 I mean, I left the Paras, joined the SAS. I was one of the youngest to join at the time. American Army logistics team took a wrong turn, drove into Al-Nazareer. They allowed me onto the sort of plinth to see this fallen statue of Saddam, very famous statue at the time. And then from the distance, I saw this old boy in the middle of the road with the head. Quite exciting time of being sniped at, trying to bargain for this, the head of Saddam in the middle of Baghdad. Spud, how are you, brother? Pretty good, Chris. Pretty good. Great to chat again, mate. Yeah, I heard the Goose Green podcast went really well. Yeah, so for our friends at home, Nigel Spud Ely was a former parachute regiment, joined the SAS, during Spud's time in the Paras. He took part in the infamous, or do we call it legendary, battle of the Goose Green. And the podcast that we did was just went through the roof. I think it's been one of our most popular so far. And so it should be, you know, in memory to those guys that went down there and fought and also to those that came back injured or didn't come back at all. And today we're going to be talking about the next phase of your life, but aren't we in your adventures? And bring me the arse of Saddam. Do you want to tell us a bit about that? Bring me the arse of Saddam, yeah. Basically, right, Chris, we shouldn't forget the those that were very badly wounded in Goose Green and during the Falklands were, of course, the 255 lost souls through all, all arms. And we just shouldn't forget them. And yeah, I've got a book coming out March next year called Goose Green, Uncensored Voices. And it took me three years to put together. I basically travelled up and down this great nation of ours, interviewing the guys that were there and civilians and the merchant navy at Navy Air Force. The guys that worked there at the front, the guys that helped us win the battle. So that's kind of, that's an exciting project that's been reviewed at Frankfurt Book Show this week. So I'm really excited about that. But yeah, I mean, I left the powers, joined the SAS. I was one of the youngest to join at the time. I left the SAS then went on to do military contracting, which they now call the business in Iraq and Afghanistan. We used to call it bodyguarding, but now they call it CP, don't they? I then became a war correspondent. I covered a bit of Afghan. And basically I wanted to cover the invasion or liberation of Iraq, depending on what side of the political fence you sit at. I had all my creditations from the NUJ, National Union of Journalists, and I had contacts in Kuwait. So the idea was was for me to basically base myself in Kuwait until such times that Blair and Bush gave the order to invade. That tells you where I come from. And so I sat up there, but by a twist of fate I bumped into an old mate of mine while back on leaving Hereford, a guy called J.Y. Who just left the SAS, a very esteemed career. And we served together in the Falklands. And indeed he actually saved my femur as we assorted down to Goose Green because we were getting mortared and he just shouted out spud. And I sort of stopped. And then a big sort of length of shrapnel came sizzling past my right femur. So J.Y. and I have always sort of been mates. Anyway, I bumped into him in Hereford and he said that he'd just formed a company the now very famous Olive Security, multi-million pound contract company now which has been bought out. He said that they've got their first contract and that they were going to assist Sky News. Sky News had a Maverick team that they were going to cover the war without being embedded. And the invasion into Iraq was basically the first war where you had two sets of journalists. You had the embedded and the journalists were embedded with units whether they were on board ship in the Gulf or whether they were forward with the combat Marine teams and they had un-embedded. Basically people like myself that had all of the journalistic credentials but we were allowed a free reign on the battlefield. So that sort of had inherent risks because you work covered by, you work covered medically and you work covered communications-wise and equally you could become a victim of blue on blue. So you had to have the knowledge of battlefield. You had to have combat knowledge if we're not to go where to go. And journalists mostly, mainly, they want to break news and generally that they will risk their life to break news. Not many of them have been in war. So they really didn't know. So Sky News employed J.Y. and J.Y. and U.R. is going out to cover the war and he said, well, why don't you double up as a security? And then you can use our SATCOMs, they're satellite comms at the time for a wire and then you can send your copy back to whoever wanted to buy it. And I thought that was a great idea and that's basically what we did. On day one of the war, I was the first un-embedded journalist to cross into Iraq from Kuwait. We, Sky News filmed the first battle of Safwan and then several days into it, I was involved with probably the biggest battle of the war, the battle for Al-Nazariya. And that was where the famous incident happened when the American Army logistics team took a wrong turn, drove into Al-Nazariya, which is really a sort of a nest of vipers. You won't want to get caught in there. These guys got caught. They got ambushed. Most of them got killed. I think there's about 12 or 13 got killed, but there was a woman, Jessica Bleach, who got injured. Anyway, there was a big thing about it because the American Marines and everyone else, hopefully the Iraqis had raped this woman and the God knows well. And there was all these rumors going around. But actually I was the first un-embedded journalist to interview the doctor who saved her and he gave me a completely different story. So the book covers up to Al-Nazariya and I've written about his conversation, which is very humane because of an incident that happened when he was in Kuwait when Saddam invaded Kuwait. But I won't spoil that for the readers. A few more days, we move forward and eventually went into Baghdad. Once again, the Sky News and myself became the first un-embedded team to reach a third or square, which is where that famous statue was pulled down of Saddam Hussein. And next to it was the Palestine Hotel, which is where all the world media were all congregating. And if you can recall far back then, we had an embedded journalist in the Palestine Hotel for months before the invasion. So while the Sky Boys went and did all their thing and back slapped all the rest of their fellow journalists, I was left wondering what to do. And I've kind of wanted to go and see this statue. It had been pulled down several hours earlier. So I went over and seen the Marines and basically they allowed me onto the sort of plinth to see this fallen statue of Saddam, very famous statue at the time, probably still is. Then there was sort of gunshots going all over the place and the Marines were engaging targets because they were getting sniped at. And then from the distance, I saw this old boy in the middle of the road with the head. And I couldn't believe it. And the head was missing from the statue. So I guess it was the head of