Well I am really happy right now.
It was my birthday today and I got loads of messages on faffbook, thanks anyone that put them on, annoyingly Carla could not have this week off work. But we went out for a meal at Wetherspoons so I did not have to cook.
I got some nice presents which is good.
But the best news that is making me happy right now is that a project that I have been working on for about 10 years is finally coming to its end.
My Grandad died in 1999 and left to my brother and myself his memoirs which he had dictated and then had them typed up on a typewriter. He tried to get them published during his life but did not get very far with it. He did get one offer but he was not willing to sell all the rights to the story.
I first read it a couple of years after he died. I wanted to preserve it so I wanted to get it onto computer.
The manuscript was double spaced single sided type and I tried a number of ways to get it on to computer, typing was too slow and painful for my hands. Voice input at the time was so rubbish you would not believe. I tried some OCR software and that worked!
So my dad and I scanned in all the pages I can't remember how many of them there were but it was a serious amount. The whole book is somewhere around 100K words.
After this monster was scanned I did the first edit. This consisted of removing all the rubbish that the OCR software also picked up. It was a real mess of formatting, fonts and sizes. There was handwritten notes in the margins, all sorts of stuff that was hard to remove.
It took me a long time to knock it into shape. After I had done that it really just sat there for a long time as I am not skilled enough to edit it myself and my dad was too busy to do anything like that.
So fast forward a few years to 2012 and I found a woman that does editing but sadly she was far to expensive. Then a few months later I stumbled on a website called people per hour.
I found someone to edit it, he did the whole book for about £160ish.
He did not change the story only edited the spelling mistakes and just things that had slipped past me.
So after that edit was done it was a lot easier to read. I did another edit to correct mistakes and Russian/Polish spellings.
One night googling looking at book printing I found a really really good website that would give me an instant quote for getting books printed. All the others just wanted me to call or leave detailed info and they would get back to me. Protip, make your website just work and the info the provide easy to obtain.
It was quoting about £116 for 30 books at about 260 pages long in A5 size. It was then I spoke to my dad about getting it printed for the family and he was interested because the cost was a lot lower than he, or I, expected.
We visited the printers which is a small firm in Peterborough.
As a lot of the hard work was done my dad has been editing the final draft, which really is about edit number 4
I also asked for some help on here with a cover design. Lottie very kindly did me a cover along the lines of what we wanted. She also put up with a lot of requests from me to tweak the cover.
So Hopefully tomorrow the book will be e-mailed off to the printers and in a few days we will have a bound proof to look at.
We are planning on trying to sell it so my brother has done a simple website. I am going to try and get some stuff in the local press as over my Grandads lifetime he was in the papers a few times for different reasons, he also help setup Norfolk gliding club, Norwich Judo club and he is well know as he had a Jewellery shop in Norwich until he retired. He received two awards, one for performing CPR and reviving a child at a local swimming pool (he still lives locally as far as I know) and one for dealing with two yobs that were assaulting a policeman (he would have been in his 50s at the time) so he is well know locally.
Thats it, thats why I feel happy now and a tad emotional. And I feel that I have done what my Grandad wanted. I have got his book published. Its not just going to be lost over the years.
I hope that it sells well and I would love for the story to get out there so I will be spamming your facebook pages to death to try and advertise the book.
If anyone runs or know of book review blogs and would be interested in reviewing the book please let me know and I will see what I can do with regards to getting a copy.
If you feel like you want to buy a copy then I will be posting a link to the website on facebook in due course.
