Write what’s in your Heart

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books, bookselling, creative freedom, publishing, write what you love, writing

‘Write what’s in your heart.’ So says my writer friend Jim Bates, and I’m sure he won’t mind if I quote him on this important matter. It makes the point that writing is about so much more than identifying a gap in the bookselling market and manufacturing something to take advantage of it. It also makes the point that writing is not about making lots of money or becoming world famous. For most of us, most of the time, it’s about self-expression, pure and simple. As a writer you might never reach the fame-and-riches that non-writers usually think you want. If all your writing comes from the heart, as Jim advises, you might never find much commercial success – but you will always have something to be proud of, that represents the essential you. This is why I’d never recommend writing as a means of earning a good living. Having said that, it’s surprising where the heart can lead you.

After parting company (peacefully!) with my publisher a few years back, I decided to return to first principles, and write what I loved. I gave no consideration at all to the commercial possibilities – I simply wrote what I wanted to. It gave me the creative freedom I needed, and led, in time, to acquiring further skills. I took up illustration again, after a very long gap, and ultimately learned bookbinding so I could literally make my own books. I sold them to friends and enjoyed it all immensely, and would happily have continued to do that indefinitely.

But writing from the heart had another effect: the fact that my stories weren’t crammed into an uncomfortable genre, or designed for any particular audience, made them quite unusual. I’m a great believer in fate, and it eventually intervened when I crossed paths with a local publisher whose magical turn of mind meshed perfectly with mine – and, hey presto, the books are being printed as I write. Will they make money? I don’t know, but I hope the project will do reasonably well for my publishers’ sake; they certainly deserve it for the time, care, effort and money they’ve invested. And for their patience and good humour, too.

So, I guess I’ve proved that writing from the heart doesn’t necessarily cancel out a commercial outcome. For me, though, the importance of writing what I love will always outgun the practical marketing considerations, and maybe that’s as it should be for any writer.  I heartily recommend it.

A word from my publisher:

‘Two brand new quirky tales based on plants and herbs found in Dorset. Both books are written and beautifully illustrated by Kathy Sharp. Imaginative, well-written and thoroughly delightful. The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary are available on pre-order as a pair at the special price of £15.00 from https://www.veneficiapublications.com/ ’

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Thinking Outside the Box: Lockdown Book Launches

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Book launches, books, lockdown, publishing

Back in March this year, I sat at a table in the Chesil Beach Centre café, chatting to my potential new publisher. She had seen my two hand-bound books at a local bookfair a couple of weeks earlier and shown a real interest (I think the exact phrase was ‘Ooh! We’d love to publish these!’). Anyway, we met in the café to discuss it. I told her I’d like to hold a book launch here, partly because it’s a wildlife centre and my books feature lots of wild plants – and partly because the books were mostly written here in the café. It made perfect sense. The books wouldn’t be published until late 2020 or early 2021; so, we said, plenty of time for the looming covid lockdown to be over with and things more or less back to normal.

Well, here I am, six months later, sitting at the same table in the café (mercifully reopened), with the books nearly ready for the printshop and the hope of having them available for Christmas – and completely unable to guess whether any sort of face-to-face book launch or signing will be feasible this year or next.

We are not the only ones in this situation, obviously, and many books have been launched purely online, via social media or zoom. But the opportunity to sit and chat, on the spot, with real people in real time, especially those who just happen to be passing, is hard to replicate online. Lockdown regulations are designed to prevent precisely this kind of personal interaction, and the impossibility of successfully guessing what regulations will be in place at any particular place and time makes planning very difficult.

So what can we do, apart from plod on, fingers crossed, and hope for the best? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to ‘think outside the box’, as they say. I could, for instance, do some sort of live broadcast from the Chesil Beach Centre (with their permission), talking abut the books and showing the setting in which they were written. In the worst-case scenario – the café closed again – I should still be able to do this outside. I have an acquaintance who does this sort of thing for local events and puts the resulting videos on YouTube as well as social media. It’s not the same as meeting the public face-to-face, but it’s more enduring, really, and in theory at least, could go all around the world. It’s a good idea anyway.

This doesn’t mean I won’t hold an in-person book launch if I can, but it does give me back some sense of control in hopelessly unpredictable circumstances. So, let’s not collapse into despair: I can display my illustrated books just as well online as I can in person. It’s a question of dealing with things as they are, not as I would wish them to be, and just getting on with it. Once the ‘box’ is open I’m sure more ideas will start to flow, and thinking on the outside will become natural. I’ll let you know how I get on!

The Herbarium and The Chesil Apothecary will be published by Veneficia Publishing later this year.

How did I miss that? The Perils of Proofreading

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books, proofreading, publishing, writing

We all want our writing to be perfect when it’s published, don’t we? Typos, omissions and silly mistakes are part of a writer’s life; they are mostly minor – but now and then they might change the meaning of a sentence or introduce an element of comedy into a serious piece of writing, and nobody wants that. Even so, and despite our best efforts, they do slip through the net.

It’s a long while since I handed over a book of mine to an editor or proofreader – but it’s far longer since I prepared a book for a print-run. The digital age has lulled many of us, including me, into a false sense of security; e-books and print-on-demand mean it’s possible to retrieve your book and make corrections reasonably painlessly after it’s published. But a print-run is a different matter – you have to do things the old-fashioned way, which means waiting for another edition of the book before you have a chance to make changes. And learning to live with the errors.

The old saying is that the best way to proofread a book is to print 5,000 copies; when you open the box and look at the first book, all those errors will jump out and smack you right in the eye. How, you wail, did I miss that, and that, and oh my goodness, look at that. The old-fashioned way of dealing with this was to put a slip of paper labelled Errata into the book, with a list of corrections (‘Page 7, line 2, should read “Petty Officer Smith”, not “Potty Officer Smith”…’ you get the idea).

To avoid this kind of problem, then, I approached the proofing of my two little books with extra care. As a reader my enjoyment of a book is ruined if I continually find myself stopping to proofread it; it spoils the flow, and the suspension of disbelief required to read fiction is disrupted. I want my readers to enjoy the stories, so I paused to winkle out as many errors as I could find at each edit, before it went to another pair of eyes for a final proofread.

It’s unlikely we’ll find all the errors – I find them in most books I read, old or new. We can only hope to pick up most of them. Indeed, for the sake of sanity (mine), I tend to regard an error or two as ‘lucky mistakes’, provided they’re minor.

All the same, when the books come back from the print shop, I’ll be opening the first one with trepidation, half afraid to look. In fact, I might not look at them in detail much at all until we contemplate (if we do!) a second edition. Safer, really, than lying awake night after night muttering, ‘How did I ever miss that?’

My two illustrated books, The Herbarium and its companion volume The Chesil Apothecary, will be published later this year by Veneficia Publishing.