Saddam. So I went over there to see if it was and actual fact it was. So I've expanded on that in the book as well. So quite exciting time of being sniped at, trying to bargain for this, the head of Saddam in the middle of Baghdad and then having to be escorted back by the US Marine Corps back into safety. Anyway, so that went on for about three or four days. And I got a bit bored with the whole thing. J.Y. and the Sky Team were being changed over and they had to go north to Crete because the rumor said that Saddam was hiding out in Crete, which was his hometown. So I decided to make a mad dash back. And I took a few journalists back with me in typical sort of military style, gave them a briefing and no nonsense briefing, what I'm gonna do, what I wanted from them, what I expected from them and stuck fucking asking questions sort of thing, because journalists always ask questions. So we eventually, we made it back to the border after having been given by the Marines a big piece of this arse from the statue. Because the Marine said to me, he said, well, buddy, what do you want a piece of the bronze? And I said, yeah, I will do. And it just happened that his left buttock came off. They cut it off with this steel disc cutter and smashed it with a crowbar and stuff. So I eventually had that in the back of the wagon, got stopped by the Kuwaiti police army on the border. They didn't believe we'd come from Baghdad. They took away a lot of trinkets from the guys. The guys had pinched a load of Saddam pictures and I mean, you know, the usual stuff, AK-47 rounds of magazines. God knows why they wanted them. But they left the arse alone in the back of the truck. And I said to one of the soldiers, I said, you know, that's a bullet catcher. That's pretend they kind of understood that because I had sandbags in the back as well. So, so kind of long story short from there, the book then takes us several years forward. I was still working in Iraq and I was getting really, really pestered off with the way our wounded and soldiers were being treated. And the sun runner, a news article that really slugged off the NHS and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. So I made some investigations. It wasn't as bad as what the son had made out, but it was enough, it was concerning enough for me to sort of wanted to do something about it. So I thought with this piece of arse, what could I do? So I decided to put it up for auction to raise money for the Royal Centre Defense Medicine, which was where all our boys and girls were coming back to the wounded. And they were being sort of looked after there. And Hope for the Warriors, which is a US Marine Corps charity in America, which I sort of got involved in. So I put it up for auction. It sort of didn't reach its reserve because I deliberately put a high reserve on it because when you put something in auction, you wanna give it an outing, something as kind of important historically, I guess, as the arse, or as funny as the arse at the time it was, it wasn't historically important then to give it a second outing. So I put an unachievable high reserve just to get a feeling what the market wanted. And then after that, all hell broke loose because the police then sort of came and arrested me. They wanted to know where the arse was, what was I selling it? I stole it and then they came out in the United Nations sanctions. I stole the arse, knowingly taking or stealing Iraqi cultural property, can you believe it? So the book sort of covers that part from the Keystone cop element of them trying to chase me and find the arse. And they still haven't got it yet. I was bailed seven times over a period of 14, 15 months, which really screws up your business, screws up everything, screws up your life because you left in limbo. And that really pissed me off, that got me angry. And they eventually, because they couldn't find it, they eventually said the arse wasn't the arse and I was a fraud, which really really pissed me off as well. So I decided to write the book about the story to see how complicit some of the police were and just how devious they were in trying to, I don't know, react to some foreign government telling them what to do. I mean, basically they were, I thought that, and the way contracts work in Iraq as they do generally everywhere, you get a contract, somebody wants something else, you know, the Brown envelope type of thing. So I've got this thing in my head that maybe the British government was doing something in Baghdad and one of the ministers, Iraqi ministers decided he'd want the arse. He may have the head that he wanted the arse. And he realized how much it was worth now because I've got estimates anything up from 40,000 to 250,000 pounds at the time. So I got the impression that they screened that the British embassy apparatchiks in Baghdad who then screened a Metropolitan police in London. And the Metropolitan police in London were so, well, I know this, they were so embarrassed that they farmed it off to Derbyshire police because that's where I initially auctioned the arse up at Derby. Only because my business partner at the time knew someone that knew Charles Hansen, the chap on the BBC Antique program. We auctioned it at his auction house. And that's when my sort of life changed really because then I went back to Kuwait and went to an Islamic art festival and bumped into an American guy and he put an estimate of seven to 10 million US dollars on it, which absolutely shocked me. But then he gave me the example of the Mona Lisa. He said, the Mona Lisa, you can't buy it. I mean, if it was a billion dollars, you still wouldn't be able to buy it. The last estimate a few years ago was 750 million. And I said, why is that? He said, well, it's the provenance of it. He said, if you saw it in a yard sale or a boot fair, you wouldn't get 10 quid for it. He said, but it's the provenance behind it. He said, same with your ass. He says, it's the provenance behind the actual object. So, you know, I was being run around one time. I got a message, got a phone call. I don't normally answer phone people when people sort of phone me up and say, hey, Spud, it's either a good friend or possibly a journalist because it was still quite warm at the time from the auction. So I, and it was a no-call, you know, no-call identity on the phone. So I decided to take it anyway. And this bloke phoned up and said, he said, is that Spud? I said, yeah. He says, this is a friend. I went, oh, mate, not that old chestnut. What do you want? You know, what journalist, what newspaper? Are you an independent? He said, no, he said, this is a friend. This is no duff. So you know what no duff is. So I mean, I thought, well, if you say it to me, no duff, that indicates to me that it means basically there's a, if you're on exercise for your listeners and viewers, if you're on exercise and someone has a fatality or a bad injury, no duff means you go on the radio and you say, no duff. And basically it means that if you're the enemy, you're not allowed to use the area where the accident took place to enhance your position, to then when the injured is lifted out of the area, you can then use that information to then go and attack the forces there. So