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Publishing

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Anonymous

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Ok so supose someone u knew had writen a Novel..with a Fortean theme... And sort of retired from the sending it out to publisers thing cos of a 6 month stringing along to find they are vanity publisher type thing....i...err this friend had done self publising of a magazine before (Well Wierd Cornwall) and now realises he is geneticly unsuited to selling anyting!...who would u sugest he sent it to? or did with 60.000 word mostly in the right order?...
 
The Writers Handbook is published yearlly and gives details of publishers, agents, etc, and what type of books they specialise in. The WH also has useful tips on presentation and so forth, and it should be available in your local library.

But a word from one who's been there - don't get your hopes up! It's almost impossible to get new work published nowadays unless you are already famous. If you have not rowed the Pacific single-handed, are not a Premiership footballer, or have not discovered a new city in the jungle, I suggest you embark on a passionate affair with a cabinet minister, or even Peter Mandelson. Ann Widecombe would be a good bet too...
 
Writers Handbook..been there done that... Macmillans letter on me...err my friends wall as i type.. Please do try other publisers or agents, good luck..... I know the score on publising and publisers i think .... i just wondered if there was some way of releasing it into the wild to run free!....

as for ur other sugestion......err no thanks i'd rather not... i couldnt with Madelson cos i dont fancy blokes and i couldnt with Widecombe cos i dont fancy blokes...

i gues im ...er my friend is doomed!
 
Just a sugestion ever thought about DIY publishing? I mean if you have a printer and a local copy shop you are half way there, as for an out let ther is always the "market" section of the board here, Just a thought.

Wm.
 
The web itself is the ultimate in self publishing. Just set up a website and let it all hang out! Probably reach more people than a book ever would. You're already on the internet, so you're part way there.
 
rynner said:
The web itself is the ultimate in self publishing. Just set up a website and let it all hang out! Probably reach more people than a book ever would. You're already on the internet, so you're part way there.

Yeh, but it's not the same as seeing your name on the glossy cover of a book!

Minerva press are always advertising for manuscripts by new authors, jon.

Carole
 
web publising is te front runner at moment...but i realy wouldnt expect anyone to read a book on screen!...my eyes go wonky all the time on the net!.......Minerva Press are vanity publisers and therfore vermin (not quite fair as long as they are upfront about it)

I realy like the idea of self publishing and i have done it. With me Magazine (Well Weird Cornwall reviewd by FT and called 'A delight'...which gave me a warm feeling all over!) But my heart realy did brake toiling round shops who went bust, lost em, we never had em, just plain vanished....i am so bad at selling things now i just avent got it in me!...... But i like the idea of a labour of love not money...i read once of a guy wo published a mag on and made perfumed paper, and anyone remeber the briliant 'Coat Hanger Catalogue' a fee to anyone who asked book about A7 and pics of coat hangers with some very very witty titals....o no i feel a "project" comming on!
 
So glad you wouldn't have an affair with the two said MP's as the first is my local MP. I don't want to see anything in the local paper about him having an affair.

As a writer (or trying to be one but it's hard when you have had w.b. for over 6 weeks) I wouldn't stop trying after 6 months. If a writer thinks they are good and they want to be published then they will keep on trying.

The web isn't the greatest place to put a book but you could always put a chapter or two there. Get people (including the publishers) interested in your work. With some luck the whole book might get published.


luce
 
http://www.hackwriters.com/FirstChapters.htm

this is the web site of the guy who ran the creative (comerciel) writers course at Falmouth Collage of Arts. Sam North. he said it was good and wopped it on his site for publishers to see....months ago...not a sniff not nofink.....

oh its "Living in Penury" down the page a bit..u can read the first chapter....

im feeling a bit down now..perapse its rubbish....been deludeing myself......imm off to starve in a garet... oh i cant cos the wifes made some toast....
 
Hey Jon, what gives! On this message board you mostly mispell every other word, but the first chapter of your book is fine! Aren't spellcheckers wonderful!

I haven't read it all yet, but I will. I have a little booklet called "Farthest from Railways", which is about Hartland, North Devon. Your opening reminded me of that.

Didn't you mean "Cousin Jacks" though? Or is that part of the Fortean twist? If so, I guess not many people outside Cornwall will get it!

I love the name of Penury...
it describes my 'situation' very well!

PS: I had an Uncle Jack, and my grandfather was also Jack. These were given names, not slang or nicknames. But none of us is Cornish. (I may have been conceived in Cornwall, but that's hardly a subject I like to raise with with my elderly mother...!)
 
You could always tr changing your name to Salman Rushdie or Wilbur Smith or something . . .

Doris Lessing did the same thing in reverse - she submitted a manuscript under an assumed name and got no end of rejections. It's a hard life out there for a budding author. I've got several mss, tried submitting a couple of them a few years ago and got the usual rejections. Now I don't bother because I'm an unknown, it's a waste of time and I can do without that sort of hassle at this stage in my life. I still keep writing tho'.

It's most annoying when people like V Beckham, who have absolutely nothing to say except how great they are, are published straight away.

They say an agent always helps, but then even getting an agent is difficult, and of course that costs money, oh woe . . .:(

Carole
 
carole said:
Yeh, but it's not the same as seeing your name on the glossy cover of a book!

Minerva press are always advertising for manuscripts by new authors, jon.

Carole

I don't want to slag off Minerva as I don't know anything about them, but as a general rule any Publisher that has to advertise is a vanity publisher.

