Grab your Kindle and get ready to download. I’ve just signed a contract to have a non-fiction manuscript published, this time as an e-book.

In March 2013 you can check the electronic bookstores for Extending your use-by date: Why retirement age is only a number. It will be published by Rod Morrison and the team at an emerging Australian e-publisher, Xoum Publishing, www.xoum.com.au

Signing the Xoum contract

My agent, Sophie Hamley, sent them the manuscript, they liked it, and now we’re working together to prepare it for publication and promote it to potential readers.

Xoum is a Sydney-based independent multi-media publishing company, founded by publishing and design professionals, David Henley, Jon MacDonald and Rod Morrison. They say they use the most up-to-date production technologies combined with traditional editorial, sales and marketing nous. Xoum titles are distributed globally via Amazon, the iBookstore, Kobo, Overdrive and Google Play.

The starting point for Extending your use-by date is that we sometimes head unthinkingly into retirement at a time when many of us have developed skills and abilities we can keep on using and when people are generally living longer. It also argues that continuing to work can maintain our well-being as well as contribute to our bank balance. But only if we want to.

So, I’ll have two books out in 2013: Extending your use-by date as an e-publication in March (Xoum* Publishing), and the biography of aviation pioneer and global adventurer Bert Hinkler in hard copy in August (Hachette Australia).

* pronounced ‘zoom’ of course