it's no duff. So it meant, you know, don't piss about, this is not training, this is real life. So I sort of took that on board. He said, have you got the arse? And I says, well, yeah, I have. And I said, why? He said, because they're coming to get it. I said, what do you mean they're coming to get it? He said, the police, they're coming to search your properties. I says, well, right, so they're gonna do a raid on it. He said, yeah, they're doing a raid on it. I said, but I'm in Herefordshire. And they said, yeah, they're coming. I said, when are they coming? And he said, well, what's the day? I said, Friday. He said, how about Monday? So they came to me. So this is someone up there in the security services helping me. They know the cause, they know I'm not a threat for anything or a thief or this is the absurdity of it. So the book covers that side as well. So that's, I enjoyed writing the book. It is funny. It's been a reviewer put up something like, it's a corking read, crisp, eloquent, and at times laugh out loud. And it is, and it made me absolutely laugh when I was writing it. To the absurdity, the waste of police time, tax payers' money, the whole bloody lot. I engaged a pro bono barrister and that's in the book as well. So the book is of two parts. The book is my adventure through war to get the arse. I didn't intend to get the arse. I just intended to be first or whatever I didn't break decent stories, which I hope I did. And the second part is back in the UK where I'm pursued by this mad Derbyshire Constabulary and helped on by the Metropolitan Police. She's crazy. So, Spud, what's it like then? Because the thought of the police rocking up on your doorstep would terrify your average person. Or it's not everybody, but it's gonna put your nose out of it. As an SAS man that's seen combat, how do you deal with that copper when you're at your door? Are you nervous or are you just like, what will be and will be? Well, the funny thing is, because I live in quite isolation, I know the sounds. And I heard a pheasant sort of cry and flutter around and I knew that wouldn't be a fault because it was very light. And so I knew something had disturbed it. So, obviously I was waiting for the Monday when the Monday came. I wasn't sure if they were gonna turn up, but I was waiting for them. Anyway, this pheasant fluttered around and I thought, well, okay, then someone's coming down the track. And yeah, I was right. It was this guy, Sargent. He's named Sargent Sargent in the book. He was promoted to inspector after all this nonsense. But yes, Sargent Sargent came knocking at the door and I said to him, yeah, what do you want? He says, oh, we've got a search warrant to come and search. I said, what do you wanna search for? He says, I've come to search for the bronze arts of Sudan. I said, all right then. I said, where's the search warrant? He says, oh, it's in the car up the track. We got stuck up the track. I said, I guess it's an unmade road road lift. I said, well, you better go and get it then. So he trudged all the way back up there and he came down with two heavies. And actually, if I had the two heavies turned out to be real nice. You know, they came in the cottage and asked them to take their boots off if they wanted to go upstairs. He spent a couple of hours here, took away my diaries because I wrote the diary every day of the campaign which I needed, obviously, notes to write the book. And they were really good. But the strange thing was, and this really, really worried me, they didn't ask me. I've got a firearms license and a shotgun license, yeah? And I have weapons. And they didn't ask me if they could see them. I had to physically tell them and show them. I had to say, look, you know, I've got weapons in the house here, guns. And they went, oh, right, really? And you know, I thought that's the first thing they would have done, especially in this day and age. So I said, look, you need to come to the gun cabinet and we'll sort it out. And I'll be nice and slow and take it easy. So you know, obviously they weren't trained in weapons. So I was very, I was very cautious because I didn't want anything to happen. And yeah, that completely blew me. That completely blew me. They didn't even know I had firearms licenses. So just shows you the inadequacies. Anyway, they left me tell between their legs. I guess it was a jolly for them from Derby. And yeah, that's when it all started. That was when the fun and game started. But it just showed me the competence of the police out there. I'm sure they're not all like that, but certainly Derbyshire and Sabry were. Are you at liberty to tell us what weapons you've got? I'm quite interested. Yeah, I'll rather not. I'll tell you, I'll tell you off line. Okay. Yeah, I'll tell you off line. Yeah. That's one of these things. Police, man, everything's legal. I get seven to 10 years if I didn't. Yeah, of course. Easy. Yeah, I've got a friend. He's got a few rifles and stuff and he's, he does a lot of work for farmers and kind of landlords that have got big areas to land and taking out foxes and... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got a big squirrels around here at the moment. Yeah, literally squirrels. First time I've seen it in years and they're taking all, first time I've seen it, they're taking all the conkers off the tree, which is unheard of. I've never, I would have thought they'd be poisonous or something. Yeah, yeah, well, they've been taken. I'm a barrenam, blast them. Maybe a hard winter's coming. Yeah, for all of us, I think, if this nonsense carries on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've got some other stories from Iraq. You've had some close shaves over there. Yeah, when we initially crossed the border, I had this jeep, the Sheikh who I deal business with, the Sheikh Amoud al-Sabah in Kuwait, he gave me one of his vehicles and it was one of these jeeps, jeep Cherokee it was, but J.Y. and the Sky Team had these high lapses. And what you should have done as journalists, and we did, was put the arrow, the black arrow, on the side of the vehicle and on the roof, which was to tell those guys up in the air, don't hit us with friendly forces, you know, big black arrow. But J.Y. and I decided that wasn't good enough. You know what I mean? In the heat of combat, that's not fucking good enough. So I got stars and stripes flag, managed to find one in Kuwait city and J.Y. got the Union flag. I mean, we take them to the roofs of our vehicles. So the first time we crossed the border was away from the main crossing point at Abdili, which was where all the main, the British and the Americans were gonna go through. We crossed it further up from Safwan towards the coast, an area which I knew very well from my time in Kuwait. And as soon as we crossed it, we were intercepted by these three Cobra gunships. And that was absolutely scary. The Cobra gunship is the US Marine in equivalent of our Apache. And that was absolutely frightening. The lead pilot came down to about 300, 400 meters, dipped its nose and I thought we were just gonna get vaporized. It was absolutely fucking mind-blowing. And the thing you do in vehicles is you never, never, never get out the vehicle. Even