Nelson & His World

Not being terribly interested in the “Jonathon Ross Christmas Celebrity Cookbook Revelation”, or whatever it is that adorns the windows of the book retailers at the moment, I was interested in Justin’s comments about his return to the subscription publishing model, and also in Lesley’s comments about the publisher’s antics with ‘Jack Tar’ (both here and in Roy and Lesley’s interesting newsletter). Given that ‘Jack Tar’ is selling so well, and currently bouncing around in Amazon’s top three in Maritime History, it does seem extraordinary that publishers can’t get it right.

How long will it be before you can’t buy a ‘real’ book in a bookshop, and will technology come to the rescue in time?

How close are we to affordable “Print on Demand” publishing that delivers an acceptable quality? Does that offer a more flexible alternative to the subscription publishing model? And does “Print on Demand” linked to self publishing offer an escape from the tyranny imposed by the publishers, or is that doomed by its vanity publishing connotations?

Or will we have to download all future naval history titles onto our Sony e-book readers?

Having spent many years on the committee of our local literature festival, I can confirm that most of the writers I have come across, even highly successful ones, seem to be dissatisfied by the service they get from their publishers; and the more literary or academic your work, the worse you are treated.

As far as self-publishing is concerned, there are numerous difficulties:

1) achieving an acceptable quality in the finished product and at an acceptable price;

2) having to be responsible for your own copy editing. Self-publishing, in essence, means you hand over copy to a printer. There will be no teams of editors and proof-readers to check your work;

3) having to market your work when self-published works are not highly regarded by booksellers. They will often showcase a local author, but otherwise, even persuading them to stock self-published works can be extremely difficult.

Some self-publishing companies offer back-up services such as editing and marketing but writers' websites throb with collective rage at the expense and/or inefficiency of many such companies.

As far as my little anthology was concerned - I was very lucky to find a good printer who produced the books at a reasonable price and who was efficient and honest. Further copies, or even single copies, can be produced after the initial print run.

The finished product looked very splendid indeed, but that was because Mike Tattersall did a wonderful job of preparing the text. Some printers will prepare your text for printing, but with none of the additional professional flourishes that Mike gave my booklet. As far as copy editing is concerned, I nearly went blind and would never do it again. It is a nightmare. I have had some harsh words to say about poor copy-editing in the past. No more. I am humbled to silence.

I didn't have the job of persuading booksellers to stock the booklet since I was not in the business of selling. As I said on another thread, I gave the book away to anyone interested because a commercial venture was out of the question. In addition to the printing costs, I would have had to pay enormous copyright fees, and then would have had to spend time and money marketing the book.

Subscription publishing would spare the writer the marketing task - but again, would there be full publishing back-up - copy editors, proof readers etc?

However unsatisfactory publishers are, we are stuck with them, I fear.

E-books? No! No! A thousand times no! I find on-screen reading horribly difficult - I need to hold a proper book to galvanise my few remaining brain cells into receptivity.

E-books - Yes! Yes! Not on a computer screen, no, but on a dedicated portable e-book reader - yes! I haven't tried one myself yet, and maybe they are not there yet, but the time is fast approaching when a page on a portable electronic reader will be brighter and clearer than paper, and it will be lighter and more comfortable to hold than a book. Lying on your back in bed with two kilos of hardback balanced above your face will be a thing of the past!

But can you bend the spine, underline things and write in the margins?

Only kidding.

"As far as copy editing is concerned, I nearly went blind and would never do it again. It is a nightmare. I have had some harsh words to say about poor copy-editing in the past. No more. I am humbled to silence."

I am a copy editor and proofreader and it's true - however careful you are, however eye-scrunching your reading, you never find every error. And even when you do, sometimes the typesetters put them back or introduce new ones.

And unfortunately, we're sometimes limited in how much we can do - I'm proofreading a book at the moment which is absolutely *appallingly* written. It's painful to read - but the author put up a fight and demanded that nearly every one of the copy-editor's changes were reversed so all I can do is ensure that his cliches and hyperbole are correctly spelled and punctuated.

