Everybody has something they would love to do. Some ambitions are even legal. Mine was legal and was a simple enough one. For years I had wanted to walk from one end of Great Britain to the other but, somehow, there had never been the time.
In 2014 I used the Create Space platform to self publish a book for my aunt. This quote is the opening paragraph which I love.
The platform was already owned by Amazon at this point, and funnelled people into the Amazon and Kindle store (which was fine with me) because it felt like absolute magic to be able to create a real book with a real ISBN, print it and sell / give it to people! (Actually I still think it is magical). This was the story of her mid-life journey (physical and metaphorical) and the manuscript as it was, turned up in a variety of legacy Microsoft Word files on floppy disks if I remember correctly! (She actually had a printed copy, filed in a lever arch file which she used to pass around our family before that). It had been a labour of love for her to create it, and she was certainly no technologist or editor, so the formatting and layout were all over place. Despite this, I thought it was rather great, true, it was huge streams of consciousness without chapter or much structure, but reading it, to me at least, did feel rather like the journey she described, it did have structure in that it was linear, started at the beginning, ended at the end and contained great struggle and meditative thoughts in the middle (along with a whole world of wild reflections). When I read the last pages and finished the book I cried (if you’ve ever finished a true long distance walk you’ll recognise that feeling, and the book brings it home to the reader). I loved it, I still do. As I’ve noted on the books’ home page, it’s a great reminder of another era, when travel and logistics were a whole different world pre smart phones. When we released it, obviously we just gave copies away to friends and family (I still remember that feeling of seeing it the first time as a “real” book), but then it actually sold to the public here and there and is still selling quietly today, with a review score of 4.2 / 5 on Amazon, which feels rather good all things considered. I figure it still sells as it’s a narrow specialisation which people search for, as I’ve never marketed it. We don’t make any money from it of note, a few pounds a year but it was never about that. I just still think its extraordinary that people can get there work out there, rather like Substack makes me feel now too, when I see authors, writers, creators in general being able to publish their work and receive micro payments directly. I love this model. The same way I love donating or paying for small software projects like Notepad++ as an example.
The truth was though that I was an awful editor. I managed to mangle the manuscript into something which was compatible with the platform, design a bad cover (I’m really not a visual designer in any shape or form), but it was good enough we got it out there in the world. The idea of using Microsoft Word for hours upon hours, adjusting formatting, spelling, punctuation and that all jazz just made me feel utterly groggy. It’s not a strength of detail focus that I have, so I just put it out there, best I could, warts and all.
Roll forward 12 years, and I’ve recently published a second piece of her work. Well actually it’s a collection of short stories which I’ve had backed up safely for years, but which I could never face attempting the edit on. This stories were held as 40+ odt files with all sorts of formatting incompatibilities. The amazon platform felt much the same, despite 12 years of what you would normally expect to be technical progress but the difference for me this time is that I was able to employ modern tooling (Claude CoWork) to help me do the edit (and no, I didn’t change any content using AI, what would be the point of that?) and make the edit slightly less painful. Actually it was a joy, I just gave Claude the 40 files, told it to create a nice merged manuscript in the appropriate format, that was it. I’d started to try to do it in Word a couple of times but I just didn’t have the stamina.
You can see the 2nd book here
Short Weird Bytes: A collection of short stories
There’s one simple conclusion in my mind. Getting your content out there is amazing, and if you can do it for someone else who’s maybe not technically proficient as in this case, and would never even be able to get their content out there, then that’s even more amazing. You get a real book delivered to them - it’s extraordinary! It definitely brought some joy in our worlds, and that ultimately is the point.
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