Greetings from the Scriptorium as spring begins (even if it hasn’t had a chance to get going properly, at least the weather is a bit warmer). Surprisingly, this newsletter is going out more or less on time (and by that, regular readers will know it’s not the middle or end of the month yet, and this doesn’t begin with an apology for being late). Firstly, the good news.
After all the delays, complications and simply how long it takes for ink to dry, The Scriptorium Chronicle is at long last ready for publication. I know it has been a while coming, and you’ve all been very patient. After a last-minute panic concerning copyright issues relating to fonts, the last hurdles were cleared out of the way. The release is scheduled for April 1st. Yes, I know it’s April Fool’s Day, but in a twisted way it sort of makes sense. Sort of.
Works In Progress
As you can imagine, all efforts over the past month have gone into getting The Scriptorium Chronicle ready for publication. Finishing the final illustrations took longer than expected, but the digital cleanup after scanning went a lot better, having used the new (well, new last year) scanner. What took time was the pagination after inserting the new graphics into the text, which was about as easy as nailing jelly to the ceiling. Having long since abandoned Scrivener for this project (which is a great writing tool, but not intended for managing graphics), I’ve been using Pages. It’s not perfect by any means, but it was an improvement. It got me to being able to export a publication-ready file.
Then came the fun of trying to figure out how to get the thing published. Having received not even so much as an acknowledgement from any of the literary agents I’d approached, I already had it in mind to go down the independent route. I’ve used Kindle Direct before, but although it is straightforward to use (sort of, there’s a learning curve), it is part of Amazon. I wanted to diversify and have a wider reach for distribution. Not being dependent on one tech platform was also a factor. Reality came at me hard and fast when I looked into the alternatives, of which there are a few. The problem, as it turned out, concerned fonts.
The Scriptorium Chronicle uses several of these, including a blackletter font and a medieval font, as well as the font used for the bulk of the text. The thing is that fonts, on the whole, are copyrighted. There are exceptions, but the ones I’d used were. You can buy licenses to use these commercially, but these didn’t come cheap. When I looked into it, I found the whole area around fonts and copyright to be a legal minefield, and it took ages to figure out what I could and couldn’t do. Hardcopy publication is easy, as the ink marks you see on the paper page are a typeface rather than a font, and (again with some exceptions), typefaces are not subject to copyright. Where it gets tricky is with eBooks. You can think of the font as the software that controls how what you see on screen is displayed. This is embedded into the file that the eBook reader uses. It’s that bit that’s subject to the copyright. Put things into the ePub format these things require, and you carry over the font copyright requirements. That was the first part of the problem.
The second part is that a reader can change the fonts for their eBook so that it is easier for them to read. That means that the blackletter and medieval lettering, which is crucial for the look and feel of the thing, could be replaced. That in turn would ruin the running joke about the prior complaining about how the dates in the Chronicle were being written, and one or two other parts which wouldn’t work without the appropriate font being displayed. Put these two things together, and I decided that on balance, it would be easier to skip the idea of an eBook version and stick with hardcopy only. There may be a workaround with PDF that I’m going to look into, but for now, I’m thinking print only.
This meant looking at Print On Demand (POD). Apart from Kindle Direct, I had two other runners in the frame — Draft2Digital and IngramSpark — but I got cold feet when I looked into their offerings more closely. On balance, for The Scriptorium Chronicle, it was more straightforward to stick with KDP. There are huge downsides to this, but going with the alternatives also came with huge downsides. Long story short, being an author sets you up to be shafted either way. Distribution via KDP will be more limited as “going wide” means you can effectively forget about any royalties from anyone other than the ‘Zon (even though IngramSpark use Amazon to fulfil their POD requests). Is it messed up? Sure, but that’s just the way it is. Welcome to the wacky world of publishing.
So, March is going to be about book promotion and getting ready for publication. If I do any writing, it will be going through Pass The Duchy one last time.
The Wildflower Meadow & The Kitchen Garden
The first bumblebees of the year have been spotted! The first was a buff-tailed queen in the wildflower meadow (formerly the front lawn), looking for nectar and pollen in the crocuses that have opened. The second whizzed past in the kitchen garden and all I can say for sure is that it wasn’t a buff-tailed.
I don’t know what species it was as it flew past at high speed and was gone before I knew it. It could have been a carder queen, but that’s just guesswork on my part. All I can say is that it was a bumblebee.
Seed sowing has begun in earnest. The tomatoes and chillis have come up and are now out of the propagator. Sweet peas have been resown as the autumn sowing failed.
Various butterfly and meadow mixes have been sown and put outside to germinate. Some have already begun to come up. We’ll be playing “What is this?” later in the year, as the contents of the packets didn’t come with any indication of what to expect. The Mystery Seed from last year remains a mystery, so we’ll be picking that one up again when shoots begin to emerge (always assuming it wasn’t an annual that failed to flower…)
What I’ve Been Reading And Watching
Books-wise, I’m still reading The Light Ages and am about halfway through. It’s a factual account of the life of a 14th-century monk called John of Westwyk and is a fascinating insight into medieval science. It’s a period when the first universities were being founded, and mechanical clocks and eyeglasses were being invented. It is a revelation how advanced in their thinking they were when it came to what essentially boils down to telling the time. We’ve covered how to use an astrolabe to calculate the date of Easter. These days, it’s just marked on a calendar, and you know it’s coming because the Easter Eggs have been in the shops since January.
Television-wise, I’ve been watching Foundation on Apple TV (thanks to a free 3-month subscription).
It’s based on the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, which I read some forty-odd years ago and of which I remember very little. Having brushed up on the show and the books, it would seem that the TV series can be more accurately described as being based on the title of a book by Asimov and featuring some characters who bear the same name. I have to say, I’ve been enjoying it. The first series seemed muddled, as there was a lot of jumping backwards and forwards between different story elements, but by the second series, this had settled down. It is space opera on the grandest of scales, and visually, it is stunning. There’s a fourth season planned, but it won’t be released until after my free subscription ends, so we’ll have to see how that goes.
An unexpected watch was Ted Lasso, also on Apple TV. I hadn’t thought that I’d like this, and sat through the first episode with a “we’ll see” attitude. It is set in a (fictional) Premier League football club, and tells of an American Football coach with no knowledge of “soccer” who is brought in to manage it by a woman who has acquired the club in her divorce and has a score to settle with her ex.
Having got past the fact that it’s set in a football club, it isn’t really about football. Yes, it features football, and the storyline follows the rises and falls of the club’s fortunes, but it’s not about that. It’s about a group of people with their own quirks, faults and issues. Be warned that there is a lot of swearing, but that aside, it’s funny.
And Finally…
That’s about it for this month. I have lots to do before the book launch, so I’d best be getting on with it!
Mark Weaver 