This October will mark twenty-three years since I swore an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs. I did this as a university student who’d just turned eighteen years old after Manchester and Salford University Officers’ Training Corps (MSUOTC) managed to persuade me to join them over the Territorial Army (TA), as the Army Reserve was known at the time.
 
I’d never heard of the UOTC before I went to uni. I had heard of the TA. Before I went to uni, I’d already worked in a wholesale bakery, a high street deli, a kennels, a farm shop, an ice-cream van, a packing factory, a care home, and a bar. I knew what minimum wage jobs looked like, and the TA sounded far more fun.
 
Except I joined the UOTC instead. If, like eighteen-years-old me, you have no idea what the UOTC is, then to explain, it is basically a branch of the Army Reserves for university students. Formed in the early twentieth century, it was created to fix a shortage of military officers. Back then, only the wealthy went to uni, and if the wealthy joined the army, they became officers.
 
So it’s the Army Reserve for potential officers.
 
Except it isn’t. Not anymore. It would love to turn all its officer cadets into officers, but very few ever commission. Most who join never join the Army, and the majority of those who do sign up, join as non-commissioned ranks, not as officers. But anyway…
 
I spent a year in the UOTC. I did the equivalent of basic training, quit my degree, left the UOTC, then after a short break where I trotted off to France to work as a chalet maid in a ski resort for a season—having never skied before in my life—I joined the TA. I then went back to uni, but I remained in the TA.

I went to the University of Leeds to study Earth Sciences and transferred to the nearest Royal Engineers TA unit—a detachment of 106 Field Squadron—based in nearby Bradford.
 
A year later, I commissioned. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. Between 2003 and 2006, I rolled through the Army Officer Selection Board, the initial three modules of officer training, and then into the final training module at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I popped out of the other end with a single pip on my chest, wide eyes, and thinking, “how the hell did that happen?”
 
That was my first three years of service; I’ve been trying to figure out how to be a decent officer ever since. I’m a major now, and I’m still learning.
 
I graduated from uni two years after I commissioned. At this time, I was already in charge of twenty-odd soldiers as a troop commander, and I had a stable boyfriend. And despite plans to join the Regular Army when I graduated, I found myself thinking: “do I really want to go back to Sandhurst and start again?” and “Do I really want to live away from Andy?”
 
I decided no on both counts. I ended up marrying Andy, by the way, so I guess it was worth sticking near him! Would our relationship have survived the inevitable separation that full-time military service would have brought? Who knows…
 
I got a graduate job in the waste industry instead. I rattled around the various departments and settled in the project engineer team. It seemed to fit. I did enjoy the work I was given, but irritatingly, I was not given enough of it. One of my biggest fears in life is boredom. So many decisions I’ve made in life are a direct result of being bored, or trying to be not bored. Some of them have been rather rash.

​But anyway. I had to turn up to work and look busy, but no one really cared what I was doing most of the time, so to alleviate my boredom I started writing a novel. Soon, To Save a Pegasus was finished. I tried to get published. Failed. Twiddled my thumbs for a bit longer, then trotted off to Afghanistan.
 
You see, a chance for a deployment had come up, and ever being one to jump at any opportunity that looks remotely shiny, I stuck my hand up.
 
This article is supposed to be about how my military service has shaped my writing. I’m in danger of writing my military biography here, so I’m not going to go into detail on the rest of my career. I’ll summarise what came next.
 
I spent one year away doing pre-deployment training, the tour itself, then a bit of leave before going back to my old civvy job. I went back, decided I was still bored, and quit to become a property developer. Soon after, I changed Reserve units and went to 170 Engineer Group as their recruiting officer for the Reserves. While there, another chance to deploy came up, and off I went to Afghanistan again. I came back to no job in the Reserves—my recruiting role had been taken over by someone else—so I transferred to a job in the regional Brigade Headquarters.

Meanwhile, I was busily bashing houses to bits as a civvy, slowly building property equity but not quite making the big-bucks I hoped to, when another opportunity popped up—a Full Time Reserve Service job (FTRS) as adjutant at Yorkshire Officers’ Training Regiment was being advertised. I applied, and to my amazement, I got it.
 
Three years later, after having my fill of that job, I quit. This time, I was going to do property development on speed.
 
