Long live (real) books!

I bet there must be loads of people out there with the same weird habits as me.  New book purchased, stroke, sniff that lovely cover and then a quick flick to the back to see how many yummy pages there are to keep me enthralled - always being careful not to discover the ending, of course.
With the birth of the Kindle and epublishing this isn't posssible.
I would like nothing more than to hold a copy of my "baby" in my hands, sniff it and think, "I wrote that!"
Sadly that's not the way my book went - it came very close with two near misses with top London publishers but the "real book" was never born. Ironically, given that the credit crunch is one of the themes of the book, they'd scaled back new writers by the time I submitted the changes they asked for (and my agent dropped the ball!).
An ebook seemed to be my last option and I'm glad that I've done it but, being old fashioned, it will never be the same.
Had I been a celebrity, I'd have been in print before you could say "royalties!"  And I wouldn't even have had to write it myself. Bitter, me?
I may be a published Kindle author but I still say, long live REAL books.  Sorry trees!

Diary of a Mummy Misfit is on Amazon for Kindle.

Now also available in paperback at Lulu.