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A former Derby Evening Telegraph reporter has come up with a novel way to bring his first book to a mass audience.

Jeff Clark-Meads decided not to wait a year to see his first literary effort make it into print – so he set up his own website where readers can get the story The Plowman and the Rose e-mailed to them.

Visitors to www.plowmanrose.com will be able to read the first two chapters of the book for free from October 20. They can then pay £4 to have the remaining 18 chapters e-mailed to them.

Jeff (41), is originally from Nottingham but now lives in Brighton. He was a reporter in Derby from 1980 to 1985 -when he first began writing the book.

But it was only seven years ago that he began seriously thinking about publishing his work, which is set to the east of Derby and is the story of a man called John Morgan who has to fight for his life.

Reporter Catherine Cunningham told his story in the Derby Telegraph:

What prompted Jeff to take a second look at the story was a brush with death in 1993, when he collapsed in a supermarket and was diagnosed with bleeding on the brain.

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