LeonardTwitty

So I have a dilemma and opinions would be very much appreciated, so currently the royalties i make from these books is really low, im not prepared to raise the cost of them because it was never about getting rich, however because the paperback books are in colour it eats around 40% of the profits for each one. Now the dilemma is do i change the books to black and white or do you think it would destroy the books? I need help because i would like to keep being able to write but funding the artwork etc is expensive.

Really? The Science teachers here are like kids with too much sugar in their body and a severe case of ADHD, and a little mix of magpie!!! Anything that is shiny and new and gives them their dopamine dose

Fronter. I hadn't heard that word in years and I'd been doing rather well. Six years of making the mandated thing work. Then you sent one email and everyone left inside a month. That is the whole argument, delivered free of charge, and nobody holding a budget has ever once heard it. Still finding things now is the part I recognise most. You inherit a network and you spend a decade opening cupboards. Most contain nothing. One contains a switch undocumented since 2011 that is somehow holding up the east corridor. You don't touch that one. You close the door and you say nothing. Which subject area held out? There's always one. And it's never a department. It's one bloke.

Just a gentle reminder that if you have read the books could you pop your review onto amazon. If you don't like leaving reviews that's fine. Regardless I am deeply appreciative of all your support.

Yeah we have a new science teacher starting in September who already asked me on his walk around if he could bring his own device in, i told him out right no its school devices or nothing.

Im so glad you have all enjoyed my books, and also so sorry you have encountered the same scenarios I have over the years! But I think in a lot of ways these are what make us invaluable....its not our knowledge alone its our understanding of the processes, infrastructure and most of all the staff and pupils!!!

Thank you for the feedback BKGarry, book 3 will be more like book 2, when I was writing book 2 I found myself picking up from some storyline that appeared from book 1 and just went with it. I personally prefer book 2 over book one. But also there are aspects of book 1 that mean you need to ready it before book 2 such as Mr Hartley and Mrs Brennen. And the back story of me the narrator.

Thanks smurfomatic. I ordered author copies of the books they arrive Friday so I hope the covers are all good. When I uploaded them it said they were all in proportion lol

I know I've said this already, but I just want to say thank you to you all for the support, I really hope you enjoy reading my books, while they are stated as fiction I'm sure you all will be able to tell that they are all based on real experiences that you will have had at least once. And I will do my best to get the next book out as quickly as I can for you all.

Thank you MartinT your support is appreciated. Hope you enjoy them.

A small ask, and then I'll say no more about it. If you've read either of the books and got something out of them, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon? I'll be honest about why I'm asking. Reviews are more or less the only thing that makes a self-published book findable. There's no publisher behind this, no marketing budget, no table in a bookshop — just whether Amazon decides to show it to anyone, and that's driven almost entirely by reviews. It doesn't need to be an essay. One line is genuinely enough. "Made me laugh, reminded me of my old job" does more than you'd think. And if it wasn't for you, say that instead — honest reviews are worth more to me than kind ones. Thank you either way. Genuinely.

Thank you very much, I would really appreciate reviews for the books on amazon if you have the time and please feel free to share about the books to anyone you think would enjoy them. I appreciate the support you have all shown more than you know. This started as a simple project to just have a laugh but I have found great joy in writing these, I may have to do one from Michael's perspective one day haha

Thank you, I hope you enjoy the read, and more importantly enjoy your holiday and the break it hopefully brings!

This was the very first cover.

Book 1 no i used ai for the illustrations, but I wasn't a fan but couldn't afford to pay someone and I can barely draw a stick man ha. Book 2 a good friend of mine offered to do them for 50 quid so that's why they are different. I will be using him in the future for Book 3 too. Also he did the book covers too. The original book 1 cover was AI made and I hated it so when my friend offered I changed it. Ill see if I have the original book cover and will show you how bad it was lol

There are 2 out now and I'm currently writing the third, my aim is to get it out before Xmas but realistically probably looking at after. The whole aim was to take real experiences in my job and turn them into funny stories. My only hope is that people get a giggle from them.

