite result? This book is my attempt to answer that question

honestly, using the official record wherever possible and my own

experience where the record falls silent.

It is not a book that excuses crime. Victims matter, and the harm that

crime does to individuals, families and communities is real. Nor is it an

attack on the prison officers, probation staff, nurses, chaplains, teachers

and charity workers who give so much to people the rest of society would

rather forget. Many of them will recognise the problems described here,

because they see them every working day.



It is a book about incentives. It asks what happens when an entire

economy of contracts, careers, suppliers and institutions grows up

around a problem, and whether that economy has any real interest in

solving it.