Today, I received notification that both the book and Kindle version of “The Champagne Truckers” are available on Amazon.
As with “Trucking Magic”, I published this myself through Createspace. Obviously, it being the second book that I have
published with them I already had a heads up as to what was required. This made it so much easier to perform the task.
In fact, there was a delay in getting the book out there but that was down to me not seeing a couple of typo’s and
having to resubmit it to the process. A moment of word blindness during the re-reading process.
I would suggest to anyone that wants to publish a book that you seriously consider the implications of using Createspace.
This book comes home at 348 pages and has a word count of 94,500. It is highly unlikely that any publisher would allow
you that amount of latitude. They would generally be looking for a word count of 60,000 - 70,000.
The reason for this is the cost of printing. This rises in line with the word count and number of pages.
They then have to set the print cost against the R.R.P.
They want to lower the R.R.P. so that more people buy the book.
Obviously, because they want to recover their initial outlay and make a long term profit out of your work.
However, in saying that what you may wish to consider is submitting your manuscript to
somebody like Old Pond, so as to get an appraisal of your work. Shaping the book up from what you have written
to what they want will teach you the discipline of editing. You will also learn a great deal about the publishing
process which will set you in good stead when you go down the self publishing route. Whether they take on your book
and you publish through them before publishing your next books yourself, or you self publish after they knock you back.
You could look upon it as being similar to the Owner Driver process. Most of us who were Owner Drivers
learned our trade as company drivers for numerous firms and having learned the system then went our own ways successfully.
I would imagine that very few people started out as an Owner Driver, without having driven for companies before hand.
But, there we are. I have successfully published my third book. Whether it sells or not is now down to me, as the marketing
operation is my responsibility. A bit like selling myself as an Owner Driver back in the day. 
Take good care
Mick