Thanks all for the support with the book. I've had more orders off this thread than everything else I've tried put together, which tells you something about where my actual people are. If you've had a read and enjoyed it, an honest Amazon review would be hugely appreciated. It's the one thing that genuinely moves the needle for a self-published book, and it takes about sixty seconds. Cheers for the welcome, it's been a good week. Right, back to the trenches. The printer's been quiet all morning and I don't trust it.

Rob_D our Remote access server is the same, it worked....once but after 2 years and multiple support calls and tickets with the local authority (which has stumped them also) we have reached the stage of, it must have been witchcraft. I took over as IT Manager in December 2023 and the Remote access just stopped for no reason or at least no comprehensible reason that 12 different people can find. Somethings are either fixable or just existed once.

We have started using a web based software called StudentKeeper, it is by a company called Activion. it is designed as a safeguarding support app that allows teachers to better manage their classrooms. It allows staff to allow or block different URLS, can be used to message students directly, there is an AI assistant for the students to use, which if a safeguarding concern is raised it locks the account and sends an alert to the designated staff member (whoever you allocate into that roll). All in all while there are still some bugs to iron out, it is a very promising system and the team are very active in incorporating it into the overall design. maybe worth a look. Puts control over to the teaching staff and less stress on the IT department (I also am a team of 1) but I am still somehow described as an IT team or the IT department.......must be my moods being mistaken for multiple personalities.

Rogueleeder — that's very good of you, thank you. That's a particularly maddening flavour of inherited mess, because nothing is actually broken. The servers are fine, the network's fine, you can't point at a single failure and say there, that's the problem. It's just been bent into a shape it was never designed to hold, and the cost only shows up as a hundred small daily frictions that nobody ever raises a ticket about. The part I'd find hardest is that over-restriction is much harder to undo than under-restriction. When something's locked down too far, people don't complain — they route around it. A personal drive here, a folder shared with everyone-can-edit there, a spreadsheet emailed back and forth because nobody could work out who owned the original. So the moment you start loosening it properly you're not just changing permissions, you're dismantling three years of workarounds that people have quietly built on top, and every one of those is somebody's actual working day. Three months in is the right time to be seeing it clearly and the wrong time to be fixing it. The people who've been there for years have stopped noticing. You still can. Worth writing down everything that makes you wince now, before you acclimatise, because in a year you won't see it either. And your point about balance is the one that gets missed. Locking it down isn't neutral. It just moves the risk somewhere you can't see it. Are you going to rebuild the shared drive structure, or work with what's there? I've never regretted a rebuild, but I've also never finished one in the term I said I would.

Evening all. New-ish here, so hello properly first. I'm the IT manager at a secondary school — eleven to sixteens, one server cupboard that runs a few degrees warmer than anyone is comfortable with, and a kit list held together largely by optimism. A few years ago I started writing down the parts of the week that weren't actually technical. Reception needing the printer fixed before break. A new head arriving with a Digital Vision and no budget line attached to it. Twenty-three staff accounts needed yesterday. One desktop that has outlived three refresh cycles and shows no intention of stopping. "The internet's gone", which turns out to be one cable. It became two books, which was never the plan: Have you tried turning it off and on again?: The Chronicles of a Secondary School IT Manager https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GVRMW763 Ctrl+Alt+Survive: The Chronicles of a Secondary School IT Manager https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H67P5NDM Names changed, school fictional, printer entirely real. Both are on Kindle Unlimited if you'd rather not pay for the privilege of reliving your own week. I've read the advertising sticky and I'm not trying to bend it. I'm not a supplier, there's nothing here for a school to buy, I'm not after leads, and I won't be PMing anybody about it. I saw crimsonspanner's book thread last year and took that as the precedent for posting openly rather than assuming. Mods, if it's the wrong side of the line, bin it with my apologies and no hard feelings. Mostly though I'm curious about the source material rather than the books. What's the one thing in your school that everybody knows is held together with tape and hope, and that you're quietly dreading having to explain to an auditor?