It's a cardinal rule that you never open a book you edited because right there, on the first page you look at, will be a huge and glaring error. I find a mistake in nearly everything I read - papers, magazines, novels, non-fiction. The only writer in whose books I have yet to find an error is Bill Bryson ... who used to be a newspaper sub-editor. Everything else has something - but they're usually things no sane or normal person would ever notice, rather than glaring literal errors.

I for one hope that publishers stay in business - I wouldn't have any work otherwise...

This thread is timely for me, because I am meeting my "book producer" next week to finalise plans for my Admiralty book. We have not yet decided which route to take, other than I know I will not be hawking it round the publishers, and I doubt it will be in more than 3 or 4 book retail outlets.

First, although I am frequently published in journals (and now in a volume of monographs in Spain) I am an unknown quantity to publishers, even specialists in naval and maritime history. I bounced the concept around Conway, Suttons (with whom I got as far as jacket design) and others some years back but had very little positive response. It could be I'm a rubbish writer or that the concept (a history of the buildings and key characters of the Admiralty in London - not of the office of state or operations - designed for the general reader as well as the specialist) would be unpopular, but I'm led to believe not. And there is a plethora of esoteric books out there from those houses.

Also publishers market in fixed ways, mainly of course through retailers, who take 37% of the cover price, and will remainder unsold copies within a few weeks. This means that authors cannot make any return on their time and expertise unless they hit the jackPotter.

I pretty much know, or know of, all the people who are likely to buy my Admiralty book. Many of them live in the US and I have email or web group contact with them all, so I don't need a retailer.

My book producer will handle the production aspects (I am used to print buying myself so know I need expert help there) but I will handle digital text origination. I have an editor (who has trained me to accept her expert help!) and I am lucky in that most of the images will be copyright free. The book should be around £25 (200 pp, hardback, loads of illustrations, nothing else quite like it, blah blah...) which these days is reasonable.

The issue I am stuck with is that of "vanity publishing". No matter what we call it, that is what I am doing. But at least I know that there is a small demand (say 1000) for my book - until it gets reviewed of course, when that might vanish overnight!

However, with subscription publishing - what my producer calls "limited edition" - we are returning to the tradition of Johnson and Walter Scott. I am taking a risk, in underwriting the production costs - my break-even is 650 copies - as well of course as doing all that research and writing, but the risk is mitigated by the subscriptions. My real issue - and I have yet to resolve it - is how to manage that ethically and safely for my subscribers, for which I feel I need a third party.

Print on demand is expensive and one has to join a waiting list. One book I ordered is £50 and the wait is currently 3 months.

Finally, as to e-books. They exist in the form Tony is looking for now, but a printed book is much more convenient to carry and to read, allowing the serendiptous flip through pages, scanning references quickly, popping to and fro the index and so on, making notes, turning down corners and other horrors, and you can dry the pages on a radiator if you drop it in the bath!

Justin
about to de-corrupt another ten pages (but that's another horror story)

I always post news of recently published books and articles of Nelsonian interest, particularly if they are written by contributors here. However, as time passes, these slip down the page out of sight.

I think it will be helpful to have a readily accessible thread on the Information Forum in which all contributors here, if they are so minded, can post details of all their publications, whether books or articles. It would be helpful to know if, and how, we can obtain back copies of the publications in which articles appear.

If no one is interested, then I'll delete the thread after say - 6 weeks.

************

E-books. I endorse eveything Justin has said about real books. And let's not forget the aesthetic pleasure of a beautiful book. I've seen ebooks in Waterstone's, sad little oblongs of plastic. Totally dispiriting. It is deeply satisfying to read from, and handle a book that is beautifully bound, carefully typeset, imaginatively illustrated and made with care and skill. Book binding is a dying art but it is still possible to buy exquisite examples at small private presses such as The Old Stile Press and The Old School Press. The thought that e-books might drive bookbinders to begging for a crust in the streets.........

