Thursday 1 December 2011

Two Heads ... Why?

Welcome to my blog!

It’s mainly about being a writer, but I’m sure I’ll have other things to say sometimes.

I’ve called my blog Two Heads because today is a special day for me. My novel set in modern Cumbria and Ancient Greece has finally got a title! After weeks of thought and about a hundred possibilities, we have decided on The Boy with Two Heads.

Some people find that alarming, so just to show that such things were not unthinkable in those days, here is a photo of a sculpture in the restored ancient stadium in Athens. Other people want to know why the story is called that. I hope they’ll read it and see!

But, however others react, for me it’s a great relief. This story has been without a title for the whole of the two years it has taken to research and write. There is a lot going on in it and I found it impossible to pick out something that can represent the whole in just a few words.  So it’s wonderful that my publisher, Connie, of Trifolium Books UK, has been able to.

Starting this blog is partly to celebrate that, and partly to trace the progression of this new way of publishing. 


POD
Trifolium are going to publish in January, Print On Demand (POD) ordered via the internet or through bookshops. Connie tells me that later it will be available also as an ebook. I worked for years for traditional publishers of textbooks for English as a Foreign Language, so I know how huge companies work when they print tens of thousands of paper copies at a time. But I don’t know anything about this new way of only printing the copies that people actually order. It is going to mean learning lots of new procedures.

And the first one is to get the text into a state that the software programs can accept. So I have to make sure the font(s) I use are compatible, and that my chapters and other breaks are consistent throughout.

The second procedure is to experiment on screen with what the cover will look like. I must say, it’s much more fun working on that than on the text, which I know only too well by now. Still that has to be done, too. I must have rewritten it twice and gone through with corrections another four or five times.

We’re also waiting for our reviewers to get back to us so that we can quote them on the cover. I’m quite nervous about what they are going to say...

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