As we all know Valentine’s Day is an invention created by commercial enterprises to sell cards, flowers, champagne and exorbitantly expensive nights out.
All that said, it’s good to celebrate love – not necessarily just romantic love, but love of any kind. Here for instance is a poem I just constructed about my grandson. I am not – as is blindingly obvious – a poet. But there is something about watching a small person grow that brings out the McGonagall* in me. So here goes:
FOR SONNY
I’m looking at you. Yes, I’m looking at you, kid, In a way I never did with my own. (My own kids, that is: Not enough time, too much anxiety, Too much of everything.) But you I can watch without judgement Or criticism or anxiety, With time, and simple fascination and wonder, As you grow and learn and become Your very own person. But there is one thing you both have, Both you my children and you my grandson, You have my total, undivided, unconditional love.
As anyone who knows me will confirm that is about as sentimental as I am likely to get. For a different take, or series of takes, on the thorny business of love, have a look at my collection of short stories about love in adversity.
*William McGonagall was a Scottish poet in the ‘doggerel’ style. He was widely regarded as ‘the worst poet in British history’ (to quote Wikipedia). His life, incidentally, was fascinating, and he was remarkable for his total belief in himself and whatever he chose to write or to do, no matter how weird and unlikely.
Free-spirited, anarchic, rule-bending, Prudence’s purpose in life is to have fun, sometimes in unusual ways. Hobnobbing with the likes of actress *Mrs Patrick Campbell, *Lady Ottoline Morrell and *Millicent Fawcett, pioneer suffragist, Prue is happy to dip her toe into anything that catches her fancy.
It’s not often our headline news features How To Keep Cool in a Heatwave in this country of unpredictable weather. (Hot tip for night-times, fill a hot water bottle with cold water; or better still, put it in the freezer.) So if you fancy an easy read to distract from that and other things take a look at Claudia, free on Amazon in ebook form only until July 16th.
It is 16 June 2022, the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on a single day in 1904.
Blooms
It is, not quite coincidentally, the 10th anniversary of my first book, The Worst Country in the World, the story of the beginnings of colonial Australia as seen through the eyes of my ancestors, which I published on 16 June 2012. Far be it from me to bracket myself with James Joyce, but there it is. The date was, in my case, quite deliberate.
So in celebration of the anniversary of my first dip into the world of book publishing I am reducing the price of Worst Country to AU$3.99 ($2.99/£2.99) for just one day. Click here:
Enjoy the day, the sunshine, the blooms and the books!
Images of Violet (illustrations by Anna de Polnay)
Violet is being offered free as part of a competition organised by Booksweeps. It’s free to enter and all you need to do is type in your email address and click the link and presto! you could just be the lucky winner of 52 books of historical and literary fiction, plus a Kindle.
You can also choose an author whose newsletter list you want to join (which is the ultimate purpose of the whole thing). I am in the throes of learning the whole process so if you want to take the journey with me – and I could really do with your company – just click on my name.
‘True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen‘ François de La Rochefoucauld
My anthology of short stories about love in adversity is out TOMORROW, Saturday 13 February, just in time for Valentine’s, at the Incredibly Inexpensive (and Introductory) price of $0.99 (£0.99), ebook version.
Whether you love Valentine’s Day or you hate it, there is a story here for you. But a warning: these are not romantic stories. Love may make the world go round, and it may be many-splendoured and all that, but as we all know it’s not that easy to find. To misquote Oscar Wilde: ‘Love is rarely pure and never simple’.
She originated in a short story I wrote some years ago, about a woman in her fifties and the mother of three grownup children who discovers the joys of sex for the first time.
‘It got better, in time, though to be truthful it always felt more of a duty than a pleasure: a little like homework, satisfying when over, and done well, but never exactly enjoyable. But then nobody had ever suggested it could be otherwise.’
That was Claudia talking about sex.