Old books too: I have just bought Lovewell's 1814 publication of Nelson's letters to Emma that caused such a scandal. (Not the re-bound one on ebay!) I know the book is on Googlebooks, and may soon be available as an e-book, but there is something inexplicably vital about a tangible connection with the past that an old book provides. I open my copy and imagine the original owner, some scandalised lady in her parlour, maybe, throwing up her hands in delighted horror..... I know I'm an old Luddite....ah, well.

Gentle nudge:

it has been suggested that no one would like to be first in posting details of their published work on the Information Forum. Please don't be hesitant - it really would be very useful, and spare us the hassle of scrolling about, to have the information on a single thread. Think of it as a good deed, like helping old ladies across the road.

Hello, this is turning into an interesting thread as well - the future of publishing. Indeed, is there a future? It's difficult to know where to start in adding to the already useful discussions. Obviously, there is a divergence of opinion on e-books v. traditional books. Personally, I think e-books are a great idea when travelling - think of all those novels and guidebooks that you can take. They have little other attraction except as a means of storage of huge volumes, journals perhaps.

But there are more fundamental issues at stake and that is the state of publishing and bookselling. After Christmas, the booksellers in the UK will moan that they have had a terrible time. They did this last year when they concentrated on the celebrity-cookbook genre etc (Tony has expressed it so well above), but what did they learn from that experience? Nothing. It's even worse this year. At the moment, the major chains say that history doesn't sell and therefore they don't stock it (except in tiny amounts) and so the publishers can commission very little. Publishers seem utterly powerless and more or less do what they are told - or that's how it appears from an author's point of view. Most orders by the large chains are done by one or two people, and they make decisions that affect the entire country. Individual stores seem to have very little leeway in what they can order. And to our huge frustration and bewilderment, Jack Tar is out of stock with all online retailers and elsewhere, so even if there is a demand for history books, it is not being fulfilled. 'History doesn't sell' - a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is worse is that much of the retail trade is aimed at a very young market, whereas the population is ageing. I imagine that many older people have fewer money worries at present than younger people, especially those who have long ago bought their houses and have secure pensions. They therefore have the time, money and inclination to buy books, but virtually nobody is catering for them. Why ever not? Perhaps if a buyer at a large chain or a supermarket is reading this thread, he or she can start to make a difference right now!!

A book like Justin's would have easily found a publisher a few years ago, perhaps a small publisher or a university one or a museum one. Many good books are self-published, and the word 'vanity publishing' shouldn't of course be used in such cases. But it shouldn't be like this.

And Tycho, I accept the nudge and will post details of a few relevant publications shortly!

Lesley Adkins

I just thought I would add a brief outline of what is involved if you do decide you have one or more books in you that you would like to see published. Let's assume the first one is a really good idea on a naval/maritime theme, fiction or non-fiction. You do a certain amount of research, do up a proposal, maybe even write the book in its entirety if you have the means to finance yourself. If you approach publishers, you will find that most of them do not accept direct submissions from authors. What you have to do is get an agent to represent you, so first of all you probably have to sell yourself and your book(s) to an agent.

Assuming you've done that, your book is then submitted to publishers. A commissioning editor might love it, but it then gets taken to meetings with the sales and marketing people. If they think it won't sell, you get rejected. Their decisions don't seem to be based on what the book buying people might love, but on what the bookstore buyers will take on.

Let's assume that you strike lucky and a publisher takes you on. You then spend the next year or two totally immersed in the book, perhaps even more excited at the way it is turning out. You then submit it on time. It now takes another 9 to 12 months before it goes through the production process and is published. Probably even before you have finished writing the book, it is being presented to the various 'buyers' of the book wholesale distributors and bookstore and supermarket chains by the sales department people, who you've never met. If they fail to inspire these people, then the orders for the book will be small. This is all out of your hands.