I rounded up some outside investment and hit the ground running with multiple projects. Things were going well until Brexit uncertainty started playing havoc with the housing market. Sale after sale collapsed—not ideal for cash-flow. Then Covid hit. More delays, price rises, and eventually a property market crash. My head was ready to explode with the stress of it all when another opportunity came along. Another FTRS job. This time as SO2 Basing Operations, North and Scotland. I applied and I got it.
 
I enjoyed the role, but once I’d settled in I ran out of enough work to fill my time. I tried to find work, but kept being told that the things I suggested were not my department’s problem to solve. So, I started writing again.
 
It was perhaps six months into this role that I started writing the first book in The Gallantrian Legacy. Inspired by a holiday where I found time to read, I suddenly recalled an idea for a new book that had been rattling around in my head since I’d finished To Save a Pegasus. In this story, I send a military character from Earth to a magical planet where he has to become a sorcerer to help his wife defeat an evil queen.
 
I’ve always loved fantasy. My relationship with the army has been broadly positive. A combination of the two seemed obvious—to me, at least.
 
I guess the journey I send Tom on, one of my two protagonists, is a journey I would love to go on myself. Tom is a captain in the Royal Engineers when he and his wife, Emma, are abducted by aliens and told that Emma is secretly the heir to a throne on a faraway magical planet. Just to clarify, because Tom is a Regular and a man, doesn’t mean I wish I’d joined up full time and had a different gender, because I’m quite happy as a female Reservist! It just made sense that he was who he was in the context of my story.
 
Between 2021 and 2022, I drafted the six books in The Gallantrian Legacy. In that time, I also quit my FTRS job and started a job for Amazon. I liked the job, but between the long hours, the night shifts, the resumption of my Reservist role and family commitments, it was just a bit too much. So I quit. And late in 2022, with six books drafted and all in need of a lot of editing, I decided I was going to try to make it as an author. Three and a half years later, I’m still working on that one!
 
If people ask me what I do for a living, I now say I’m a Reservist, author, property developer and buildings surveyor. I do a little bit of all four jobs, but I think my passion is writing. Especially writing fantasy fused with my military experiences.
 
In my second book, I send Tom and Emma back to Earth. Tom ends up being arrested for desertion and has a court martial hearing in Catterick. I once did court martial duty in Catterick, so it was the obvious courthouse to choose! I’ve been to Catterick a fair few times and although I don’t mention the name of the pub where Tom catches up with his old friend Mark—a major in the infantry—I can picture it quite clearly in my head. Along with the style of the room in the Officers’ Mess that Tom ends up kipping on the floor of on the evening after Mark picks him up from the courthouse. I’ve seen the inside of those kinds of rooms plenty of times.

​Mark is probably my favourite character. He and Tom were at Sandhurst together, and whereas Tom is a very stereotypical officer—from a middle-class family, went to uni, then commissioned—Mark joined the ranks at sixteen and was put forwards for a soldier-entry commission in his early twenties. Mark grew up on a rough estate in Manchester and got embroiled in petty crime as a kid. Like many people whom I’ve met in the Army over the years, his service somewhat turned his life around.
 
Mark is a bit of a rogue. But he’s also a flyer. He’s an OC at the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick, and his career is progressing nicely when he ends up following Tom back to the magical planet that his old friend had spent the last two years on. Mark ends up stuck there and stuck in the rest of my books in that series, too!
 
Some of my favourite scenes feature banter between Tom and Mark. Mark takes the mick out of Tom for being a typical officer from a middle-class family. Tom grudgingly concedes Mark is better at tactics than him. Mark is clever, direct and tells things how he sees them, and has an interesting time adjusting to life on a medieval-style fantasy planet.
 
Tom’s character draws on my experiences as an officer in general, and my many years of working closely with regular officers, as does Mark’s character. But Mark’s start to life is more similar to mine. Like Mark, I grew up in a single-parent family on a council estate with a mum who was often out of work. I can’t confess to ever being involved in petty crime, unless the odd underage drinking session counts, but my background is very different to the majority of officers I meet in the Army.
 
I recall clearly how difficult I found it to relate to my peers in the UOTC. When they all chatted about gap years and ski holidays and experiences that were way outside the price bracket of stuff I ever did as a kid, I confess I struggled with a degree of jealousy at first. I’d keep quiet and wouldn’t know how to engage in the conversation. I never made any close friends in the UOTC for this reason.
 