I was intrigued by the notion that for many women of previous eras sex was largely a matter of lying back and thinking of England. The idea that it could be pleasurable, and done not just for the sake of procreation, never seemed to enter their heads. Then along came Marie Stopes, who made the outrageous suggestion in her book Married Love that sex could be enjoyed for its own sake, and that there was such a thing as a clitoris – whose function was for the purpose of (self) gratification rather than producing babies – and, in her own way set the world of sex on fire.
Originally published by A C Fifield in 1918 (this cover from The Gollancz Paperbacks edition 1995)
But The Awakening of Claudia Faraday is not solely about sex. There is a bit of erotica of course. But it’s essentially – as the title suggests – about what the effect this new discovery has on a woman in her fifties, brought up in the rigid confines of the Victorian age and now, thanks to an unlikely happening, emerging into the bright lights of the Roaring Twenties: a time of bohemianism, Noel Coward and the Bloomsbury group; when women were shedding their corsets along with their inhibitions.
It’s a book about a reserved, impeccably-mannered woman of a certain age learning how to behave badly, you could say. What might have happened if Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (whose name was the inspiration behind Claudia’s) had met D H Lawrence’s Oliver Mellors.
Mrs Dalloway, originally published by Hogarth Press in 1925
Lady Chatterley (goodreads.com), originally published by Penguin Books in 1960
Claudia Faraday, originally published by Prefab Publications in 2019
For the good people who attended the Society of Genealogists workshop on self publishing on Saturday 8th July, here as promised is the gist of what we covered:
First off, it is important to find out as much as possible about the process in order to avoid getting confused and/or ripped off. There are sharks out there.
Self publishing is ideal for family historians for several reasons:
You get to control everything: the length of the book and the look of it including the cover
You can mix the genres (ie history/family history/memoir and fiction)
It doesn’t matter if you only intend to sell a few copies (see POD below)
You can edit the text, images and/or cover at any time and re-publish the book at no extra cost
Your book never goes out of print
PRINT ON DEMAND (POD)
This is what has made self publishing in print form possible and financially viable. Instead of having to print off hundreds or thousands of copies of your book, and find somewhere to store them, Amazon (or whoever) files your book electronically and only prints a copy when someone orders one. Unit costs per copy are the same no matter how many you order. Shipping costs on top vary according to the country the buyer lives in and how many copies he/she is ordering. So if for example you order ten copies to be sent to the same address it will not cost ten times as much as ordering one copy.
BEFORE PUBLISHING
EDITING
Having written your book and polished it to within an inch of its life, it’s a good idea to have it professionally edited. Every writer no matter how successful or experienced needs an outside eye to check for overall structure, clarity, repetition and consistency.
(That said, if you are only intending to publish for your immediate family this may not be essential, though the right editor can always improve any book.)
COPY EDITING & PROOFREADING
Copy editing means checking the book for grammar and sentence structure. Some editors will do this for you, but don’t expect it.
Proofreading means checking for typos. You should be able to get a sharp-eyed friend or colleague to do this for you.
Once your book has been written, rewritten, edited and proofread, the next step is to gather it together in two documents:
INTERIOR
COVER
The interior consists of Front matter, text and End matter. What goes where is a matter of choice but generally speaking this is what I go for:
INTERIOR FRONT MATTER
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication/quote page
Map/family tree/photo
Table of contents
INTERIOR END MATTER
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Appendix & chapter notes (or notes if you have footnoes)
Bibliography
Author biography
Index
FOOTNOTES
In my first book The Worst Country in the World I didn’t use footnotes for various reasons: a) I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the text and b) footnotes don’t generally work in ebooks. Instead I referenced my sources in the Appendix and Chapter Notes, and expanded on various things only the seriously interested, such as family members, might want to know. This was a personal choice however. With my current book I may rethink.