if your vehicle is disappearing from the, just it's all smashed up and it's disappearing from where you're sitting and you don't even get out the vehicle. Unless and unless you really have to and then you make a dash for it. This incident, I was screaming to the teams, don't get out the vehicle. J.Y. was doing the same. And then eventually I had to do something because he came right down, dropped his nose and I thought, what's he gonna do? He's not gonna waste a hellfire on us. He's gonna spray us with his 20 mil Vulcan cannons. So I basically put my head and arms and hands out the window like I'm surrendering and eventually managed to get to it. And I'm screaming at him, we're Brits, we're friendly. What you do when you're like really pissed off. And you're just about to die. And I got out the car, then J.Y. We slid out the cars, the vans and he sort of saw that we were Brits. So obviously saw the Union, the Union flag and the stars and stripes of our vehicles and realized we were gonna threat. But it was, you know, several minutes of hot beating. You know, this is it. We haven't even got, we've only crossed the, you know, 100 meters into the desert into Iraq. And this is us. This is us goodbye. But he saw a sense, thank God. He did a smart left and turned off towards Uncle Sir Port. And then we managed to hitch up with the convoy guy North, which was the basically, we wanted to cover the Brits down in Basra. But really the Brits wasn't the story for me. Sky News wanted to cover it because their anchor man, Jeremy Thompson, was covering with the Irish, was down there embedded with the Royal Irish. And I wanted to get the bagged out because that was the story of us. But I had to go with the sky team for safety. We got several miles outside of Basra where we got to stop by the Brits. I thought, well, we're gonna get captured here and sent back across the border. But they basically told us, you can't go any further because there's T-74, T-72 tanks down the road and we're just about to engage them. So that was like, okay, we'll do a left and we'll jump on the back of the Marines, thank you. And that's what we did. Unfortunately, several hours later, ITN journalist, ITV journalist Terry Lloyd, who I'd had a coffee with in the Marriott Hotel in Kuwait several days earlier, real nice chap, went down with his camera crew and got killed in a blue on blue American airstrike. I don't think they found the French cameraman either. I think he's still missing, presumed dead. Yeah, so that's... Yeah, I think I remember that. Bring me the arse of Saddam. Can you see that? Yes, we can. Lovely picture of me on the back as well. And we'll put a link for it below this video, folks. So please follow the link and get yourselves a copy. So what was it like writing the book? You say you wrote it off the back of this police harassment. Yeah, the idea, yeah, it angered me so much that I thought, although having my experience of being bailed several times during that period, it's not uncommon. People get bailed like that all the freaking time I mean, they get bailed seven, eight times in a year. And for me, living in Harrahfordshire, I had to go to Derby every time, two and a half hour, three hour drive back. You know, it's all time and it's designed to grind you down. And I had to let them know if I was going off out the country. I mean, it's really is. It really is. They treat you like a terrorist, you know. They don't want veterans either, do they? So I mean, but that's another opinion that I have. Yeah, so I decided to write the book. I went to my agent and he sort of, he turned it down. That's what he did, he turned it down. But he's also turned down a couple of other books which have been best sellers. So, but he's a good guy. He's a good guy, he just has so much on. So I said, okay, then you don't want it. I'll write it myself. And at the time, a couple of years back, Amazon were making self-publishing the way to go forward for people that haven't ever been published. Now, I've been published several times before by a big publisher. So I was going to take it to them, but I thought, no, it's because it's a niche genre. When I say that, it's, although it's a sort of SAS and para and there's a bit of war in it. It's also so comical in the sense of the second part of the book is a bit of a fast, where the keystone caught fast. And I thought, well, I'll have a go at it. If it's that good, you know, it'll sell. And I write to make money. I don't write because I want to see my name on the front jacket. I write to make money because it's, as you know, Chris, it is very hard and it's tedious and you have to become very, very disciplined in order to finish the book. So I decided to do it myself. I watched a ton of YouTube videos and there's some great videos out there on how to do it with Amazon, which was the path I was going to take and did take eventually. How to set it up, the text, the font to use, everything else is out there on YouTube. Also, get a book off the shelf if you're unsure. Measure the margins. It's normally 35 lines per page and 10 words per page. You know, so you get an idea because if you can't get an agent, and I would always say try and get an agent, but getting an agent these days is, unless you're someone very well-known or you're very, very, very, very lucky to send your manuscript in on a Monday morning, they pick it up and they just seen a war movie, for example, and your manuscript's about war and they like it and it's a bloke or a woman. It go with file 13. So the options are very, very tiny for self-publishing authors, first-time authors. So that's what you do. I went through Amazon, Amazon are very good. Get yourself an Amazon account. They take you stage by stage in actually setting up the book. Write the book. Your book should be between, well, a non-fiction book because that's all I write. It's generally between 70 and 120,000. My uncensored voice is for Goose Green. The Goose Green book is about 130, but it's quite a big book. But generally 80,000 is quite good. Yeah, you set it up with the font that you prefer. Normally it's Times or... One of the, Ariel's not a good one. Garamond is good. The other one's Courier. A lot of them like Courier. But you can choose whatever font you want. All the bump, all the blurb in the front of all these books, you can get online through the YouTube videos or copy it from a recent book. And that's what you do with that. When you've got it all up together, you have to have it edited. Now, this is what happened to me when I first published, Bring Me the Arse of Saddam. My brother was dying of cancer and he didn't have long to live. And I kind of rushed it because I wanted him to fill the book when he was lying on his deathbed. You know, it was a personal thing for me. By trying to reach that timeline, I didn't have it edited properly. I paid to have it edited. And that's another thing. You have to be careful who edits it. I paid about 500 quid to have it edited. And they didn't edit it right. But I thought they'd done a job. But I didn't re-edit it myself, if you understand. It was sent to a company that does it, that does editing, so they say. But they don't know the idiosyncrasies of this particular