Despite my intention to blog more often, the observant
among you will no doubt have noticed that posts here have been, at best,
infrequent. Part of the reason for this is that I’m now working full-time
again, but more recently I’ve been putting whatever spare time presents itself towards
a new project.
As my workshop at the Guernsey Literary Festival
draws ever closer, I’ve been conscious of the fact that if somebody wanted to
read a collection of my stories I’d need to direct them here, or give them a
list of URLs to work through and a few photocopied pages from magazines and
books. Fine in some respects, but not really something that fits with my
intention to present myself as a professional writer (if not in terms of how I make a living, at least in the sense of my attitude towards my writing).
There’s nothing wrong with stuff being online,
it’s just – even in these days of mobile internet, wi-fi hotspots and horseless
carriages – sometimes it all feels a little remote. So, with the intention of
having something glossy to brandish in front of my workshopees, I’ve spent the
last couple of weeks pulling together a selection of my stories that have been
published, online or in print, those that have done well in competitions, plus
a couple of tales seeing the light of day for the first time (Yes! Exclusive
bonus material!)
Having gathered all this together, it was then a
matter of using Lulu.com to fashion it all into a book. This process was pretty
straightforward, and I was impressed by the user-friendly set-up Lulu operates.
I did hit a couple of problems, but these were mainly due to me trying to avoid
anything that would howl “Self-Published!” at anybody who picked up the book. This
involved much messing about with typesetting, trying out different cover
designs, and a lot of agonising over the ‘correct’ running order for the stories.
It was good to revisit my back catalogue and the
search for suitable stories unearthed a few that I’ll be revisiting in the
future. And although I’ve only seen it in PDF format, I’m very pleased with the
finished result, too. It looks – dare I say – just like a proper book.
4 comments:
Good luck with the anthology, Dan. I'm sure your workshopees will be impressed.
Thank you, Patsy. It's been a useful experience putting it all together and I'm very pleased with the response the book's getting so far. Thanks for the mention on your blog, too - much appreciated.
I've just nominated you for the versatile blogger award - partly to make you feel obliged to make more posts (I'm mean like that)and partly because the posts you do make are so interesting (see, only a bit mean)
Many thanks for the nom', Patsy. I appreciate it and will take the hint - honest! I'm not entirely sure I can really claim to be all that versatile, though. I try to keep this blog focused on writing so it's quite narrow in its scope. However, if bits of it are interesting, I've achieved my goal. Thanks again!
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