DESIGN
Whether you decide to go it alone or get people to help you it is useful to have some idea of what you want your book to look like. It can be helpful to find a book whose layout you like and use it as a template. (I chose Kate Grenville’s The Secret River for the plainness of style, clarity and size of font and relatively generous margins.) These are the considerations:
Page/trim size: Amazon’s POD templates are limited to standard book sizes such as 5” x 8” (standard novel), 6” x 9” (standard non fiction) etc. (I chose 6” x 9”)
Font and font size: (I chose Palatino 11 point – on the large size, deliberately; I experimented with different fonts and sizes, & margins, by printing out a few pages and cutting them down to the relevant size, but it’s difficult to see how it looks until you can see the full printed proof)
Margins: (mine were top & bottom 1.9cm, inner 2 outer 1.5, gutter .33)
Chapter headings layout: (Aligned L, R or C, upper or lower case, start some way down the page)
Extras: such as drop caps (1st letter of 1st sentence in each chapter enlarged), small caps at beginning of new chapter, headers
Images: (photos, maps, family trees) – see below for copyright
COVER
Received wisdom says don’t try to create your own book cover unless you are an experienced graphic designer or au fait with Photoshop. Professionals know what is eye-catching and what is not and what is appropriate for the genre. They should also be clear about how many versions and amendments they are willing to provide for their fee. Fees differ according to how much they are required to do; original artwork will obviously cost more than if you provide your own image, or if they are able to use stock images from copyright free sources. Expect to pay from around £250 upwards.
Alternatively look online for cover designers and if you find one you like, contact them direct. Likewise in a bookshop: the designer’s name may be on the fly-leaf of the book, otherwise contact them through the publisher.
COPYRIGHT
As we touched on in the workshop copyright is a minefield, and I cannot pretend to be an expert. However I did come up against a copyright issue when I wanted to use a 19th century painting by Australian painter Tom Roberts for my cover. The image itself was out of copyright but the high-resolution photo of the image online belonged to an art gallery in Ballarat, Australia. They allowed me to use it on condition I signed a detailed license form stating I would not change the image or superimpose text on top of it, and that I would send the final proof to them for their approval. In the end my cover designer decided she couldn’t comply with their demands, so we didn’t use it.
So while an image may be out of copyright the online photo of the image – or in the case of books or documents, the scanned version uploaded online by an organisation or library – may not be.
BLURB
This is what appears on the back of a paperback or on your Amazon page. The blurb is notoriously difficult to write, but it is your selling tool, and should be:
Brief – no more than 200 words
Written in the third person present tense
A selling tool not a synopsis
Here for what it’s worth, is my blurb for Worst Country:
In 1787 a handful of people – convicts, marines and government servants – sail across the world to settle a new colony and call it New South Wales.
In 1801 Mary Pitt, a widow with five children, migrates to New South Wales from her home in Dorset to live among these same convicts.
Two hundred odd years later Mary’s great great great great granddaughter travels to what is now Australia to discover why her ancestress risked the lives of her entire family to make her home in a penal colony. She uncovers tales of astonishing bravery and bloody-mindedness, the origins of a unique form of class distinction, why her own Australian/English mother was the person she was and how what was once regarded as the worst country in the world became one of the ‘luckiest’. (135 words)
I’m not saying this is an ideal example (nowadays I think I’d edit it down a tad), but what I’ve set out to do in three paragraphs is:
1) The original story
2) My family’s part in the original story
3) My quest to investigate 1) and 2)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
HOW TO GO ABOUT SELF PUBLISHING
There are three basic options
DIY using POD with either Amazon Createspace or Ingram Spark – the cheapest option
AIDED – through a reputable publishing company or individual
HIGH-END – custom-made with special paper, size and shape and/or binding, eg coffee table book. Ideal for image-heavy books.
DIY – This is the option I chose but I would only recommend it if you have a lot of time and patience. I formatted both the paperback and ebook versions of my book – it took me longer than it should have or than it would do now. It isn’t that difficult, you don’t need any particular IT skills no matter what the books tell you.
