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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: SoF book
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Yorick
Infinite Jester
# 12169
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Posted
26 March, 2014 09:29
No doubt it will have been suggested before, but has any serious thought been given to the possibility of the Ship publishing books composed of material taken from the discussion boards?
There's a lot of great quality stuff out there, which I understand the Ship owns, which might be publishable and sellable. If, for example, a paperback of the (properly edited) Christus Victor thread were produced, I'd buy a copy, along with a compilation of specially selected threads from across the boards. And I'm sure a quorum of very fine editors could be recruited from Shipmates who'd be willing to do it for free.
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این نیز بگذرد
Posts: 7574 | From: Natural Sources | Registered: Dec 2006
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
26 March, 2014 10:28
It's something that has been considered on occasion, yes. The main obstacles are, as always, time and money - but there's also the question of whether anyone beyond this site would actually be interested in reading it!
I do agree with you that we've had some threads that could potentially be edited into readable books, be they in the theology section or the comedy section. And if someone were to come to Simon with a concrete proposal for how to make that happen I would imagine he'd be willing to listen.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Yorick
Infinite Jester
# 12169
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Posted
26 March, 2014 10:44
It would be easy enough to compile a set of individual posts, a la Quotes File, for a sort of book of SoF Aphorisms. God knows I could nominate dozens of posts I have found deeply helpful. Shipmates could link their entries on a dedicated thread, and prospective entries could be elected democratically.
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این نیز بگذرد
Posts: 7574 | From: Natural Sources | Registered: Dec 2006
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
26 March, 2014 11:28
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
And I'm sure a quorum of very fine editors could be recruited from Shipmates who'd be willing to do it for free.
If they're good enough to do the job they're good enough to be paid for it. A general rule for hiring editors or proofreaders is that if someone's doing it for free they're probably not worth the money you're paying them. If you hire someone they can donate their pay back to the Organ Fund if they wish.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Yorick
Infinite Jester
# 12169
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Posted
26 March, 2014 15:53
Thank you, Dafyd. That just about kills any hope of finding any would-be volunteers.
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این نیز بگذرد
Posts: 7574 | From: Natural Sources | Registered: Dec 2006
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The Phantom Flan Flinger
Shipmate
# 8891
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Posted
26 March, 2014 15:58
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
I do agree with you that we've had some threads that could potentially be edited into readable books, be they in the theology section or the comedy section.
Although deciding which bits should be in the theology section and which bits should be in the comedy section may be tricky....
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http://www.faith-hope-and-confusion.com/
Posts: 1020 | From: Leicester, England | Registered: Dec 2004
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
26 March, 2014 16:31
The big thing about writing a book is that you have to have a purpose in mind for it. If it's just to amuse/edify yourself, no problem. But in the case of the SOF book you are imagining, I suspect you mean it to have sales.
And in THAT case, you need to have a clearly defined audience who is likely to want it enough to put down cold hard cash for it. Aye, there's the rub--for while Shippies may or may not choose to do so, I suspect the appeal on-shore would be considerably less. They mostly don't know who we are and don't care, and so they will never crack the cover/download the sample and experience a hopefully pleasant surprise. Sort of like a church cookbook. Nobody buys it except those with an attachment to the organization already.
Then there's marketing. That costs money which has to be recouped from the profits (if any) of the book. And marketing, too, is something you need a decent professional on. That is, a paid professional.
Finally, there's the problem that the original source material is already available for free online, in Limbo (I'm presuming that's what you'd be using, as the cream of the crop). Sorry.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
27 March, 2014 07:32
Dafyd--
Except that EVERYONE who works on the Ship is a volunteer. There isn't money to hire anyone.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
27 March, 2014 08:06
I know from my experience, the costs of producing and publishing a book can be very low.
The cost of getting a book properly read through and checked is not low. It actually takes some specifically skilled people. Several thousand pounds worth of people. It is possible that Simon might know people who could do this for a reduced rate, but it will still cost significant money.
The cost of actually selling a book is high. Many many thousands of pounds. There is no way around this.
So yes, the principle is a good idea, if someone has £10K per book to invest in the project, I am sure that there could be a plan to make it happen. Bear in mind that there is every possibility that this money may never be recovered - sales are never guaranteed.
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Blog
Music for your enjoyment
Lord may all my hard times be healing times
take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
27 March, 2014 12:42
OTOH, if the Ship used a "print on demand" service, like Cafe Press, we could avoid most of those costs, AIUI.
Marketing could be via word of mouth, social media, press release--and, of course, ads on the Ship.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
27 March, 2014 14:09
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
OTOH, if the Ship used a "print on demand" service, like Cafe Press, we could avoid most of those costs, AIUI.
