The ripple effect
Get your work out there, says Michael Allen – it could have an unexpected effect
I recently came across my original copy (bought in 2007) of Andrew Losowsky’s remarkable book The Doorbells of Florence.
Doorbells, as I shall abbreviate it, was first published under the Prandial Publishing/Lulu imprint, which means that it was self-published – because that’s what Lulu.com did then (and still does, very well).
Doorbells is essentially a collection of photographs of unusual doorbells in the city of Florence. Having taken the photographs, Losowsky then wrote a series of short stories about the imagined person(s) who lived behind those doors. But these are not just stand-alone stories: Losowsky introduces a narrative thread which links both the first and the last of them, and which reappears periodically throughout the book.