When the book is printed, you might assume that it goes direct from the publisher's warehouse to the shops or to the online retailer warehouses. Wrong. And this is where I am totally confused. What seems to be the case is that there are a few big wholesale distributors, and they might only order a few copies of your book. Many independent booksellers rely on what these wholesalers recommend, and even the big chains and supermarkets buy their books from wholesalers. Publishers seem to have no control over the book at this stage, you as the author certainly have no control, and you can see many people are in place who need to make a profit from your book, which dilutes what you will receive. And at present some of the distributors are in financial difficulties (part of the Woolworths empire), so the situation is exacerbated. And in the case of Jack Tar, the publisher has been in dispute with Amazon for many months, and so aren't supplying Amazon with books any more, so Amazon gets its books from a wholesaler instead, who have no copies because the wholesalers are waiting for copies to be reprinted and/or because they are in financial difficulties.

And can anyone explain why our very nice reviews on Amazon have been removed? Is there somebody reading this who knows someone who works at Amazon or perhaps works there themselves? Our publisher says it can do nothing. Thank you!

Lesley Adkins

Lesley's posts exactly pinpoint the dilemma facing authors, especially in niche subjects. The maritime / naval field seems to be well catered for by Conway, Suttons, Seaforth and Seafarer but as described in previous posts, it is difficult and time-consuming to run the gauntlet, historians in particular are loth to hand over control of ther finished product, and publishers' marketing is a lottery.

The "limited edition" subscription route is worth trying in my case, as I am in touch with my "marketplace", but it needs careful and ethical management.

I have been discussing a project with a published historian to set up a publishing company in which marketing will be direct - probably using the internet as well as personal contacts (one has to avoid stepping on corns with that) as a source of customers. I feel sorry for booksellers - as distinct from reatilers of books such as supermarkets, for whom I cannot feel any sympathy - but I am afraid most of them have gone with the wind of commercial greed tainted by a lack of expertise in judging their markets.

As part of that operation we might well create an online journal, with pay-per-view to download some articles, others being free, very much like the Journal for Maritime Research but perhaps more wide-ranging. This approaches Tony's e-book preference and meets a need, at the same time as reinforcing marketing and awareness of hard-copy titles. I had thought of taking this idea to the SNR, whose online Forum - the equivalent of Notes and Queries in MM - is proving popular and often very productive.

Comments and advice would be appreciated.

Justin
chilling out in Oxford

Justin, I think that anything that increases the availability of books and articles for readers (especially on niche subjects) and makes life easier for authors can only be a positive thing.

I am very glad I am not a desk editor any longer - my friends and contacts in editorial at publishing companies are having a horrible time, with books they've been working on being put back a year or more, or pulled entirely. Marketing concerns means that anything 'out on a limb' gets squashed, so, for example, a trade publisher I work for is churning out sports biographies and true crime books and precious little else.

Many of them are finding their freelance resources are being pared to the bone, so they find themselves doing more in-house, and each book has fewer pairs of eyes and so more errors get missed.

All terribly depressing.

Many thanks for all these fascinating perspectives here. The limited edition subscription model sounds very promising for well defined niche markets, but it is sad if a single very small print run is still the only viable option. Maybe there is an argument for an initial print run followed by a print on demand option sold online?

Justin, your online journal idea sounds most interesting indeed, but I suspect there may be quite a resistance to pay-per-view. I have a feeling that even most educated readers still judge value for money by the number of pages, and not by the content. Everyone (except a researcher who just has to have that information) thinks twice before paying £5 for a ten page article when they can buy a 200 page paperback for the same amount. Do you have any information on the conversion ratios for pay-per-view articles at other sites?

I must say, slightly belatedly, that I love ‘real’ books too! There’s little better than a nice pristine new hardback (as long as it’s one that doesn’t fall apart on first opening) – but not paperbacks – I hate the way you have to abuse them so much to get them to open flat enough to read, and how they then turn into twisted, distorted things that you can never quite bring yourself to throw away! Definitely a necessary evil – necessary for economy, size and weight.

What is better than a nice new hardback is an old book. I’ve recently spent a small fortune on old books. Quite a number I had already downloaded – and I still use the PDFs for searches, but I like to have the originals too – books like the Naval Chronicle, Nicolas, William James, Clarke & M’Arthur and so on. And I love margin notes and inscriptions in old books. My copies of the Naval Chronicle have corrections made by the original owner. I haven’t verified them, but I bet that most will turn out to be accurate. Researching the original owners from their inscriptions is often interesting too.

