Re: Advice for Authors
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 8:28 am
Good points. What is the name of your book?
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Yeah, why worry about paid hacks, when we'll do it here for free!Frederick L Clemens wrote:Richard, don't be down on the basis of a few reviews.
I know you didn't mean it like that, Fred, but when I first read through it, all I could think was, "Damn, Buddy- is only half a word!!"Frederick L Clemens wrote:There's a sucker born every minute. After you sell it to enough suckers, you'll forget about the negative reviews.
'Told in the words of those who conquered Poland'. Always the kind of phrase to make the heart sink, and this is indeed the weakness of this book. It is perilously close to John Keegan's critical phrase 'the historian as copy typist'.
I think what really bugs is that there are a lot of pulp historians out there, who churn out books by the dozen (and by the numbers), who just use secondary sources. And there are people who just copy and paste personal reminiscences and make no attempt to weave a narrative together. I don't. I spend weeks at the IWM, PRO, BA-MA rooting out obscure material, digging out Feldpostbriefe, diaries and the like. So when someone writes "I can't see anything new or refreshing in this book" it really does hurt - not least because it's not true, and it's there for all to see and it basically says "second-rate author". There's a lot of material in the Normandy book never seen in English before. And probably 80 per cent of the material in the Poland book has not been used before. Not least it's a very complicated narrative. It took months to write some of the chapters such were the various pieces of the jigsaw. It was anything but the work of a copy typist...I expected a serious history book, while obviously this work has more of the journalist approach, 'a la Cornelius Ryan' but without that author's flair.
That's exactly the kind of selling of your book you should do on your own website. Is there some reason you are not doing it? I have had one page up about my Lauchert project and have had a number of people contact me through the years, including the granddaughter of Lauchert's Panther driver from PR15! I have visited him twice and would never have heard of him without that webpage.Richard Hargreaves wrote: I think what really bugs is that there are a lot of pulp historians out there, who churn out books by the dozen (and by the numbers), who just use secondary sources. And there are people who just copy and paste personal reminiscences and make no attempt to weave a narrative together. I don't. I spend weeks at the IWM, PRO, BA-MA rooting out obscure material, digging out Feldpostbriefe, diaries and the like. So when someone writes "I can't see anything new or refreshing in this book" it really does hurt - not least because it's not true, and it's there for all to see and it basically says "second-rate author". There's a lot of material in the Normandy book never seen in English before. And probably 80 per cent of the material in the Poland book has not been used before. Not least it's a very complicated narrative. It took months to write some of the chapters such were the various pieces of the jigsaw. It was anything but the work of a copy typist...
Not really fair to say that the statisticians miss the point. They are the ones who have demonstrated that the Soviet story about Kursk is a propaganda lie that even Paul Carrell fell for. And Hitler did have a feel for battlefield reality based on his own experiences, he just didn't care. Anyway, I'm sure 90% of people on this forum appreciate your focus - the question is how well it was executed in the face of competition from other books.Richard Hargreaves wrote: There is a place for deeply analytical military history, the Zetterlings, d'Estes and I take my hat off to their diligence and indefatigable research. But I also think that studying a battle statistically fundamentally misses the point. I don't often agree with Beevor, but he was spot on in his introduction to Stalingrad about Hitler coldly looking at the situation maps with no 'feel' for the reality.
lexie and Prit Buttar have now been joined by 'yours truly' in the self-publishing field, since I went to Lulu with my book. Admittedly, it doesn't carry the same 'oomph' as one of the more well-known publishing houses, but at least they won't turn you down!lexiebabe wrote:I won't say I took the easy way, but for the first print I turned to lulu.com. It was a kind of selfpublishing.