I'm super excited to announce that Up the Creek is now available as an audiobook on Audible and Amazon and soon to be available on iTunes. If you already have an Audible account, you can listen to it for free. Otherwise, you can purchase it for the seemingly arbitrary price of $13.08 (Audible sets the price, not me). Anyway, Tanner De Bruyne did an excellent job of narrating it, and he's already working on Unlimited, which will be made available on audio this summer, followed by The Water War. You can listen to the first chapter for free below.

Chapters are starting to roll in, narrated by Tanner De Bruyne. Excited to hear the finished product, soon to be available on Audible and Apple Books. In the meantime, here's the first chapter. 

To celebrate the book being in print for five years, I decided it was time to do a new cover, so I commissioned Hannah Doerksen, who did such an excellent job on Randolph the Yellow Snowman, to do it for me. Here's what she came up with. New cover soon to be available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

I've held off on turning the Milligan Creek Series into audio books for a while now, partly because I wasn't sure if there was a market for middle grade audio books (I've since learned there is) and partly because I wanted to narrate the books myself but never seemed to find the time to do it.

However, recently I read something by fellow indie publisher, ad guy, podcaster, and coach Bryan Cohen where he said that even though you may be good at doing a lot of things, it doesn't mean you should be everything yourself. Instead, you should be focusing on what you do best and, perhaps most importantly, what makes you the most money.

That was a tough pill for me to swallow seeing as I enjoy learning new skills and seeing if I can pull them off. Case in point: on my last documentary, I was writer, director, producer, and editor. We only had a two person crew (me and my son, Huw), so I also worked as a cameraman, sound recorder, sound mixer, gaffer, grip, post-production supervisor, music supervisor, second-unit cameraman, and the list goes on. Contrary to appearances, it's not a control issue, just a desire to see if I can do it.

As I mulled over this advice, realizing Bryan was right, lo and behold, last Sunday my wife mentioned that someone I knew right here in town is an audio book narrator. I contacted him immediately, had him record a short sample, and just last night greenlit the project. 

With any luck, Up the Creek (which just came out in hardcover) should be ready to go by the end of April, with the other books to follow. I'll keep you posted here. 

I finally took the plunge and made Up the Creek available in hardcover, exclusively on Amazon. The other Milligan Creek Series books will follow shortly. The move involved resizing the book slightly and tweaking the cover, shown below. It also gave me an opportunity to add "A Brief Note About the Inspiration Behind This Book," which I've included in every other Milligan Creek series book. Plus, this edition contains a sneak peek at the first chapter of Unlimited. which will be the next book to get the hardcover treatment. 

​Up the Creek, the first book in the Milligan Creek Series, has just reached an important milestone (at least in my mind). As of this week, it's sold over 10,000 copies! That may not sound like a lot considering some books sell into the millions, but remember that this is an independently published book set in Saskatchewan of all places, and the majority of those sales have been into the good, ol' US of A. In fact, my biggest market is New York City. Go figure! As Frank Sinatra said, "If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere!"

I wrote the first draft of Up the Creek way back in 2001. I was living in Abbotsford, BC, at the time, and we had just had our first child. I'd gotten a bite on the book after pitching the first few chapters to a mid-sized Canadian publisher, so over the next few weeks, I knocked out the entire draft, revised it, and was about to send it in when . . . that publisher went under, along with a number of other Canadian publishers who were the first wave to go bankrupt in the face of the dot com boom and a major consolidation in the market. Feeling a bit disheartened and not knowing what to do with it, I set the manuscript aside as I spent the next fourteen years or so working in the film industry.

Then in 2015, with filmmaking opportunities dwindling and opportunities for self-publishing growing, particularly through Amazon, I decided to dust off the manuscript and see if I could find an audience. 

Initially, I focused on Saskatchewan, seeing as that's where the story is set. Not knowing how to market the book directly to kids, I decided to go to the "gatekeepers" instead--teachers, librarians, and parents--by offering to do writing workshops. Not only did this provide a legitimate service to schools and libraries, it also got me in front of thousands of potential readers. The plan worked, and soon I was booking writing workshops all over Western Canada. That gave me enough confidence to continue the series, until today I'm working on the fifth book with plans for at least two more. 

And it all started with Up the Creek, which has now become part of the childhood reading of thousands of children across North America. Considering how formative authors like Gordon Korman, Roald Dahl, and Farley Mowat were for me growing up, it's amazing to think my books are playing the same role for so many kids. 

I often joke that writing is all about days and nights of misery punctuated by brief moments of despair--and then something really bad happens. It's not really that terrible, but it is a laborious process riddled with self-doubt. So, I'm a big advocate of celebrating little victories and milestones like this one. Thanks to everyone who has supported Up the Creek and the other books in the series. The best is yet to come!
 

Just received this nifty award along with a cash prize for Up the Creek!, the first novel in the Milligan Creek series. Pretty cool!