If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of doing things yourself you can find more technical details here
Amazon Createspace: https://www.createspace.com Amazon are the market leaders for self publishers. They may be behemoths, and tough employers, but they are very efficient and easy to deal with. Their submission guidelines are very straightforward and easy to follow. They can also show you what kind of royalties you can expect to receive according to how your book is priced. The submission process is free, they don’t start to make money until you start to sell books. They also provide their own free ISBNs and barcodes.
Ingram Spark: http://www.ingramspark.com Ingram have been around forever but Ingram Spark, the self publishing arm, is relatively new on the scene. The advantages of IS are they have print outlets in the UK and Australia as well as the US (Amazon CS is US-based), their distribution is considered to be better, and for the Amazonphobes, they are not Amazon. The quality of print is also slightly better, in my experience. The drawbacks are you have to provide your own ISBN (available in the UK in batches of 10 through Nielsen – http://www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk/controller.php?page=121) – and you have to pay a small fee to submit your ms (unless you are a member of ALLi, see below).
AIDED – Here is where you get someone else to do the work for you. You can buy in services a la carte so to speak, in other words you can provide the cover yourself but hire someone to proofread the book, or to format it.
Before contacting an outside organisation, there are things to be wary of.
DO be clear exactly what you are looking for
DO make sure you hang onto the rights to your book: if you’re using a self pub company pay the one-off fee to get the book up there and that’s it
DO make sure the royalties come straight to you and not through a third party: otherwise you’re dealing with vanity publishing and have the worst of all worlds and will make zilch money
DON’T sign any long-term contracts
Recommended organisations:
I Am Self Publishing https://www.iamselfpublishing.com. A young brother and sister organisation, very friendly, very savvy, experienced in producing all kinds of books. They offer an initial no-obligation consultation, either in person or on the phone.
Matadorhttp://www.troubador.co.uk/matador.aspA large organisation with a rather confusing website. Probably American but also based in the UK. Again recommended by indie authors.
HIGH END – Custom-made, recommended:
I Am Self Publishing – see above Lifelines Press – www.lifelinespress.com Pynto – as above
WEBSITES
If you don’t already have your own family history website I would recommend creating one. It is an excellent way for other family members to get in touch with you. I have a static (ie not a blog) site at marymatchampitt.wordpress.com and I’ve had all manner of distant relatives contact me with very useful information. You can create one for free, or for a small annual hosting fee, at WordPress.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Published by ALLi and available on Amazon and elsewhere*
Published by ALLi and available on Amazon and elsewhere
*There seems to be a problem with this Amazon link. I will query it with ALLi and repost.
An organisation run by indie authors for indie authors. They publish a list of recommended service providers (available to members only) and books (available to all). They also have a closed Facebook page and monthly meetups in London and elsewhere, plus they offer other perks such as reduced rates with Ingram Spark and free entry to the London Book Fair, among other things. If you want to know more, click on the ALLi logo on the top right of this page.
For example when I contacted Who Do You Think You Are for a review they were pretty sniffy, but I sent them a copy anyway and heard nothing more. However they do – or did – have a feature in their magazine called ‘My Family Hero’ and when approached were very keen to include a story about my ancestress.
EBOOKS
Whether or not you are thinking of publishing in e-form (not so suitable for picture-based books), ebooks are easy to produce – again on your own or with help – and you receive a higher royalty (70% through Amazon compared with around 20-25% for paperbacks). Most indie authors sell more ebooks than paperbacks, partly because bookshops are generally reluctant to stock indie published books, and partly because of the cost of POD. My sales are 90% + ebook, and of those, 95% are through Amazon Kindle.
Submission is straightforward, and free, through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: https://kdp.amazon.com/
For other e-devices such as Apple iBook, Nook and Kobo, you can use one site to distribute to all platforms such as Ingram Spark or
That’s about it. If there is anything you would like to add or comment on, or if you have any further queries, please either comment on this post or email me at patsytrench@gmail.com.