Over the years, I’ve come to realise that no one can help the life they’re born into. All they can do is shape the hand they are dealt. As I have, as Mark does. And that years of service life can mean you have more in common with fellow soldiers and officers than you do with anyone who had the same upbringing as you.
 
The longer you serve, the more of an imprint service life has on who you are. In my case, it’s shaped my novels. I simply couldn’t have created Tom and Mark without my military experience. I don’t think I’d be able to make Tom a convincing sapper if I wasn’t a Royal Engineer. I recall someone once saying Tom wasn’t like a ‘real soldier’ in a review of one of my books. I wanted to scream back, “not everyone in the army is in the infantry!”. I didn’t. But I did tweak my manuscript to make it clearer what the role of a Royal Engineer was.

Trying to make it as an author is hard. Bloody hard!
 
But what do I mean by making it as an author? In my head, it means earning more from selling your books than marketing them.
 
Sure, there’s loads of costs involved in getting your books out there in the first place, but these are fixed costs. Once you’ve published your book, what you’ve spent on editing and cover design never changes.
 
I make no secret of the fact that I’ve spent thousands of pounds getting by books publishing ready. The biggest chunk of that cost has gone to editors: circa £1500-£2000 a book, plus what I spent on editors who did a sub-standard job—whose work had to be re-done. I also spent a lot on a cover designer who produced a load of covers that I have since replaced—they just weren’t good enough. My latest designer is far cheaper and far better.
 
I’ve spent lots of money and wasted a big chunk of it. And now I have 6 books ready to release this year. If you want to know how I ended up with 6 books written before I published any of them, I wrote a blog post about it here. Two of them are now out, and I’ve already spent more on marketing them than they’ve earned back in profits from sales and pages read on Kindle Unlimited.
 
Curious about my stats?
 
I’m happy to share. First, here’s my sales figures:

£112.41 earned so far. Path to Power was out on 20th February, Masters of Magic was out on 3rd April. Clash of Crowns is not out until 15th May – so the £1.67 is a pre-order figure.
 
Where have these sales come from?
 
The spike on 20th Feb was mostly down to pre-orders. I’d collected 9 of them by release date. A few others around that date will be from people who might have pre-ordered, except that they wanted a paperback, and pre-orders only work for ebooks. But who were these people? I don’t know for sure, but I’d suggest they’re a mix of people who I’ve engaged with on Twitter, newsletter subscribers, with a few friends in the mix too. But as you can see, sales faded to almost zero until 25th March. A few of my Twitter posts had a lot of hits around that date—there could be a correlation. But I’m actually unsure exactly where they came from, TBH.
 
I know I got 6-9 sales in late March because I attended a Royal Engineers Army Reserves conference, went to a function in the evening, had a few drinks, and managed to persuade quite a few people to buy my book on the spot—they got their phones out an ordered then and there! When you’re at a Sapper conference and you say, “I wrote a book where I send a Sapper to a magical planet!” It seems to get a bit of traction. (Sapper is a term used to describe someone in the Royal Engineers, if you’re wondering).
 
What about ads?
 
As for ads – I kicked off my Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) on 6th April and have sold 6 copies of Path to Power and one copy of Masters of Magic since. I’d suggest the sequel sale is probably from someone who bought Path to Power earlier. So if we attribute all the Path to Power sales to my ads, that gives £10.05 in royalties, plus another £1.75 in pages read in Kindle Unlimited. A total of £11.80.
 
How much have I spent on ads since then? At the time of writing, £88.85. And here is where my money is going. 

Over 20,000 people have seen one of my two ads. 487 people have clicked on the “Shop now” button. And of those people who have perused my book on Amazon, a maximum of 5 of them bought it. How cheery do those figures make you?
 
It’s possible that some people will have downloaded it to Kindle Unlimited. I won’t see any evidence of that until they start reading. It’s possible that some people have saved the post for later or logged the name of the book to come back to. It’s possible. But I doubt that will get me another £80 worth of sales to cover the cost of the ads.
 
Do I have money to burn?
 
