The trouble with self publishing an e-book is that the only person who's going to market it is you - and it's jolly hard work.

All the 30 or so books I've written in the past have been commercially published - like the set of four I'm currently working on for a big company. My job was/is to write them. Someone else does the rest.

But Please Miss We're Boys is my baby in every sense and, in this context, I'm a single parent. So I've scatter-gunned everyone in my email contacts list, used Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friends Reunited and, of course, Goodreads to keep reminding people that the book is there and that it's about my first five years in teaching when I was 21, wet behind the ears and thrown in with the sharks in a very rough Deptford boys' school.

So far these tactics are working - along with a few others I have up my sleeve - but I begin to wish I had a degree in marketing ...