A New Year Progress Update

I'm so excited about recent progress in marching smartly down the road to publication, that I just had to write this update. Excuse the gush that follows (or stop here, if you prefer).

Just before Christmas I created a Facebook page for The Day Parliament Burned Down.  Do please 'like' if you're on FB!  I admit I've become a pretty shameless social media tart - apologies if I've also become a bore in the process.  

I've been in discussion with my commissioning editor, Matthew, at OUP about an image for the endpapers of the hardback.  We've decided on one of the unburnt old Palace of Westminster, which will contrast with the vibrant cover showing the fire in progress from the Lambeth bank of the Thames.  The Production Editor, Emma, has been in touch to say that production has now started and with details of the schedule for producing the book.  It will go to press in early July, and be published late August or early September.  My agent Bill is now asking for ideas for the next book too, and we are going to be talking over nine possibilities I have come up with later in the month.

I've now received a number of bookings for talks this year, and shortly I hope to be discussing the publicity programme OUP has lined up, with their marketing and PR folk.  The need to create a talk/events page for this blog has highlighted the limitations of the software Blogger uses (there are also bugs preventing followers from posting and being visible as members).  I'm therefore planning to move the Dustshoveller's Gazette to WordPress in the next couple of months, but don't worry - I'll redirect from here to there, when it happens.  Quite how many bells and whistles I'll need, and whether I'll be getting some professional help with the design, is still being pondered.  If you belong to a society, group, library or bookclub who would like a talk on the 1834 fire in the autumn, please get in touch with me at cshenton *at* hotmail.co.uk.  Sorry for that clunky email rendering which is designed to stop junk email: yet another reason to move to WordPress - with a spam-foiling form.

Then, finally, all of sudden on 3 January, I found that my book had been listed on OUP's online site, ready for pre-order, and with lots more about its content.  And now it's been given an ISBN by OUP, it's also available on Amazon for pre-order, and has already attracted several 'likes'.  The official marketing has begun.  2012 has got off to a really great start...and no blisters so far.

The Good History Book Checklist

If you want to choose a great read this Christmas for you or someone else, here are my top tips for finding a good 'un (and I'm talking here about non-fiction, not historical novels):

1) Check the biog of the author on the book jacket.  How do they describe themselves?  What's their platform? Do they sound credible?  When was the last time they published a book?  Producing a book like clockwork every year doesn't leave much (or any) time for original research.

2) Does the author have a track record of specialisation in the period or topic in question?  Or does their list of other publications indicate that they cherry-pick subjects from all over the place, skimming across the surface and not doing anything in depth?

3) Call me old fashioned but I do like a good footnote.  Personally, I find histories without them frustrating and suspicious. (Sorry to postmodernists). If I want to know more, or to follow a lead, then I can - with a footnote.  And I can tell what is new research, and what is anecdotal or apocryphal.  Similarly, you can see immediately if there is too much dependence on a small number of secondary works, and all you are going to get is reheated history.  Footnotes which cite only titles and no page numbers are, well, a bit odd, in my opinion - it seems lazy and superficial, and doesn't save any space.  Sometimes books don't have footnotes at all because of space constraints imposed by publishers.  But that itself makes me wonder about the seriousness of the publisher too.  One way round this is that some authors put footnotes and references on their websites.

4) Flick to the back.  What does the bibliography look like? I avoid books which have only used about ten books in their preparation, but equally a long bibliography of books which are 30 years old is not a good thing either.  A  sign that a book may be compelling, with lots of new ideas, will be a bibliography citing:

• manuscript (ie archival) sources, including foreign archives, where appropriate.  That means the book should contain some original work.
• many academic journal articles (of a recent date) and/or a number of recent unpublished PhD theses.  That's because here will be the latest ideas on a topic; the author will be up to date, or at least aware of current trends and new discoveries.
• recent publications, up to a year before the book in question is published ie up to the time the manuscript went to the publisher.

5) Look at the acknowledgements.  Who do they thank?  Lots of libraries, archives and other specialists?  Good.  In addition,  I'm usually nervous of any author who has used researchers to find material for them.  Why aren't they doing themselves?  Unless you're very old or infirm there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to do your own legwork; not least because only you can spot connections when researching and make serendipitous links. If an author's used a researcher to help them identify and translate odd bits of material in a tricky language, then that's OK, but if they are seriously specialising in a particular country's history it does make you wonder why they haven't learnt the language first. 

6) And finally, of course, have a read of the introduction or opening chapter.  Is it gripping right at the start?  If not, then you may be in for a bit of a slog.

7) Enough from me - what are your top tips?  Post your comments below!

Happy reading!

Cover Story

OUP has now had its editorial and sales meeting and has produced this thrilling cover for my book.  I'm really delighted with it, as it is almost the same as the image I've had in my head all along.  Book covers are often a source of friction between publishers and authors but I couldn't be more happy.  Choosing the book's title, however, has caused me, my agent and my editor much more difficulty - right up to the last moment. I had used the working title of Conflagration throughout the book's creation and that was the title as sent off in various submissions. This wonderfully evocative word was used constantly about the fire at the time. However, I became increasingly nervous that this was not a title which would make the book walk off the shelves, so after much dicussion - with the sales and marketing people having the final say - we have settled on what had emerged first as a subtitle - The Day Parliament Burned Down.  However, a definition of the word 'conflagration' from the Oxford English Dictionary still opens the book: it means a lot more than just 'a great and destructive fire', as the narrative gradually reveals.

