I don't know if you remember the ill-fated offer by a certain daily newspaper to "Print Your Own Book" way back in the Autumn of 2005? The idea was that the readers could submit a manuscript of 20,000 words + and would get any number of copies printed up in a standard book format in return for a set of coupons from the newspaper and £5 per copy requested. I think they expected to get about 5,000 orders, they finished up with more than 10x that amount and a backlog of angry punters who had hoped to have their seminal novels in their hands in time for Christmas and were still asking where they were by the following Easter.
Anyone remember that? Did you take part?
It was a daily paper that spends most of its time annoying the British Middle Classes - any ideas ;-)
I had always wanted to publish a book but had never had the time or money to self-publish and had never sufficiently excited the attention of real publishers. Therefore, this newspaper offer seemed a good way to get some copies printed at a modest price. The best of it was that there was no minimum print run, you could have 1 or 100 if you so wished. The only stipulation was that your manuscript had to be 20,000 words or longer. At that time, although I had been lucky enough to have a few articles printed by a local newspaper, I simply didn't have enough to fill a book and certainly not 20,000 words worth (perhaps I should have been a Lake poet?)
Continue the story at Booked Up Part 2
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