Lesley, I am shocked that your customer reviews have disappeared on top of everything else that has happened. Is it a glitch or something worse? It looks like they may not have disappeared altogether from Amazon, but the link from the book details has gone which obviously has the same effect. See here for a review still buried in the site: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3EXINF5EXZ1P4

It might be worth looking at the online models of the various newspapers for ideas. Some (like the Guardian) put virtually all their content, minus a lot of the pictures, online - although I think they now charge for the crosswords!

Other broadsheets make a limited amount of content available free of charge, with the rest only available online via subscription, but allow you to download single articles for a small one-off fee. Perhaps a system of subscription bands could work? So you could choose to pay a few pounds for one article, say, or to subscribe on an annual basis? Or even, to be more convoluted, £X for five articles, £Y for 10, £Z for access to the lot? (I'm just making this up as I go along, by the way...)

As an aside, I also like real books, and despite my relative youth would have no truck with digital varieties if I had a choice. (I'm Tycho's daughter, so it's clearly bred in the bone!) I also like old books - I adore the smell, and like Mum, I appreciate them as historical artefacts, and often as beautiful things, as well as for their content.

For those who haven't already read it, I heartily recommend a book called 'Ex Libris - Confessions of a Common Reader' by Anne Fadiman. It's a series of essays about loving books and I go back to it time and again.

Many thanks to everyone for these thought-provoking and informative posts.

A few thoughts on copyright:

copyright law can be fraught with difficulties, even when you are writing about a period as far back as the Napoleonic Wars.

As I understand (or misunderstand) it – and I would welcome any clarification or correction – published material is out of copyright 70 years after the author’s death. So presumably, one can quote from any published letter, history, biography etc.once the author has been dead for 70 years. However, if the material is previously unpublished, the law is less clear. There has been much agitation recently over some unpublished poems of John Clare – who died in 1864. An academic has gained possession of, edited and published some of his previously unpublished work and is now claiming copyright over the edited and published text. No one, I believe, has yet tested the right in court, yet scholars are understandably nervous about using this material in case they are charged with breach of copyright – which rather hampers Clare studies.

Copyright over paintings and other images is similarly covered by the copyright 70 year copyright law – BUT the owners hold copyright over any photograph of the work made in the last seventy years. For example, on the cover of my anthology, I wanted to use Abbott’s portrait of Nelson painted 200+ years ago. Out of copyright? Yeeeees, but the copyright of the photograph of the portrait is held by the NMM to whom I had to apply for permission to reproduce it, and one other image. This was granted, and the fee charged was deemed to be ‘for personal use’ since I had no intention of selling the book, a quarter of the fee payable had it been ‘for commercial use’, which was generous; though I have to say that other public archives charged only a pound or two for supplying an image, plus p&p at cost.

I was careful to use mainly poems that were previously published and out of copyright. Some modern ones were still in copyright and I was doubly careful to ensure that the appropriate fee was paid. Some poets and publishers generously reduced their fees but they still came to £250+.

In one case, I couldn’t trace the copyright holder, so I merely put a note saying that every effort had been made to trace copyright holders, and supplied a contact address so that I could rectify the matter. Apparently, you are legally pretty well in the clear if you do that; it is filching material without permission that raises hackles.

Publishing material on the internet – ooooooh! Very complex! Any comments? I believe that the poet Wendy Cope pursues any internet site that quotes her poetry as she says, very credibly, that it damages her sales; though I believe you can quote snippets and short passages of poetry and prose for illustrative purposes, say in a review.

The Times Digital Archive is a fascinating source of information about Nelson and his world, but I am not sure what the position is about quoting from the text, or posting the actual piece from The Times. It is marked with the copyright symbol, even though the archive dates from the 1700s, so some of it must be out of copyright, surely?

If I’m wrong on any of this – PLEASE correct me.