Newspaper Nest
At the Start
Hi, my name is Jon Franklin. After twelve years of working in betting shops at the tail end of the eighties and throughout the nineties, I decided to start on a novel set in a high street betting shop.
At that time, as many of you will recall, betting shops were as common on the high street as pubs, supermarkets and chemists and yet, apart from the initiated, very few members of the British public really knew what went on inside them. The wider public considered them places rife with petty criminals, work dodgers and other undesirables and though it is true from time-to-time I served people fitting this description (!), they also were places that harboured the elderly, the lonely, the disenfranchised and a lot of very astute racing fanatics and - above all - plenty of very likeable, larger than life characters. Crucially, I set my book just before the advent of the world-wide-web - a time when unless you were going to the races, apart from the backroom of some shady public houses, the only place you could get a bet on was at your local high street bookies.
Horse racing fiction is a genre dominated by murder-mystery skullduggery. Much of it is very good, Joe McNally's Eddie Malloy series among them. But in writing Shouting The Odds, in my own small way, I wanted to widen the genre to write a book that celebrates the 'lifeblood' of British and Irish racing: the high street punter.
I self published Shouting The Odds in 2021. Despite favourable reviews in both the Racing Post and Sporting Life, as an indie author, I don't have a huge marketing budget to keep it at the top of the Amazon best selling horse racing fiction lists. Because of this, I am still discovering plenty of people who have yet to give it a try.
As well as being a great writer and all round good bloke, Joe McNally has also become a great advocate for my books ( I published the stand-alone sequel to Shouting The Odds earlier this year). Reviews by Joe can be read on my Amazon author pages. So for the price of a dual-forecast bet, (the kindle version), why not give Shouting The Odds a try? At worst, it will take you back for a few hours to the time of UK and Irish betting shops in their hey-day.
Thank you for reading.
Shouting The Odds
And why not give me a follow here:
More Info
At that time, as many of you will recall, betting shops were as common on the high street as pubs, supermarkets and chemists and yet, apart from the initiated, very few members of the British public really knew what went on inside them. The wider public considered them places rife with petty criminals, work dodgers and other undesirables and though it is true from time-to-time I served people fitting this description (!), they also were places that harboured the elderly, the lonely, the disenfranchised and a lot of very astute racing fanatics and - above all - plenty of very likeable, larger than life characters. Crucially, I set my book just before the advent of the world-wide-web - a time when unless you were going to the races, apart from the backroom of some shady public houses, the only place you could get a bet on was at your local high street bookies.
Horse racing fiction is a genre dominated by murder-mystery skullduggery. Much of it is very good, Joe McNally's Eddie Malloy series among them. But in writing Shouting The Odds, in my own small way, I wanted to widen the genre to write a book that celebrates the 'lifeblood' of British and Irish racing: the high street punter.
I self published Shouting The Odds in 2021. Despite favourable reviews in both the Racing Post and Sporting Life, as an indie author, I don't have a huge marketing budget to keep it at the top of the Amazon best selling horse racing fiction lists. Because of this, I am still discovering plenty of people who have yet to give it a try.
As well as being a great writer and all round good bloke, Joe McNally has also become a great advocate for my books ( I published the stand-alone sequel to Shouting The Odds earlier this year). Reviews by Joe can be read on my Amazon author pages. So for the price of a dual-forecast bet, (the kindle version), why not give Shouting The Odds a try? At worst, it will take you back for a few hours to the time of UK and Irish betting shops in their hey-day.
Thank you for reading.
Shouting The Odds
And why not give me a follow here:
More Info