genre, i.e. military. Always best, if you write a book about war or military, try and find a military editor. So they didn't edit it right. So it went to print. My brother saw a bit of the book. I rushed it out, went to print. And there was an awful lot of mistakes in it, embarrassing it a load, embarrassing. And I want to make an apology to everybody in the book, the first edition. Although it still reads right, there was the grammatical mistakes in it, spelling mistakes. Yeah, I wasn't proud of the first edition. But that's all corrected now. So the things you need, you need to write the book. You need to get it edited. Then you have to pay someone to design the jacket because jackets are like fashion, okay? At the time, Amazon only did paperback. They now do hardback, but it's what they call a wraparound hardback. They don't have a dust jacket on them. So a wraparound is like, remember the school, the comic annuals, remember? The hardcover annuals, the beanows, so I remember it. It's the wraparound jacket. It doesn't have the paper jacket. It's basically stuck on. So you have to have a jacket designer, someone specifically that knows how to set the jacket up and knows the fashion of books for your genre. I tried three and I was embarrassed. And then I tried a fourth off the internet, a guy called John Amy, who really did a good job. And he's credit is in the front of the book. So if you wanted to get hold of him by the book and you'll see the credit in there for him. And he did a great job. It's the second jacket he's done. He just upgraded the book to, you have to refresh the book all the time. So my advice is get an editor, pay for an editor, pay for a jacket designer. But having said that, a friend of mine wrote a small book about war poems and he got a chap in Singapore, I think, paid $40 for the jacket design. But I paid about 200 pounds for mine because there's complications in it. Well, you look at the jacket, you see the back of the book as well. There's a lot more detail to it. So you have to pay for that. Yeah, so the jacket design, once you've got the jacket template, you then upload it all to Amazon and they do it. Now they check to see if your text is in line with their book. They give you several different book sizes you choose from. My book, bring me the answer to that is nine by six, which is a common kind of, it's a nice size. You can see it, it's not as big as a hardback and it's not as small as a traditional paperback novel. They put it all in and they actually go through it page by page very quickly with this modern technology. And they tell you if your text is outside the lines of their parameters, and they tell you to adjust it. What I will say is you can upload it in Word, but you should really do it in Adobe because they like Adobe. Now that may have changed. I haven't uploaded a book for a couple of years, but that's wrong six months ago. So look at the software that suits you and you have to buy Adobe or at least buy, I think it's 12 pound a month. Work out how you're gonna set up the book and do it. Writing the book is the easy thing. It is the easy thing about being an author. He's writing a book, getting it published through Amazon. It's relatively easy. It's not, if you know your way around word processing and incidentally, a friend of mine, I spoke to him yesterday, Lonnie, he's like an expert in IT and all that. And he's written this, but he sent it to me. He said he wants me to read through it because this first time publisher. And I said to him, Lonnie, if you know your way around the IT that word processing business and software, he says, I do. I said, well, you're fine. Okay, but it's not necessary. I did. I had to learn everything myself. Process was, you know, I had to learn it all myself. So once you've done that, you go to Amazon and then they send you a, basically a draft copy format. You have to pay for that. It's only about five, six quid. And it comes with draft stamped all over it. So you can't sell it. You like the idea. Then you have to get an ISBN number. Now, Amazon, the ISBN number is the international number that tells you, it's basically the fingerprint of the book anywhere in the world. Now, Amazon, give them for free, but funny, contemptuously, in my opinion, booksellers don't like the Amazon ISBN number. Okay, so you have to buy the ISBN number. I think I bought six ISBN numbers for about 130 quid off a company. There's only two or three companies that sell them off a company called Nielsen, I think. I bought six because I thought it was cheaper in the long run rather than I think it was about 50, 60 quid for one. I bought five or six. So you have to have that. And that's when you go through the Amazon process, there's a little space on the back of the book that you put it in. Again, on the software designs and does it all for you. So that's fine. Yeah, when the book comes back, you read through it again, look at the quality, make any changes, put it into Amazon, make the changes, it gets accepted. They then put it up on their website. You're ready to rock and roll. That is the easy bit. The hardest bit is marketing, as I found out. It's marketing. You could have the best book in the world, fantastic book. If you can't get it out to people, you ain't gonna sell any. You ain't gonna sell any copies. So you have this two ways of getting the book out. One is through Amazon. The other one is through a company called Ingram Spark. What's Ingram now? Basically they are a company which booksellers, retail booksellers buy from. You then go through the same process as you went through Amazon, slightly different, but you have to pay for it. Okay, it's slightly different. And this, see I've got the Amazon book here, which is a bit flimsy, but thick. And I've got the Ingram Spark book, which is a bit more quality, but it's thinner. Slightly different font style, but same font, but slightly different style. But they are both the same. And you need, if you want to get your book out, which I'm sure you do, you need to make sales, then you have to do Ingram Spark as well. So they're the two ways of going out. Amazon, cross the world platform, and Ingram Spark, which retail is buy from in bulk. We lost our one, Bertrams, I think Bertrams. They were like a mini Ingram Spark. Ray went bust, I think last year during the CCP virus. So I would look at Ingram Spark, but initially go for Amazon, because Amazon will then convert your book to Kindle. And Kindle sales are really good. They're up 15% year on year. So you've got your book out. You go through the process of, you have to look at what you pick books like yourself and then you price accordingly. A lot of people give free books away. I don't like the idea of that because free books, I mean, all that hard work that you put in as an author and all that time, you shouldn't be giving it away for free. They also tells me it's not worth buying. They can give it away for free. You can reduce sales, reduce price, which is fine. So then, okay, so then you've got it out there. But as I say, Amazon takes you through all the steps through pricing at different territories. When I talk about territories, I talk about countries, America, Canada, all the Western