‘Everyone we knew said we were mad to take the risk,’ says George, ‘ and we heard all the horror stories about self or ‘vanity’ publishing always ending in disaster. We knew that virtually all people who pay for their work to be published end up much poorer and wiser, with hundreds or even thousands of unsold copies sitting in the garage.

'We also knew that, even having written a worthwhile book, the average author would have no idea of how to promote and sell it. At least we knew about successful marketing, and couldn’t see that publicising a book would be much different in principle from promoting a lawn mower, new car or pint of beer.’

So, the Easts went ahead and set up their own publishing house specifically to produce, market and sell Home & Dry in France. To finance the operation, they took a deep breath and mortgaged both their house in England and their holiday home in Normandy.

‘To get the best unit price from the printers, we knew we would have to go for a long run’ explains Donella. ‘Normally, self-publishers go for a thousand or so copies of their book, which makes production costs per copy so expensive that they are bound to lose money, even if they sell them all. We decided it was time to back our belief in the potential appeal of the book, so went for an initial run of 20,000 copies. I don’t know if you have seen twenty thousand paperback books in a pile, but it certainly made our legs go weak when we arrived at the printers factory with a truck to pick them up!’

As the Easts were to find, the actual design, production and printing of La Puce (named after the Mill of the Flea) Publication’s first book was the easy bit. They now had to sell at least half of the mountain of copies to break even.

‘ We learned at a very early stage that whoever said there wasn’t any money to be made from publishing was absolutely right,’ says George. ‘We also learned that there are a staggering 100,000 general reading books published every year in the UK, so every bookshop is under siege from publishers trying to sell in their new books every day of the week.

'All the major publishers were mailing out glossy catalogues and sample copies of their new titles, with teams of sales people calling in to see managers with in-store promotional material, and an army of PR specialists churning out releases for the newspapers and other media outlets. We had me writing and sending off press releases, and Donella on the phone trying to persuade bookshop managers to give our unknown publishing company and its only book a chance. It was, to say the least, a tough time, and for a long time it looked as if our dreams and hopes were doomed to failure.’

But the breakthrough came quite suddenly, when a major cross-Channel ferry company agreed to try the books out on board. Holidaymakers who liked the idea of buying a second home in France bought copies by the thousand in one season, and the word spread: ‘ It’s a fact that the best selling tool for a book is personal recommendation,’ comments Donella, ‘ and people who enjoyed reading Home & Dry in France would tell their friends, who would go into their local bookshop and order a copy. After a very slow start and two years of wondering if we would survive another month, we were suddenly out of copies, and immediately ordered an even bigger reprint.’

But the story doesn’t end there. After the success of what was intended to be a series of one, reader demand meant that George wrote a follow-up to Home & Dry in France, this time a memoir of their further adventures at the Mill of the Flea. Now, there are four books in the series, and the fifth is to be published in the spring of 2002. The Easts run their tiny but very successful publishing company from their home in Normandy, with the centuries-old mill filled to bursting with hi-tech equipment.