Nelson & His World

Roy and I send out 'occasional newsletters' about four times a year. Back numbers can be viewed on our website. We sent out the latest one last week, and Anna suggested we put some or all of it on this forum, including the update of Jack Tar. I'll do an update of that book here, and then perhaps do the piece we included on Gibraltar. Any of you are welcome to sign up for our newsletters, either by contacting me through this forum or via our website (set up to try to control spam).

Our book Jack Tar was published last week in paperback. For those of you who are interested in or intrigued by the publishing industry, the hardback version was called Jack Tar: Life in Nelson's Navy. The jacket design was red, white and blue in colour, though quite a lot of muddy grey was also present, which wasn't so good. As you opened up the hardback book, there were endpapers of the Rowlandson cartoon of Portsmouth Point, but these were dropped in reprints to save money and keep down the cost of the book.

For the paperback, the publisher was going to do a new design, but in the end the new designer revamped the old design. It's no longer red, white and blue, but red and blue with a pale orange or buff background, which sounds awful but works much better. The publisher also had another look at the title and decided that it was more appropriate to have a new subtitle of 'The extraordinary lives of ordinary seamen in Nelson's navy'. Publishing a paperback isn't so straightforward...

Lesley

http://www.adkinshistory.com

The paperback of 'Jack Tar' is listed today in the Sunday Times' 'Pick of the Paperbacks'. It's a very brief resumé, but the reviewer, David Mills, observes that the authors have used unpublished diaries, letters and manuscripts to produce 'this fascinating study'.

Hear, hear! I'm still working my way through the book, with endless interruptions, but am finding it enthralling.

A great book, just wish it was released as a talking book also.

No, we didn't know about the Sunday Times, so I'm very grateful to hear about that - fewer and fewer books are being reviewed in newspapers, because they are are cutting back, and this affects both local newspapers and national ones. The editor of a family history magazine said a month or two ago that it was the duty of all of us to ensure we purchased a newspaper whenever we could! (though if the newspapers keep pruning what we actually want to read, like book reviews, then it becomes difficult to justify buying them). In Nelson's time they absolutely relied on newspapers for news, of course.

Anyway, it is good to have that mention, and we also had a 5-star review in the Sunday Telegraph last week. We would love Jack Tar (and many other non-fiction books) to be an audio book, but it's out of our hands. If any audio publishers are reading this, then get in touch!!

Lesley

http://www.adkinshistory.com

Lesley:

I've just finished 'Jack Tar' and have posted my comments in Book Reports' on the Information Forum.

Lesley,

Have you tried Random House, Audio?
Or the Talking Bookshop at 11 Wigmore Street, London, W1U

Regards

Stephen

Stephen,

Your suggestions are appreciated, but for this book it is not that simple. Publishers these days rarely deal directly with authors, but go through agents. So we ourselves can't take our book projects to publishers or audio publishers, though they could come to us! Our actual publisher doesn't have the audio rights to this book - they are with an agent. It's frustrating, because we are pretty sure that there is a good enough market out there for audio books, but not enough are produced. The same is probably true of large print books (hint, hint, if any large-print publishers are reading this!). I saw a reader's letter in a magazine the other day saying that he drives huge distances for work and has listened to most audio CDs.

Lesley

http://www.adkinshistory.com

I thought I would try out Mark Barrett's excellent instructions on inserting a picture - so here is the jacket of the paperback:



As he said, it is very easy to insert pictures from other websites - this was taken from my own website. I now need to work out how to insert pictures I have myself have photographed.

Lesley

http://www.adkinshistory.com

Can I say just how much I enjoyed that wonderful book in hardback and the fact that I have been nagging at the fact of having it done in Audio, just how much has been the attraction of those great covers, in attracting a new generation just by looking at the cover, into attracting first timers into the interest into the Royal Navy, or Nelson's Navy!

Well done!!

Lesley - now you are ready for your next challenge.

To add your own photos you have to get them up on the internet somewhere.

There are lots of free photo hosting services available.

The one I happen to use - and just because it was recommended by my brother-in-law - is this one.

http://www.mediafire.com/

You just have to open an account and go through a fairly simple learning curve to upload any images you have on your P.C.

There really are no catches with this service. It really is free. I have had stuff on it for over a year now.

They make their money through services they DO charge for - but there is no pressure to use them. I have not received a single email or communication from them in all that time.

One small word of warning. If you do use them and manage to upload some images - each image is given what they call a "sharing URL". This appears to be the code to include in a link. For some reason I can't make it work - probably something simple I haven't sussed - so I just default to the right click/copy/paste routine and that DOES work.

Just to prove it - below is one of several images I have hosted on my Mediafire account for other members.

If you want to try it out just let me know if you hit any snags. I seem to keep repeating this at the moment - but you can't break anything. You just have to invest a bit of time getting through the learning curve - and you will definitely come out the other side more "empowered".

MB

P.S. I should have repeated my mantra about the problem of image size.

If I take a picture on my SLR camera it will have a width of 3000+ pixels. That is ideal for printing out as a photograph as most are printed at 300 pixels per inch. So a perfect image up to 10" wide.

But your computer screen only has approx. 100 pixels per inch - so the same image would be at least double the size of the screen.

For that reason - any image I upload to Mediafire I tend to resize first. Down to a width of 6 or 700 pixels.

But I have a feeling that Mediafire will actually automatically create a version in an internet friendly size.

I'll upload a full size image later or tomorrow - just to remind myself exactly what Mediafire does and doesn't do.

MB

A couple of other useful free services are:

http://www.getdropbox.com/

http://photobucket.com/

But also see my post in the private forum.

Yes - I was right.

I uploaded an image without resizing it and Mediafire automatically created a Small/Medium and Large versions.

Below is a link to the Small one.

If anyone is interested it's from the Trafalgar Day ceremony in Birmingham last year.

In conclusion - sorry for hijacking a couple of threads with all this technical Mumbo Jumbo. But hopefully it will help with the overall enjoyment of the forum.

I'll crawl back under my stone now!!



MB

I bought Roy's book "Nelson's Trafalgar" here in the U.S. several months back and found it to be immensely helpful in understanding the dreadful conditions sailors had to endure in the early 19th Century navy.

My only previous (and very limited) knowledge of life at sea was through my involvement in folk song but "Nelson's Trafalgar" has opened up a whole new world for me and I've been recommending the book to everyone.

I'll definitely buy the Jack Tar book and look forward to future publications from you and Roy.

Hailwood,

Many thanks from us both for your kind comments about Nelson's Trafalgar - this is the US title of the book. In the UK it is simply Trafalgar. While I'm about it, perhaps a word about subtitles - in the UK it is 'The Biography of a Battle'. The US wanted something a bit different, so they settled on 'The Battle that Changed the World'. Of course, reviewers then concentrate on analysing the subtitles, even though these are publisher decisions. Ah well...

I hope you'll enjoy Jack Tar. Folk song is a particular interest, so there are a few mentions in the book. You'll see in the acknowledgements that we thanked Jerry Bryant of Old Fashioned Music, who did the Roast Beef of Old England CD (Jerry Bryant and the Starboard Mess).

Lesley

http://www.adkinshistory.com