Marketing could be via word of mouth, social media, press release--and, of course, ads on the Ship.
No we can't. I am sorry, but print on demand only takes out the unwanted copies, the ship would still have to pay upfront for copy-edit, proofreading, layout design and marketing. None of which are cheap.
In other words, the actual physical printing and shipping is only small portion of the costs.
Doing a good job rather than a cheap job when privately publishing is expensive.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
27 March, 2014 16:07
This is why ebooks still cost money. Taking paper out of the equation doesn't do much to reduce costs.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Ancient Mariner
Sip the ship
# 4
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Posted
27 March, 2014 16:21
Odd that this should be discussed when we are about to publish our first book!
It isn't what we have all hoped for over the years - ie the best bits of SoF + new, original material. That is something we would love to find a publisher for but no-one wants to take the risk, it seems.
Instead I decided to write a novel (personally financed) which takes another approach to WWI, comparing culture and football (the soccer variety) specifically in the run-up to the Great War with credit crunch Britain in 2010. A release follows for your interest.
First chapters here.
Simon was a constant encouragement and laid out the book for me. It went to the printers today and will be available on a print on demand basis at first. We intend to handle calls about film rights alternately...
![[Votive]](graemlins/votive.gif)
Though not a 'Christian' novel (the thought makes my toes curl) Tom, in the trenches and disillusioned by traditional religion in 1914, meets a 'Woodbine Willie' character on the frontline. It leads to the story's denouement.
An article will be published on SoF in the next week or so, introducing the book.
Attention: News Editor
For immediate release
NOVEL TO BE LAUNCHED AS LAMENT TO 'ANCIENT FOOTBALL'
DISENCHANTED with 'modern football', 23-year-old Dan changes his name by deed poll in a personal act of protest.
That's one of the many twists and turns in Rattles & Rosettes, a novel published next month (Fri 25 April).
'With the Football League celebrating 125 years, I wanted to take a creative look at its rich legacy,' said author Steve Goddard, a freelance journalist from Merseyside and former sub-editor on the sports pages of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo. 'I hoped Nick Hornby would write Fever Pitch 2, documenting the effect on fans of post-Premiership football. He's shown no signs so I decided to have a go myself.'
In Rattles and Rosettes, Dan runs a 60s covers band called Born Too Late and looks back nostalgically to that golden age of football and music he has never known. Disillusioned by Crystal Palace's financial predicament in 2010, he sets out on a one-man mission against modern football – a devotion that comes between him and girlfriend Sally, lead singer in the band.
The story also follows a Burnley fan on the club's famous 1914 FA Cup run. Miner Tom, 16, falls for a rich girl out of his league, militant suffragette Emily Bettridge. The young couple travel to the Crystal Palace, venue of the FA Cup Final. It is the first time a reigning monarch has attended a major football match and police are on the look out for Emily. Months later, Tom finds himself in the trenches on the Western Front.
The two stories eventually intertwine.
'Comparing football cultures prior to WWI and in credit crunch 2010 seemed the most engaging way to document ancient and modern football,' explains Goddard. 'It also gave me an opportunity to research and interpret what might have happened on Christmas Day 1914 – and that famous match between England and Germany in No Man's Land.'
The formation of the Premier League in 1992 and the jettisoning of the classic structure of the Football League, offends Dan.
'Football League Division One survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the destruction of the Berlin Wall and six albums by the Partridge Family,' says Goddard. 'The powers that be must think the longer the Premier League exists, the more we will accept it. Perhaps the next generation will presume that Football League Division One was an obsolete curiosity, like Saint and Greavsie, shirts without sponsors, Grandstand’s vidiprinter – Grandstand itself, never mind the vidiprinter. But this isn’t Orwell’s 1984. You cannot become immune to hearing something you know is not true. We are not the dead.'
Dan's one-man campaign aims to change the 'fit and proper person' test for club ownership. He argues that potential buyers must have personally supported the club for a minimum of five years, with ticket stubs to prove it.
'A pipe dream but that's Dan - the voice of one chanting in the wilderness,' explains Goddard.
Rattles and Rosettes is published by Ship of Fools on Fri 25 April, price £7.99.
First chapters here.
[ 27. March 2014, 18:40: Message edited by: Ancient Mariner ]
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Ship of Fools' first novel, Rattles & Rosettes, is the tale of two football (soccer) fans: 16-year-old Tom in 1914 and Dan in 2010. More at www.rattlesandrosettes.com
Posts: 2582 | From: St Helens (near Liverpool) UK | Registered: May 2001
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Amanda B. Reckondwythe
Dressed for Church
# 5521
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Posted
27 March, 2014 19:19
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
A general rule for hiring editors or proofreaders is that if someone's doing it for free they're probably not worth the money you're paying them.