The Hard Reality of History Publishing

If you're writing a history book which is original and scholarly but which you hope has popular appeal too, then the news is pretty grim. The market for such books is extremely tough at the moment. You only have to glance at this photograph to see what I mean. Taken earlier this week at WHSmith in the departure lounge at Stansted airport, it tells you everything you need to know.

History gets one bookcase in a large outlet of maybe forty bookcases. Of the six shelves, the bottom four contain books on military history, specifically World War Two, shading into special forces memoirs. The remaining top two shelves are for everything else that ever happened, anywhere, and a very eclectic mix it is too.  In fact the top shelf is labelled (not visible in this photo) 'Ancient World'. Except there's not one book on there pre-middle ages. There is a fair proportion of books by well-known journalists with TV tie-ins too taking up the top two shelves, as well as prominent prize winners.

Don't get me wrong - I know as an author how difficult it has been for each and every one of those writers to have got their books, on any historical subject, published. I'm not dissing them. All I'm saying is that it's a sobering sight for anyone trying to break into the market with a book on a quirky topic or those which deal with less well-worn periods. Getting a publishing contract is only one of many steps.  The bookshop buyers have to take it on.  They have to agree with the publisher that their readers will want to reach out and buy it, even if it's not their usual sort of thing.  It has to be marketed well in the shop and elsewhere, and displayed prominently and attractively to make people stop and take a look.  Then the punters have to decide to buy it as well.  It seems that just when you've leapt one hurdle, another appears.  And they're mostly out of your control. 

Submitting the Final Edit

So, today was the day I submitted the final ms for OUP: two copies of my 108K text with e- and hard-copies of my 35 chosen images and the four maps I've drawn up. All on a memory stick too. I spent last week on leave working on the last edits, the acknowledgements and the bibliography. And confirmed The Day Parliament BurnED Down rather than BurNT Down was grammatically correct. It's hard to let go after five years of research and over a year of serious writing. Scary stuff.

All packaged up and ready to go

Next, it gets copy-edited at OUP and then the great machine rolls on: typesetting and cover design, proofreading, marketing, publicity and distribution in time for a launch in about a year. Talk bookings are already coming in for then.


Meanwhile, I need to start putting together a proposal for the next book, after discussing ideas with my agent. And the day job continues too.

What the Dickens...?

Dickens in the 1830s, looking a good deal
 more glamorous than in later life

Filling in the publicity form, one question which came up asked about anniversaries or other events which could be used as a hook to promote THE BOOK. There's the fire itself of course (16 October every year - 178th anniversary in 2012). More topically, there's the 2012 Olympics in London which will feature lots of aerial shots of the new Palace of Westminster during the marathons and the beach volleyball in Horseguards. 2012 is also the 200th anniversary of the assassination of Spencer Perceval, the only British PM to have been murdered in office (in fact in the lobby of the Commons,and which plays a part in the book)...and finally it's the bicentenary of Charles Dickens' birth next year.

Dickens appears four times in Conflagration. Surprised? You shouldn't be. He began his writing career as a journalist a couple of years before the 1834 fire, and was in fact a Parliamentary reporter. He wrote for the Morning Chronicle, one of the main newspapers I used in my research, and his sketches of London life "by Boz" came out less than two years after the fire, followed by his first - serialised - novel in 1836: The Pickwick Papers. He clearly knew the old Palace and Parliament well, including some of its personnel.  Expect 2012 to be the year of Dickensmania...

404 Error Not Found

Crisis only narrowly averted when I realised I had forgotten to include a picture of some tallysticks among the illustrations.  Idiot.

Picture Perfect

Things are moving on quickly now.  I've signed three copies of the contract, and have filled in an author publicity form.  Now I have to choose pictures for the book and send a list to OUP before the end of the month, so they can start getting licences for those which I'm not getting from work.  Selecting them is difficult - there are at least a hundred I could use, but I have to get it down to 35.

In the end I decided the easiest way was to lay everything out on
the floor to see how they looked side by side...



Stage Six: A Publishing Contract!

I'm over the moon to announce that this morning a contract for Conflagration by Oxford University Press dropped through my letterbox.  Regular readers of this blog will know that something has been in the offing for at least a month now, but only now am I able to reveal what.  I had more than one offer, and a number of other publishers were very tempted, so I'm delighted with the response from the trade so far.  There are various minor changes to make, based on the feedback of two anonymous 'readers', plus quite a lot of presentational changes to fit with OUP's house style (in particular, insertion of the famous Oxford comma).  But that is all completely do-able before 1 October, when I have to get the finalised manuscript back to my editor.  News on this blog will now switch to describing the journey towards publication: as one trip ends, another begins...

In the meantime, if you need a recap, here is a synopsis of my book.

Talking Titles

A yummy lunch today with Lady Antonia Fraser at the Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain. Tate sits on the site of the Millbank Penitentiary where Joshua Cross (one of the labourers who started the fire) did time.  And of course it houses the Turner watercolours of the 1834 fire, along with the rest of the Turner bequest, so all very evocative.


We talked about the old Palace of Westminster in relation to the Great Reform Act: that's to be the subject of her next book, entitled "The Perilous Question".  Should I rethink my title? Perhaps "The Day Parliament Burned Down" would be better? It certainly does what it says on the tin. It might be a better subtitle at any rate than "The Burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834". On the other hand, as my agent points out, "Conflagration" is nicely historical and has typographical possibilities for a strong cover.

The bottom line is: which option will sell the most books?

Dustshoveller joins the Twitterati

Very exciting news on the book emerging over the last week, which I hope to be able to divulge shortly...

In the meantime, I have joined Twitter @dustshoveller...tweet you there!