Um, no. I’m lucky in that I’m in a stable financial position. Years of slaving away bashing houses to bits, renovating them, selling them and climbing the property ladder means I pay little on my mortgage and I have a bit of rental income besides. I earn a bit from the Army Reserves and from some occasional building surveying. I also have a husband with a decent wage. But can I afford to just throw money away on ads forever? No.
 
So why the hell am I still running them?
 
Er, insanity? Blind faith? A strange desire to impoverish myself? Probably all of these, to an extent. But the real reason is that I’m hanging onto that promise that both Meta and lots of established authors have repeated: that the ads don’t work right away. They take time to find their audience, and people need to see the same ad a few times before they buy.
 
There’s also the potential of read-through. If 50% of buyers of book one go on to buy book two, and of those, 75% buy book three, then for every copy of book one I sell, I get almost the same value again from read-through sales (I did the maths, it’s an extra 87.5% of a sale, to be precise). So that nearly doubles my profits. Then there’s the second trilogy. Then there’s the people my readers might recommend my book to. And so it ripples on—at least, that’s the theory.
 
Chances are I’ll lose money.
 
But chances are, I’ll never make a profit from my books either. Not for a while, at least.
 
I was recently sent an article by Written Word Media. It did a survey of 2000 authors—most of them indie authors—and the answers to one of the questions it asked is below.

This graph kind of made me feel better. I’ll have 6 books out soon. The median earnings for authors with 1-5 books out is £0-$250. For those with 6-10 out, it's just $250-$500. If you say you need to earn at least $2500 a month to earn a living, then the median writer would need to have over 26 books out just to survive of writing alone!
 
That’s a hell of a lot of writing, a hell of a lot of editing, and a hell of a lot of expense—assuming all authors pay for editing and covers.
 
This all sounds terribly gloomy.
 
It does, doesn’t it? But it’s still early days. I’m going to hold my nerve on the ads a little longer and see if they start paying off. I’m going to attend some more in-person events—I went to PASCIFY last Saturday. Another very expensive marketing failure. See this post on Twitter. But the next ones I have planned will be cheaper to attend, and maybe I’ll sell more books? You don’t know unless you try. I’m going to try some promos with websites like Bargain Booksy and Book Barbarian. I’ll give Amazon Ads a go. I’ll write more books and keep trying. I’ve invested too much of my life in my books so far to give up now!

It was September 2021, and I was on holiday. I was with my husband in Santorini, Greece, on the kind of holiday where you spend most of your time lying on a sun lounger not doing very much—the kind where you go away just to have a break from doing stuff.
 
On these kinds of holidays I get a chance to read; and read I did! My life is often so filled with stuff that I don’t find the time, or the headspace, to read, so holidays provide space where I can fill my time with time-fillers—like reading.
 
So there I was, reading books in the sunshine, when I had an epiphany. I could write a novel at work!
 
This sounds like a bit of a dubious connection, but bear with me. Reading fantasy novels reminded me that I loved fantasy novels; it also reminded me that a novel of my own had been rattling around my head for over a decade and still hadn’t been written.
 
In 2010, I was in a graduate-level job and was somewhat under-employed. I had to sit at my desk all day, but I didn’t have enough work to fill my time. No one really cared what I was doing. I was kind of surplus to the team—slotted into various departments to learn about the business, without a real role as such. I was bored, so I decided to start writing a novel. I could merrily tap away at my computer, looking busy, but doing something completely non-work-related.
 
The novel I wrote in 2010 was called To Save a Pegasus. It was about a teenage girl from Earth who stumbled through a portal to another world and ended up embroiled in a mission to save a Pegasus from an evil queen.
 
I wrote it, tried to get it published, failed, and gave up writing for eleven years. But while I was busy not writing much, I did come up with an idea for another story. I wanted to explore the idea of sending more characters from Earth to fantastical places, but this time, it would be a woman who was a long-lost heir to a throne, and her husband, who was an officer in the Royal Engineers. And in this story, they’d not travel through a portal; instead, they would travel across the galaxy to a faraway planet where a magic field replaced the magnetic field, and Earth natives could become uber-sorcerers.
 
The basic concept remained unchanged, but the execution certainly evolved a lot over the eleven years I spent mulling the story over. I actually started writing it twice and gave up after a few chapters on both occasions after not really getting into it.
 