I resemble that remark! If any professional editor or proofreader has a bone to pick with Mystery Worship, pick away -- although you won't see a penny for it.
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"I take prayer too seriously to use it as an excuse for avoiding work and responsibility." -- The Revd Martin Luther King Jr.
Posts: 10542 | From: The Great Southwest | Registered: Feb 2004
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
27 March, 2014 21:23
I'm a professional and do some pro bono work too, but I've noticed that those I do it for often devalue the work. ![[Disappointed]](graemlins/disappointed.gif) They'd rather go further and pay more for crappy work.
[ 27. March 2014, 20:24: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
Posts: 20059 | From: off in left field somewhere | Registered: Feb 2004
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Signaller
Shipmate
# 17495
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Posted
27 March, 2014 22:18
quote:
Originally posted by Ancient Mariner:
First chapters here.
Nice start, but in 1914 Padre Brooks would have begun "Our Father, which art in heaven..."
Posts: 113 | From: Metroland | Registered: Jan 2013
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Steve Langton
Shipmate
# 17601
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Posted
27 March, 2014 23:48
Did anyone in there mention the SoF e-book? It seems an obvious way to publish the stuff?
Posts: 2245 | From: Stockport UK | Registered: Mar 2013
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Ariston
Insane Unicorn
# 10894
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Posted
28 March, 2014 17:41
quote:
Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Did anyone in there mention the SoF e-book? It seems an obvious way to publish the stuff?
Yeah, but, contrary to popular belief, e-publishing doesn't save you much money at all, especially over PoD for small print runs. Paper and bookboard isn't all that expensive; most of the cost in traditional offset litho for publishers is in setting the plates used to print and then in shipping/storage. It's why books with small print runs, like academic monographs, are so expensive; if you're making a print run of 500, you have to charge $70 per book just to break even, assuming that you sell through your entire run—and you don't have things sitting in some warehouse for ten years waiting for people to buy them. While PoD has the same delivery problems offset litho does, it doesn't have the storage or minimum quantity ones—although getting special characters to be reproduced properly can be a bit tricky with some printers who aren't familiar with the intricacies of putting Syriac text in footnotes.
However, ebook production is a royal pain. Oh, sure, it works fine for novels and popular fictions—which, after all, is what e-readers are designed around, along with their formatting standards—but get away from this norm at all and things get weird fast. You have at least three different standards (Kindle, Nook, and ePub) that you have to work around; trying to get text to appear properly on every device, at every size, in every situation a user might desire (including large text!), is, while not impossible, pretty close to it. Throw in odd formatting, graphics, non-Roman text (or even non-English diacritics!), footnotes, etc., and you're talking about a train wreck waiting to happen.
It's a major topic of discussion among academic and small press publishers—after all, if we can get our audience to accept e-books, we'll never have to worry about minimum print runs, storage, delivery fees, and can sell books directly to the consumer without having to deal with Amazon*—but the technology isn't where we need it to be, our audience hasn't fully embraced ebooks, at least not for what we do, the XML used in ebook production is still underdeveloped and under development (at least if you need obscure stuff on a regular basis), and there's this issue of multiple file formats you have to deal with. "An ebook edition" isn't so much like "a paperback edition" as it is three separate and entirely different editions with different layouts—it's like having to do three paperback editions in three different sizes from three different printers with three different covers and three different sets of quirks and limitations.
While I realize that a Ship's Log wouldn't quite be as involved as a book on early Syriac theology formatted according to Chicago footnote/bibliography style would be, it would still have quirks, oddities, layout issues, and a limited audience—an audience, I might add, that can read the original discussions for free. Unless there's some significant added content that would be exclusive to the book, there's not much of an incentive for any publisher to take it on, or anyone much to buy it—other than, perhaps, a sense of charity and collection. Simply making it readable on a Kobo isn't going to fix any of those problems.
*ETA: if you ever want to hear a publisher rant, especially one involved in marketing and distribution, ask them their opinion of Amazon.
[ 28. March 2014, 16:42: Message edited by: Ariston ]
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“Therefore, let it be explained that nowhere are the proprieties quite so strictly enforced as in men’s colleges that invite young women guests, especially over-night visitors in the fraternity houses.” Emily Post, 1937.
Posts: 6849 | From: The People's Republic of Balcones | Registered: Jan 2006
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lilBuddha
Shipmate
# 14333
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Posted
28 March, 2014 18:03
Pish! Just fix it Ariston and don't bother us with the petty details.
Was a day when the peasantry just tugged their forlocks and got to work.
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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou
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