countries. In particular, Germany is a big, is a very big bar of English books, written books. So, you know, but it's worldwide territory and you get different commissions. So you've got your book out and you're making no sales. There's two ways that I advertise. Well, there was two ways. One was through Amazon. They stopped me advertising because profanity. My book title is Bring Me the Arse of Saddam. So I don't come within their code of practice for advertising. So I can't advertise on Amazon. I can sell my book on Amazon. They freely allow me to sell my book on Amazon, but they will not allow me to advertise. So all my advertisers through Facebook. And once again, you have to have a Facebook account, an advertising account. It's for a single product, like a book, which is very easy to do. I'm no expert in it. And I'm no expert in the metrics and the data that Facebook give you. They give you an enormous amount of data. But I only look at cost per click and sales and stuff like that. So, and because I've only got one product and that's the arse book I advertise because all my other books are through mainstream publishers. I've only got that to worry about. And that's kind of really, that works for me. I, if you spend a hundred pound on advertising, and once again, you have to go on YouTube to listen to all these guys and girls with great experience. And they, you know, you really gleam some fantastic information out of it. If I spend a hundred pounds and I return like 130, that's good for me. You know, it's a thousand, you know, you are 1300. But even if I spend a hundred pounds and make 101, that's all right. Because basically what you're doing is you're getting your book out. People looking at it, they're making people aware of it. If you spend a hundred pounds, obviously, and you get 80 quid back, well, you need to change the advert. You know, you need to look at the sort of metrics within the Facebook advertising module that you go for, you know. So, yeah, I mean, it became, the arse became the best seller. Purely through advertising. It was no, it was all my hard work, all my, all my effort. And thank you to the people on Facebook with their videos as well, because they helped me, you know, they helped me enormously. I wouldn't be able to do it without that because in the old days, you had to go to people that had the experience. But now, you know, there's loads of us out there that have got this experience. I looked at the book and I felt marvellous. And it got to number one in certain genres. On Amazon, there's different genres of books. For example, humor, Navy Army, you know, murder, true crime, stuff like that. It got, and I like this because you're a raw marine. It got to number one in the Navy on Kendall. And it beat that Ant Middleton. And Ant Middleton's got a massive publisher. I think he's transworld, is it or something? So I was really, really pleased with that. And it stayed in the top 10 for, you know, several weeks. And hopefully I'm going to boost it up again. So it is hard work. You've got to get on it. You've got to do at least an hour a day with it, if you can. And you've got to be prepared to spend some money. The whole process from start to finish, forget your time. Time is, your time's nothing. You shouldn't, you wouldn't want to sort of value that. The whole thing, if physical money that it's cost me, has been about 2,800 pounds, of which I've crawled that back. And my sales, even without advertising, and I'll be perfectly frank with your viewers and listeners, Chris, without advertising, my sales bump along at about 30, 40 a month, you know, without advertising. When I start throwing money at it, obviously it goes up. It's like Nike, they spend millions and millions of pounds a month worldwide, tens of millions to sell their kit. And you have to keep it there up in front of the people. And Facebook allows you not to send it to all your mates all the time, because they get pissed off with it. So it allows you to send it to a certain sort of audience like your mates, like your friends. So do you write a Facebook post and obviously have your book cover in it? I don't know if you have a link directly to Amazon, is that? And then you just click the button underneath that says promote this post? Yeah, it says, I think I've got a button called buy now. The advert I'm running at the moment is buy now. So yeah, you're right Chris, on the Amazon, on the Facebook advert, you have a little button and it says buy now and you click on that button and it sends you to your link in Amazon. And you can buy in Kindle, paperback. I'm looking at the hardback, but like I said previous, the hardback from Amazon, which is a new thing, it's only been out a couple of months, it's a wraparound hardback. So I'm gonna, this week I'm gonna sort out a hardback go through the process, get a draft copy of it and see if it's acceptable in my eyes for the extra money and the profitability for myself, of course, to see if it's acceptable, I think, for my readers. I have put it out online, my Facebook out online and people say, yeah, yeah, I'd like a signed copy and a hardback, Christmas coming up. Christmas is a very, very difficult time to break into for book sales. Everybody's competing, the big publishers are competing, but I'll have a go and I'll sort out this week. The other thing I've got is the audio book. I learned all about how to do an audio book. I did that during lockdown last year and I can talk you through that if you want Chris. Yeah, I'm fascinated. It's something I've got to do. So I'd be interested in it here. Yeah, idiosyncrasies of it. Well, the audio book. Mine is seven hours, 13 minutes. No, it's seven hours, 29 minutes, 13 seconds long, okay? Once again, it's through Amazon. Fantastic setup they have through their audio book company. It's called AZT or something like that. You can find it out there online, leaked to Amazon. There are two ways of going. There are ways of, there are three ways with an audio book actually. One, you can narrate it. You can narrate people's audio books. Two, you can narrate it yourself. Or three, you get somebody else to narrate your book. I'm the narrator of my book. For no other reason, I just wanted the experience of seeing if I can, if my voice is pleasant enough, if it's suitable enough for an audio book. So I went that way. Once again, the software from Amazon to set it all up is simple. It really is simple. What you then have to do is, the most important thing with an audio book is the mic. It's no good having one of these 80 quid mics that maybe bloggers use, podcasters use. You need a very sensitive mic. You need a very quiet area. You need to soundproof. I'm quite lucky because I live in the middle of nowhere. And the only thing I had to edit out was the bloody birds noises. Honestly, because they're quite piercing and I had the curtains closed and all soundproofing. But every now and again, you'd go through this bird sweep and you have to cut it out. Editing out. But yeah. So if you feel that you can talk and read correctly and read, if you feel competent enough to do it, I would suggest go and do it. Read 20 minutes, record yourself reading 20 minutes and then play it back. So