More thanks, over-explaining

Thanks to everyone who offered help with Stripe. I had another look at the guidelines and remembered why I was put off - seems as though you have to go through some extra steps to guarantee privacy. Normally I would be able to push through, but at the moment I’m pretty wiped out.

I’m also a bit worried about using Substack for something that isn’t really a newsletter. I was aghast to read Lee Konstaninou’s book on The Last Samurai - he interviewed me and some other people involved in its publication, but didn’t come back to me to check facts before publishing it. The reason I talked to him was that I thought a scholarly publication would correct various misconceptions - journalists would now be able to refer to a reliable source rather than the work of other journalists, agents and editors who had heard I was hard to work with could (if they cared) see what actually happened. And instead there was a book littered with mistakes.

I told his editor at Columbia University Press, who said I should send my corrections to Lee, Lee would send his revisions in, and the editor would then check with the committee. So I sent 15 pages of corrections (!), Lee went over these (looking for ways to compress to changes that would not affect length), and the editor then said the production team said NO CHANGES COULD BE MADE because it would reflow the text.

So now all these errors were part of the historical record, the kind of thing Wikipedia would consider a reliable source. The book was published by a reputable university press, it had gone through peer review, it had been reviewed in the TLS and LRB, and NO ONE had sent it to the author to check for accuracy.

It seemed to me that at some point I should provide accurate accounts online of various incidents, and that these should all be in one place for ease of consultation. Of course, journalists and other scholars may well think I have my own agenda, but they could at least compare my account with those in the public domain. And perhaps historians would be interested in the way so many people relied uncritically on oral testimony - just because someone gets a quote from my first editor, Jonathan Burnham, or from the people who showed him the book, doesn’t mean this can be relied on. If a writer has been driven to the brink of suicide by the involvement of people who were excited about a book, some scepticism is surely in order when they give their version of events. (It may just be a matter of He said, she said - but He said, she said has to be better than settling for He said.)

At any rate, as I say, I’m not sure this is what Substack is actually FOR, and I’m not sure I should invite paid subscriptions for what is not really a newsletter. Also, if someone is paying I think they have a right to expect posts to appear - but if I go away for a few months and do nothing but work on unfinished books that has to be a good thing. I don’t want to feel I’m letting people down.

Advice: You might want to turn off notifications and just check in from time to time. Possibly even worse than never getting any posts at all would be getting an incessant stream of emails in your inbox.

[I now see that I can turn off email delivery - after today I think I had better preemptively spare everyone’s inbox.]