A correspondent reminds me that on 7 July I wrote:
Since the last approach I made to any of the 31 publishers on my A list was 1 June, I am inclined to think I should wait until at least 1 August before giving up with commercial publishers. I don’t want to do this, as I intended to take a decision about self-publishing by 15 July, but I’ll compromise by making that the 25th.
Clearly, I did not take such a decision by 25 July. The correspondent therefore quotes to me the immortal words of Douglas Adams: ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’
Yurss… I think I catch the heft of my correspondent’s drift. I am sure many other followers also wondered whether this was another case of the ‘O fallacem hominum spem!’ (‘How vain are the hopes of men!’, Kulygin, Three Sisters) leitmotif of my posts in 2016, when I was constantly overrunning deadlines for finishing the book. I would humbly ask readers to consider, however:
- I did post about the situation on 25 July; I hadn’t forgotten the date!
- When I returned from holiday shortly before, I found the situation completely changed, with as many as four publishers in play.
- Deadlines are vital if you are to get from A to C.
The situation has changed radically again. I have just lost two publishers in two days. I had to sack one, and the other sacked me within hours of receiving their commissioning editor’s positive report! This makes a total of three, outwardly respectable publishers that I have had to fire myself since the whole campaign opened in January. I fear I cannot say more: to paraphrase Wittgenstein, ‘What one cannot talk diplomatically about, one should keep silent about.’ But, in entirely different ways, these big names were a sad disappointment when we got down to the nitty gritty.
So it is not just ‘whoosh’, but ‘bang’ — I have no contracts on offer at the moment, and just two of my original 31 A list publishers in play. I spend a morning, then, taking a rigorous look at the ten publishers on my B list (which I hoped never to have to touch). For a variety of reasons, including, woe, the presence of a difficult Russian publisher’s reader, I drop six of them definitively. Fortunately, though, the nice commissioning editor at X, who has read the book, recommends to me two that I hadn’t thought of.
The current situation, then, is: two publishers in play (one academic) and six to approach seriously next week. A friend reminds me: ‘Publishers never answer emails.’ I am currently thinking therefore that the deadline for a decision on self-publishing may have to be 30 September. I go into Waterstones every week looking at the new biographies for promising new publishers, but I don’t find them.
Thud..!
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Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Whoosh and bang!
A correspondent reminds me that on 7 July I wrote:
Clearly, I did not take such a decision by 25 July. The correspondent therefore quotes to me the immortal words of Douglas Adams: ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’
Yurss… I think I catch the heft of my correspondent’s drift. I am sure many other followers also wondered whether this was another case of the ‘O fallacem hominum spem!’ (‘How vain are the hopes of men!’, Kulygin, Three Sisters) leitmotif of my posts in 2016, when I was constantly overrunning deadlines for finishing the book. I would humbly ask readers to consider, however:
The situation has changed radically again. I have just lost two publishers in two days. I had to sack one, and the other sacked me within hours of receiving their commissioning editor’s positive report! This makes a total of three, outwardly respectable publishers that I have had to fire myself since the whole campaign opened in January. I fear I cannot say more: to paraphrase Wittgenstein, ‘What one cannot talk diplomatically about, one should keep silent about.’ But, in entirely different ways, these big names were a sad disappointment when we got down to the nitty gritty.
So it is not just ‘whoosh’, but ‘bang’ — I have no contracts on offer at the moment, and just two of my original 31 A list publishers in play. I spend a morning, then, taking a rigorous look at the ten publishers on my B list (which I hoped never to have to touch). For a variety of reasons, including, woe, the presence of a difficult Russian publisher’s reader, I drop six of them definitively. Fortunately, though, the nice commissioning editor at X, who has read the book, recommends to me two that I hadn’t thought of.
The current situation, then, is: two publishers in play (one academic) and six to approach seriously next week. A friend reminds me: ‘Publishers never answer emails.’ I am currently thinking therefore that the deadline for a decision on self-publishing may have to be 30 September. I go into Waterstones every week looking at the new biographies for promising new publishers, but I don’t find them.
Thud..!
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