I just thought I’d post a few recent photos this time around, as I’m pretty busy right now preparing the newly released novel for its release in paperback format. Releasing a book in Kindle format is relatively easy since, as long as one has a front cover design ready, the whole interior manuscript can be uploaded in MS Word and the website does all the processing into Kindle format. Not so with a paperback, for a paperback to be released there has to be a fair bit of graphic design involved to format all the interior pages, plus front and back covers and the ‘signature’ need to be created before the book is ready for printing. There is a need to pay close attention to what fonts, or typefaces are used and, if you’re an indy author like me, in order to be sure that the finished product looks good enough, it’s best to have the entire interior of the book saved in PDF format before it’s uploaded to the printer’s website.

That’s why the new novel ‘The Lone Refugee’ is now ‘live’ and available as an ebook to order as a download, or indeed to borrow from the Kindle lending library, but the paperback will need to be created and then proofed in what’s called ‘hard copy’ before it can be released for order online by the public. Since the vast majority of my book sales nowadays are in Kindle format, it’s also the course of wisdom to get that version up and running first. If you’ve never read any of my works, where have you been this past 12 years? Either way, you might like to start by perusing my Amazon Author Page, from where you can go directly to any of my works’ specific pages and order from there. The ebooks of all my works are exclusive to Kindle, but the paperbacks can be found on many other online bookstores.

Right, having got the plug out of the way, here are those photos I promised you. I’ll start with a ‘gallery’ of shots taken at the back of the town beach just yesterday at around 4.00pm. You can see what I mean when I go on about how we here in the South of the island get more sunny weather than they do in the north, since this past couple of days I’ve seen a number of photos from Elounda and Agios Nikolaos showing grey skies up there. Well, here’s the scene in Ierapetra…

The light this past few days has been spectacularly vivid, as the humidity levels have been nice and low, making everything sharp and vibrant, as the above shots ably demonstrate. Here are two more from October 14th…

The first of those two above shows the tables and chairs of the Vira Potsi restaurant, the one where the turtle comes visiting most evenings and can be seen from any of the tables along the water’s edge. That plant in the left foreground is gorgeous, and we don’t rightly know for sure what it is. Here’s a close-up, if anyone would like to put me out of my misery…

Before I sign off from this post, here are a couple more of our cat, Mavkos. Whenever we have coffee on the sun terrace, he always puts in an appearance and awaits (impatiently, of course – he’s a cat!) his little treat. We keep a packet of little ‘nuggets’ for him and give him a few in a dish when we sit and eat our dark chocolate, or slice of Yvonne’s homemade flapjack, along with our coffee.

Mavkos will gobble up his treat, then take a look at each of us on our loungers, before deciding which of us will get the privilege of his cuddles that particular day. He’s canny, I’ll say that about him, because just when I think he’s never going to come on my lap ever again, after maybe three or four days of going to Yvonne alone, he’ll switch sides and come to me. Yesterday, the sun was very hot on his back, yet he didn’t seem to be inclined to get down and go into the shade, so we threw that towel across him to keep him a little cooler. He’ll often sit between our legs for a while and then, when he gets too hot, he’ll jump down and stretch out underneath one of us in the shade. He knew what that towel was for, we’re convinced of that, because he revelled in it, the little rascal.

And, finally, another blast from the distant past. This photo was taken on the rooftop of a small block of apartments in Skiathos Town, when we stayed there back in 1998…

My official web site: https://johnphilipmanuel.wixsite.com/works

Here’s my Amazon Author Page.