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| 'Forgotten Fife Tales' The original magazine concept (Click link) Also available as a Kindle Edition. |
How can you write a book by accident? Well, actually, it is very easy; you just need to fail repeatedly and emphatically at a number of endeavours and the outcome can well be seeking out an ISBN number to salvage hours and hours of work, and just moving on.
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| 'Forgotten Fife Tales' Available now on Lulu, priced £6.99 (Click link) |
What I am passionate about, and always have been, are stories, particularly local ones. For some reason my community’s history has always fascinated me but, probably because of a limited attention span, I tend to like that in bite size chunks. That’s most likely why I devoted most of my working life to local newspapers – I simply love tales of ordinary folk and that snapshot of social history, and being part of recording it. There is just one thing better ... and that’s discovering it.
At the end of my employment I was offered the chance to write features for a Scottish nostalgia publication. In some respects it was my dream assignment, given carte blanche on a publication where I was trusted to come up with the stories, write them, illustrate them, design the pages and take it right up to the point of print. There was just one downside to that, it wasn’t ‘my’ community or ‘my’ history. Nevertheless, I grew to love that part of Scotland, its people, and its stories, and I still do. And that project allowed me to make the case for a similar publication for Fife and, for a while, that looked like a possibility.
I started to take notes of Fife stories but my focus was on the 'paying job'. But all good things come to an end and I found myself somewhat tarred with the label of “protracting” the work required for this publication so when someone appeared who could do it cheaper and a lot faster I suddenly found myself as a writer with nothing to write for. So here was ‘Failure #1’, and the trigger to all that followed.
It really was, in hindsight, a daft endeavour, especially since my track record in commercial ventures lies between disastrous and comical.
I decided to launch a Fife publication, similar to the one I'd been working on for a couple of years, and that very idea was definitely ‘Failure #2’. The physical production of a tabloid wasn’t an issue; I’d had decades of experience, but there were problems, and one major issue on the editorial side that I couldn't solve - the use of photographs. Copyright, which is normally clear-cut and I understand and don’t have an issue with, proved to be a great deal more complicated when it came to historical images. Many are held in archives and collections, some of which, contentiously and arguably, may actually be in the public domain, and there were some that were still the property of the photographer, though I actually owned the print, but, of course, not the rights for commercial gain.
It hindsight there was a lot of naivete on my part in thinking these fees could be allayed and then calculated on sales, or as a percentage of the profit, if any, the publication might make. Without exception though everyone wanted the money up front, with no contra-deal acceptable. I'd been there before. One of my last commissioned articles saw me file nearly 2000 words on a story I came up with, researched, wrote, designed … and provided images for. When the sums were done, my fee was £40 for around 20 hours’ work, roughly £2 an hour. The pictures I needed for a single use were 70 years old and came from an archived collection ... and carried a reproduction price tag of £225. You can see that the maths of copyright is an uncomfortable flaw. These image costs, together with those of design, prints etc, forced a major re-think.
Meanwhile, I was still chipping away at the writing.
The next idea (‘Failure #3’) was to abandon the format of an illustrated tabloid journal, and simply go for words and spaces. I decided to do something different here and, looking at 17th century journals, came up with an A5 format I liked and one I thought might be eye-catching on the shelves, sticking out as 'something different'. The problem here was the pagination. There was a limit on what could be ‘stitiched’ (stapled) with any other form of binding doubling the production costs. Given approaches to potential advertisers I’d struck a blank on the tabloid and A5 proposals, so without having to give up space that would have offset some of the costs, the olde worlde ‘Colourful Cornucopia...’ concept was finalised.
That only left distribution (‘Failure #4’). This was one aspect where the only cost-effective approach was for my wife and I to do it ourselves. However, this is where I came unstuck again. The cover price would obviously need to include a share for the retailer. What I discovered very quickly was that the cover price would actually only include a small share for me, and then there was the 'sale or return' issue. Going back to the sums there was a simple conundrum. You either had to charge a ridiculous price or sell a ridiculous number of copies. If they didn’t shift, then the entire production costs, with no advertising support, would be mine to bear … and I had no income.
By this time I had called a halt to the writing; it seemed pointless to continue. My wife suggested that it might be worthwhile seeing if a publisher might be interested with what I had penned so far, and so began another fruitless exercise (‘Failure #5’ ). To be fair, there was some interest though I was warned by a publisher that if I hadn’t heard anything from them in a year I could take it they weren’t interested. A year is a long time to wait for a rejection slip.
The next idea (‘Failure #3’) was to abandon the format of an illustrated tabloid journal, and simply go for words and spaces. I decided to do something different here and, looking at 17th century journals, came up with an A5 format I liked and one I thought might be eye-catching on the shelves, sticking out as 'something different'. The problem here was the pagination. There was a limit on what could be ‘stitiched’ (stapled) with any other form of binding doubling the production costs. Given approaches to potential advertisers I’d struck a blank on the tabloid and A5 proposals, so without having to give up space that would have offset some of the costs, the olde worlde ‘Colourful Cornucopia...’ concept was finalised.
That only left distribution (‘Failure #4’). This was one aspect where the only cost-effective approach was for my wife and I to do it ourselves. However, this is where I came unstuck again. The cover price would obviously need to include a share for the retailer. What I discovered very quickly was that the cover price would actually only include a small share for me, and then there was the 'sale or return' issue. Going back to the sums there was a simple conundrum. You either had to charge a ridiculous price or sell a ridiculous number of copies. If they didn’t shift, then the entire production costs, with no advertising support, would be mine to bear … and I had no income.
By this time I had called a halt to the writing; it seemed pointless to continue. My wife suggested that it might be worthwhile seeing if a publisher might be interested with what I had penned so far, and so began another fruitless exercise (‘Failure #5’ ). To be fair, there was some interest though I was warned by a publisher that if I hadn’t heard anything from them in a year I could take it they weren’t interested. A year is a long time to wait for a rejection slip.
And so someone mentioned self-publishing. The financial outlay only involved some help with formatting and I was advised to abandon my A5 ‘Colourful Cornucopia...’ concept, which, I suppose, didn’t really match the style of writing, and opt for a cover. A graphic designer took on my idea, so there’s a bill for that (‘Failure #6’) .
So there you have it, that's how the tabloid morphed into the magazine that morphed into the 'accidental' book. Given the royalty set-up on self-publishing I’m already resigned to the fact that I won’t make a penny profit (‘Failure #7’) but if I sell around 1000 copies, which is highly unlikely, that will generate enough to pay for the cover and formatting.
At this point, my pay-off comment should be that this has been a hard-learned lesson and I won’t venture down this path again but … to be honest, I still like the A5 ‘Colourful Cornucopia...’ idea, so much so I reproduced it on page 3 of the book and it is shown above.
So, if there are any contributors, retailers or advertisers who are as daft as I am, drop me an email – fifetales@scotlandmail.com, I’m just about ready for ‘Failure #8’.
So there you have it, that's how the tabloid morphed into the magazine that morphed into the 'accidental' book. Given the royalty set-up on self-publishing I’m already resigned to the fact that I won’t make a penny profit (‘Failure #7’) but if I sell around 1000 copies, which is highly unlikely, that will generate enough to pay for the cover and formatting.
At this point, my pay-off comment should be that this has been a hard-learned lesson and I won’t venture down this path again but … to be honest, I still like the A5 ‘Colourful Cornucopia...’ idea, so much so I reproduced it on page 3 of the book and it is shown above.
So, if there are any contributors, retailers or advertisers who are as daft as I am, drop me an email – fifetales@scotlandmail.com, I’m just about ready for ‘Failure #8’.
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