Authors Electric

Hello! I’m drafting this on November 1st and am currently up to my eyes in what can optimistically be described as ‘preparing for publication’. If you saw my office, you’d be more likely to think of the aftermath of a violent storm. Almost every writing manual and self-help book I own (and that’s a lot) lies open on my desk, or on the blanket chest next to my desk, or on the bunk beds behind it. In pride of place, I have to say, is Chris Longmuir’s Nuts & Bolts of Self-Publishing , which has so far proved invaluable in negotiating Microsoft Word-whatever-version-I-now-have – the one with the ribbon, anyway. Thank you enormously, Chris, for writing this and for going into so much helpful detail – enough, it seems, even for me. My computer desktop is cluttered too, with so many files open that I’ve lost count. Got into a panic yesterday when I discovered I had the same file open twice – which one contained my painstakingly added latest revisions and which didn’t? Major pani...

“Henri Guérard at his press” The New York Library Digital Collections In case you haven’t noticed, the publishing world has been undergoing a massive change over the last few years. In the beginning, there were the traditional publishers! Well, not really. In the beginning, there were the professional copyists who prepared books on vellum or parchment. Moving swiftly on to the advent of the printing press, the guilds that handled the sale of most objects became involved in the production and sale of books. However, we mustn’t forget the printers, the people who produced books and performed the roles of editor, publisher and bookseller. Did you know that the first printer-publisher in Britain, William Caxton, printed more than ninety books in his lifetime? The publication business which developed through the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was still a mixture of producers and suppliers. But from the nineteenth century onwards the business of producing books became ...