you read for 20 minutes to know that you know the narrative. Don't try and do accents. Accentuate the accents. I can't do accents, so that's easy for me. But you can accentuate a jock accent or a brummy accent. But unless you can do accents really good, stay away from that. That's what they say and it works. Yeah, read for 20 minutes so you know the narrative. Recall it for 20 minutes and then play it back. So I did it in 20 minute blocks. There is a software out there called Audacity, which is free. Absolutely brilliant. Loads of people have done stuff on YouTube about it. That's what I used. So you need a decent mic, a dentsy mic. I use a, I'm not getting paid for this, advertising. A RODE, SM6 RODE mic. It's about 250 quids worth, all right? And you need one of these popper screens. Because the hardest thing I found out about, which I thought would be the easiest, the hardest is editing. I thought I would be pretty poor at reading and getting my point across of the story. But no, it's the editing. For 20 minutes, for me, 20 minutes of reading, narrating, recording, equated to about two hours of editing. You know? But you do get used to it. You do get used to it. And Audacity is a very easy program to learn from. So you need the mic. You need a proper mic. You need Audacity. You need a software program. There are programs out there, but software programs can be expensive. They may only design for musicians and stuff like that. I didn't need too many tweaks. Audacity was the one that sort of, I liked the interface of it all and everything. And of course, the other thing is you need, you need an interface. You need audio interface, which I've got, that's about a hundred quid. Basically, it transforms the sound from the mic through into your computer, into the software. And it sorts it all out. And you've got a couple little, you've seen them, the roadies do, they turn and tweak the, and you can tweak it with this audio interface. The whole package is about 300 quid, 350 quid. So you're throwing a 50 quid light even before you start. And once again, like writing, forget your time, your time's nothing, time's worthless. Once you've done it, I do a chapter at a time. They expect Amazon tell you to do a chapter at a time. First of all, you record the front book as one file. You just say, bring me the ass of Saddam by Nigel Ely, narrated by Nigel Ely. That's one file. The second file would be the acknowledgements if you wanted to put them in, the introduction, then chapter one, two, three, four, they're all separate files. Okay, so you upload, in my case, about 30 odd files. And the last file, and I'm just telling you this out of, because it's interesting, the last file is the end. That's all you say, all right? Besides, it is, I don't know, it's probably for the technicians in Amazon to sort of follow it through. And they structure it, they put the price on, they pitch it where they think it's gonna be right. Once again, you have to spend money on advertising, but you can combine that, because if somebody goes to your Amazon page to look at the book or the Kindle, they're gonna see the audio there as well. And as you can with the Kindle and the written word, the book, you can get the audio sample. And that's, my audio sample is a bastardized, I think, two-minute part of narrative that I took from the book, yeah. And that whole look took me three months. Is your road mic, I'm guessing that's not a USB mic, then. Is that the regular? Yes, condensing mic, can you see that? Yeah, what's the connection on it that actually you plug in? Is it, I can't remember the... Yeah, it's a DIN plug, DIN socket. Three pins, three DIN. Ah, okay, I'm thinking... Goes into the audio interface. Yeah, yeah, that's the one that I meant, yeah. And it's a long, sometimes you're remoteed from the interface, from the mic, aren't you? If you want it on a stand or something like that. But yeah, it's a good mic. It's highly recommended, but there are loads of other mics out there, but at the time, I've got this as a good price. And I'm not technically minded at all. I'm self-taught, I don't read instructions. So I'm the sort of guy that takes it out of the box, puts it all together, I find I fucked it up a bit, and then have to read the instructions again. But that's the way it is. And of course, the other thing is, you need a mic holder. And I've got one of these extendable, you don't like those lamp desk lamps. Yeah, there you go. That's the sort of thing, yeah. This is a cheap and cheerful, I say cheap and cheerful there, but there is about 200 quid's worth. It's just the yeti blue that a lot of podcasts use. So you'd have to have a proper, what do they call it, sort of canter lever type mic holder? Yeah, but I've also got sure microphones. So that's your Joe Rogan podcast microphones, or your Michael Jackson recorded one of his albums on them, they're the sort of best you can get. But that's got that connector that you just showed. So I'd have to get that somehow. It does have a stereo output jack, just like your headphones have. Yeah. I'm hoping I can, or rather my, it's called a zoom box, it's like your gubbins, but you also, with those microphones, you need a booster box because they need electronic, they need 24 volts going through them to work, not like this microphone. That's what this is. This is the audio interface. Ah, yeah. Yeah, and unlike your yeti, although they recommend the podcast, when you do an audio book, you need a more particular mic. And when you read, when you start reading, you have to be about four or five inches, okay? Because an audio book is so sensitive with the sound, you know, the sound that picks up everything and the expression in one's voice, which creates the element within the narrative. But you need one of these pop-up, I didn't put it on today, but one of these goes there and that stops once again, like I've said previously, and it's all to do with the cutting down on editing. As I said, the editing is the longest part of it and audacity is such a simple software. If you screwed up your lines, you can actually, as long as you've got the same settings in the same room and the same sort of sound settings, you can actually chop it out of your recording, re-record it and put it back in. A couple of times, unless you're really, really fit-a-key, you don't notice a difference. And also when people, and that's such a pain in the ass for me, when I listen to audio books done by professional narrators, they speak so slowly. So I was aware of the criticism on that when I recorded, you know, bring me the answer of sedan because I kind of talk quite fast. So that suited me. So when it became seven hours and 30 minutes, I thought, well, that's quite short. And it's a standard, if not a slightly longer book as opposed to nine hours. So I cut not two hours off the book and people normally, some people normally listen to audio books at one and a half times the speed. And I didn't want to be one of those narrators that purchasers, fans, readers, listeners wanted to, I didn't want them to listen to it at one and a half speakers. It sounds crazy. So that's why I recorded it. I didn't slow down as the experts say you should. Now, I don't know if