Cujo
 
uncle Jacks or Cousin jacks..are relatives that are working away from Cornwall...mainly in hard rock mineing in S.America or S.Africa..... Agents are as dificult to get as publishers!...Yes spellcheckers are wonderfull!..as are wives and friends willing to wade through tortured English!.... "Rambles Beond Railways" is a real book!...
 
Bagins said:
I saw somthing about publishing on http://www.whsmith.co.uk might be worth a look.

Wm.
Yes WHSmaug are running a writers' compo - send in the first chapter of your opus alng with a summary of the plot. First prize is an into to a publishing editor, a fortnight on an Arvon course and 5000 dosheroos. Give it a go!
Or else, self-publish. It's not too difficult - we self-publish a small quarterly magazine. We print the whole thing ourselves in our front room - 200 copies a time of a slightly-smaller-than-A5 mag, 120 pages. All hand-collated (every page touched by human hand, folks!). We take it to a 'proper' printer for binding and trimming, but otherwise it's all DIY. For this, we use a couple of 2nd-hand office laser printers - one mono for the innards, the other colour for the cover.
Agreed, selling is the big difficulty. For that, there's no alternative than to trek around the bookshops. Also send out review copies to EVERYONE. If you have a website, use that for publicising and selling.
But - it can be done. Just a lot of hard work, is all!
 
oh i remeber it well the front room covered in loose pages piles and the cost of a long arm stapler!..i used to use an ordinary one and bend the staples but hand!... i published at A4 cos i liked the size but i can realy see why A5 is used so much....i realy ought to get on with my threatend project of A Well Wierd Gazeteer Of Cornwall.....
 
sidecar_jon said:
oh i remeber it well the front room covered in loose pages piles and the cost of a long arm stapler!..i used to use an ordinary one and bend the staples but hand!... i published at A4 cos i liked the size but i can realy see why A5 is used so much....

Yikes! I remember hand-stapling very well, and I feel for you!
We've been going for several years now, so we're pretty well organised, with a special big table we built ourselves to do the collating on. As I said, we don't staple the mag, but get it properly glue-bound. But smaller booklets (we do a lot of DTPing & printing for friends), we still staple by hand, using a special booklet stapler that's known as a 'saddle stapler' - much stronger than a long-arm stapler, just THUMP it.:p We're getting pretty good at the whole business - thinking of getting an A3 laser printer next, so's we can print A4 mags!!
 
i never could justify the cost of a long arm stapler.....for some reason they are quite expensive compaired with ordinary ones. i envy ur sadle stapler ...but then if i'd had one i'd just be surounded with unsold copies!... A4 mags are so nice to handle i think its worth the extra...i even tried to go realy odd ball size but found that haveing to cut, collate, and staple was just a step too far even for me!... i realy do like the self publishing thing...seems altrasistic seeing as u can never make ur money back!
 
sidecar_jon said:
... i realy do like the self publishing thing...seems altrasistic seeing as u can never make ur money back!
Yes, that's true. We'll never make a living at it - just covering expenses, really, and not much more. But it keeps us busy and saves us from hanging around street corners selling crack to schoolkids.
 
Don't worry. Very very few published authors make a living at it either.
 
i know few authors make any real money..... i just thougt it was an ideal thing for me to do ...write book send it off get it back yes/no...no problem..i dont have to do any selling etc..till i got the attempted rip off merchants on my case!...they were listed as legitimate publishers in Writers handbook too....not now i hope!

does anyone know of any free pagination software?...one that can arange pages into bindable booklets?...Publiser 98 dont do it without splitting it before hand..im talking about 200 pages here!..Publiser wants to print page one on the front and page 200 on the back!...thats one hell of a fat booklet! (me staples dont reech lol)
 
sidecar_jon said:
does anyone know of any free pagination software?...one that can arange pages into bindable booklets?...Publiser 98 dont do it without splitting it before hand..im talking about 200 pages here!..Publiser wants to print page one on the front and page 200 on the back!...thats one hell of a fat booklet! (me staples dont reech lol)
You could try looking on Tucow - I'm pretty sure there's one or two freeware booklet-making programs out there.
But the way we do it is just to print (say) page 1 and page 2 side by side on an A4 sheet, printed both sides (page 2 on back of page 1), then guillotine them into A5 pages. Then take the lot to a printer for binding.
In the program - we use Serif Page Plus, which you can get for free on cover discs - we do two A5 pages on a A4 sheet (with odd-numbered pages on the right & even-numbered on the left, as you look at the screen), without bothering with pagination or text-flow - it's simpler.
And does your book need to be 200 pages? One reason why we prefer PagePlus to Publisher is that PP gives us great control over text size, leading etc, so that we can fit text into limited spaces. I've just printed out one copy of book that I downloaded free from the web. I got it down to 120 A5 pages, at over 700 words to the page at around point 9 Arial, with tight line and letter spacing. At that size, I was able to actually staple it, with the saddle stapler. Not very elegant, but perfectly servicable. So try experimenting with text size and so forth, to get the page count down. Oh yes, and if you're printing both sides of the paper, better to use a laser rather than inkjet.
 
i think pagination is the reason most mags go A5... i covered the front room with little A4 page 'maps' and couldnt arange it properly...at least not over 200 pages....... I went thro horrible gyrations to acive a A4 mag. I found a guy who had a A3 photocopier who would do it as i wanted at a good price (not easy in Cornwall!) The big breakthro was finding out that Photocopiers increased size by aprox 3% even when they said they were just copying! (amazingly enuf the penny dropped in a TV prog about MJ12 document. one of the reasons it looked a forgery is cos the signiture is elongated like it was copied) ..... i couldnt run to colour tho my 'New Ager New Danger' issue did have gold leaf on the cover (theres class for u!)
 
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