But I still thought about the story every now and then, and it evolved into a trilogy—but it only existed in my head; until September 2021, that is.
 
At that time, I was employed on a full-time contract working for the Army. But I found myself somewhat under-employed. I’d tried to come up with projects to fill my time, but I kept getting told to get back in my box—the problems I was trying to solve didn’t sit within the remit of our department, apparently. So I was left to stare at a screen, bored, in case anyone Skype-called me.
 
So that epiphany I mentioned happened because I was reading again, which reignited my love of fantasy, which made me think of that novel I’d been mulling over for over a decade, which reminded me of that time I wrote a different novel while bored at work. So, I decided that when I got back to my desk, I would start writing book 1 of my trilogy.
 
By Christmas 2021, the first draft of book 1 was written. In the new year, I started on book 2. By Easter 2022, I’d quit my job due to not being stretched enough and was busy working my notice before I’d start a new job working for Amazon. I’d also finished the first drafts of books 2 and 3. Then I started on the sequel trilogy. By the time my contract ended at the end of July 2022, I’d finished the first drafts of books 1 and 2 of my second trilogy and started on the third.
 
Meanwhile, I’d had friends and family read book 1, made a few tweaks, and tried to get it published. I talk all about this novel’s journey in a blog post I wrote in August 2024. You can find it here if you’re interested. The amusing thing is that at the time I wrote that post, I thought that novel’s journey was almost finished! It wasn’t. It had a long way to go. I won’t bore you with the details, but to summarise, I published it in May 2025, then unpublished it soon after.

​Why?
 
Several reasons—the main one being that it got review-bombed thanks to a little Twitter storm I got embroiled in. But looking back, I’m starting to think that was perhaps a blessing in disguise.
 
If I hadn’t been review-bombed for something that had nothing to do with my novel, I wouldn’t have unpublished it. But the thing is, it went out with flaws. It hadn’t been edited as thoroughly as it should have been because I’d been let down with editors and was determined to hit my publishing date. Its plot was perhaps not as tight as it should have been, either.
 
So I did some more work on it, got it beta read, digested the feedback, tweaked it some more, got it edited—again, and now it’s ready. Proofed and polished to within an inch of its life, the bloody thing is as it is now and isn’t getting changed again!
 
So that’s Path to Power. But I mentioned I wrote another five books besides. What was going on with all these during this period?
 
I didn’t just abandon them in draft form; they got work too.
 
To roll back a little, after I finished my first trilogy, tried to get it published and got nowhere, I had a pro manuscript review done, and when I read it, I realised book 1 stank. It needed so much work that I couldn’t face it right then, so I decided to publish my sequel trilogy instead and come back to my first trilogy later.
 
My second trilogy was written after I’d practiced writing on another three books, so it was, of course, better. It didn’t need as much work to get it into a decent state, I thought, so I could polish these books, publish, then after, polish the first trilogy and publish the first trilogy second. It worked for Star Wars, why shouldn’t it work for me?
 
So my second trilogy, The Offspring Trilogy, was pro-edited, polished, and published in 2023.
 
All three books got good reviews. I sold a few hundred copies. But I just couldn’t seem to build the momentum I hoped for. Sales began to dwindle, and my read-through from book 1 to 2 wasn’t great. I was starting to think book 1, The General’s Son, had flaws.
 
Not massive flaws, granted. It wouldn’t have got good reviews if it were a bad story. I just suspected it took a bit too long to get going and maybe lost readers early on. I wanted a professional opinion on this story before I did anything else, so I paid for a manuscript review. The review confirmed my suspicion about the start, but it suggested that a few other things weren’t working as well as they could, either. So, around a year after The General’s Son was released, I unpublished it—with 39 reviews averaging 4.5 stars.

​Condor moment time. I took a deep breath and decided to start over. I’d re-write my first trilogy. I’d tweak The General’s Son, I’d then get all six books ready and shiny and polished and launch the whole lot of ‘em, starting with The Queen of Vorn (since renamed to Path to Power) in May 2025.
 
As mentioned earlier, The Queen of Vorn was published, then unpublished soon after, pending a re-brand and some more work.
 
So, after another round of editing, all six books will be out this year.
 
Book 1 is now out. Books 2 to 6 will be out at six-week intervals until they have all been released into the world. For good, this time. I’m not un-publishing again!