that works. I listened to it a couple of times, not the whole book for Christ's sakes, that killed me. You listen to yourself speaking like you Chris. I mean, you think, oh, for Christ's sake, shut the frig up. But yeah, it's been received well. Good. It's been received well. And anybody, any of your listeners watches that want a bit of advice, get on, make a comment, I suppose, and see then I'll try and get a hold of you. But Lonnie, if you're listening to me, give us a thumbs up on this video. And I'll get onto your book, I'll read your book, try and read your book this week. Give you some notes on it. This is Lonnie's the type of chap that he wants some, he's written a book and I've read the first page and I tell you what, it's, I'm going to enjoy it. But he needs the technical side. He wants to self publish himself. So I'll help him with that. I mean, I'm the way. The possibilities are endless now, aren't they? And yeah. Yes, I remember Aunt Middleton asked me how to, how do you write a book? So he's gone on to write, gosh, two or three best sellers now, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, you know, good luck to him. I mean, I couldn't do a book a year, Jesus. I mean, that's hard going. They've got good support teams there and they can afford it and this kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it, mate. I get it. It takes me a solid year full time. So that's anything up to 18 hour a day. Sometimes, sometimes I'd write for 36 hours just sat in this chair. It still takes me a year to get a book. You know, I don't, you used to annoy me. It doesn't so much now, it's a business. I mean, I said to you earlier, I write to make money. That's, it's part of what I do. I kind of enjoy it in a sort of strange way. But a lot of these guys that come from our backgrounds, like you said, they have a team around them. They're a brand and that's the way it is. They're a brand and they've made an awful lot of money doing it. And that's it, good luck to them, that's what I say. But one has to look at one in the mirror and go, you know, because I'd kind of like to achieve everything and start to finish and I've done that. I haven't been anywhere successful as a lot of those guys, but I've kind of done it my own way. And you know, I mean, and it's, one was through mainstream publishing, the other one was through my hard graft. So I'm evidence that it can be achieved. Massively. And the success is getting the book finished and getting it out that that's all the success in the world you need. It doesn't matter how many people read. If one person reads it and loves it, your job's done, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it would be nice that a million people read it. Yes, Spud, before you go and obviously on behalf of the podcast, we wish you all the best of luck. Would bring me the arse of sedan. Can you explain the, is that a misappropriation, that road sign behind you? What we call in the Marine's Proft, the goose green sign. Oh yeah, that was given to me by my late brother as he was in a junk shop down in East Sussex somewhere. Oh my gosh. He gave that to me, yeah. What a great souvenir to have. Yeah, it's a, you know those old sort of, it's wooden sign, wooden sign, originals, wooden sign. Do you think Escordy profed that then when they were down south? No, it's a British, I mean. It's a place in the UK, is it? Yeah, there's a place called goose green, actually not far from the old Parabarrax, you know, several miles in Sussex or something like that. I think that's where it's from. I mean, it says narrow road as well. Goose green quarter of a mile narrow road. There was a narrow road in goose green. It was a, you know, I don't think there was a sign up there because you could see goose green from, you know, from a mile away all over. So I didn't think anybody needed, especially down there, everybody knew where goose green was at the time. I mean, I'm talking about civilians. No, that's come from the UK, Sussex somewhere. There was an Argentine commander. There was a bit of friction between him and the British after the war. I can't remember the ins and outs of it, but to highlight his kind of misunderstanding of the battle, someone had brought the name of the book he wrote into question and he wrote, the name of his book was the goose green, you know, they put the, in Latin, you put the adjective after the noun, don't you? So, but the green was Verdi as in the color. Okay. So he was saying, it's a goose that's green, not it's a green as in like a plateau or whatever, you know, as in like a bowling green. Yes, yes. Yes, that's quite funny. Yeah, I haven't heard that book. There's been a few out from the arches, but yeah, I mean, I'm not to, when I did the goose green, Uncensored Voices that brought it all home to me and just tells you that as a young Tom, young paratrooper, you know, there's an army behind supporting you. And that's what I like about this book of the new book, Uncensored Voices. It is uncensored, I recorded all of them. I did over a hundred, well, I'll tell you when it comes out, but there was over 130 recordings I did up and down the country, couldn't use them all of course, but it just opened my eye with the amount of support we got. And there's some lovely little funny vignettes about the Marines, beautiful ones about the Marines. Chris, I'm dying to tell you about them, but we'll talk about that hopefully very much. And they're nice, don't get me wrong. Why do I immediately just have a vision of naked men? No, or in dresses. No, in dresses, yeah. No, they are nice. They're not slagging off stories or tales. They're very nice between two very professional units. Yes, here, here. Well, Spud, all the best of it. Stay on the line, so obviously I can thank you properly, but we'll put all links to the book folks below. Grab yourselves a copy of one of... You have covers. Turn it the other way. Yeah, we'll put that in our thumbnail, Spud. Yeah, I mean, I can send you the... Yeah. You did it. Sorry, are you going to say something? Yeah, you did it, didn't you put a file up last time? Yeah, we used that cover, didn't we? Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, we'll do something similar. Yeah. Definitely. Brilliant. Yes, thanks again, mate. Well, I hope that your listeners and viewers enjoyed it. I do rattle on a bit, but I'm quite passionate about it all the time I've been self-published for this. You know, I'd like to take all my knowledge through, and I don't mind imparting it to anybody else, you know? Gratis, because I had to learn it, and like anything. There's two things everybody should do in, like, one is run a marathon, or wheel a marathon, whatever new situation you're in. The other is write a book, write anything, make it up, just everybody's got a book in them. It's just a great achievement. Yeah, there's a lot of demand for these 100-page books, as well, these small little sales. I thought about having a go at that. Yeah, the tension spans are getting smaller, aren't they? Exactly, yeah. Yeah. And to our friends at home, big love to you all. Look after yourselves. If you can like and subscribe. Hope you've enjoyed this as much as I have, and we'll see you next time.