“Publishing can’t be that difficult, can it? It’s not rocket science… is it?” Thor Noggson did not say this on his way to the Upper Nile in the 18^th century; I did when I realised that, barring divine intervention, the only publishing company likely to publish my novel was… my own. As Thor did once remark, on long journeys confusion is obligatory.

Thankfully I had been well-prepared for this task; successive waves of NHS cuts had gradually deprived me of secretarial support and forced me to learn basic word processing. Maybe I should have taken a secretarial course in the first place.

So, having armed myself with various publishing manuals, I prepared to cross the black and inky sea of the dark arts (fonts, formats, typesetting, bindings, paper types, file conversions). My initial terror subsided as I slowly learned to navigate the ‘word’ help system and discovered that… it was all there. Labyrinthine it may be, but it’s like granddad’s cellar; every tool under the sun, if you can root them out – more like caving than rocket science. So after much, much brain pain, I had a word file sized and spaced like a novel, converted to PDF (printer format).

To get official recognition as a publisher of serious work rather than a back street leaflet man you also need to register with Neilson and buy some ISBN numbers  from them (each book needs one). Not expensive, and it turns out the forms are a piece of piss compared to the average disability benefit application…bingo, Makri press was born. And yes, I am going to publish other people’s work too, if it’s good enough.

A quick mention for editing; you can pay someone to do it, or you can risk your sanity and do it yourself. Reading aloud to yourself for weeks on end can be a bit risky, especially when your wife used to be a psychiatrist. (Fortunately for me, these days Sheila usually has her earphones on while she listens to her Ipod.) Then there’s copy-editing; this is a bit like letting loose your inner obsessive-compulsive…yes, I can hear the laughter from my old university housemates at this point…

The most important task is to get a decent cover; when it comes to books, that’s what most people look at before they buy, let’s face it. Here, I was just lucky to meet someone – thanks again, Angela.

Printing? Well, it’s like removals or anything else. Find out what other people say about companies, get three estimates and choose one. Then prepare to fill your landing and other spaces with piles of shiny new books wrapped in polythene.

They arrive; reality bites. “Oh my God, I’ve done it now.” This is where the urge for self-expression (shout it from the rooftops) finds itself at war with the urge for privacy and self-protection (put them in the loft and hide). And the practical bit… how on earth am I, with the business sense of a lab rat, going to get them out to that mysterious entity known as the public?

…to be continued…

Thor Noggson, the 18^th century Icelandic explorer, achieved fame and fortune when he set off to find the North Pole without his compass only to discover, in a roundabout way, the source of the upper Nile…

He summed up his approach to life in the words, “It’s easy to build a ship; keeping it afloat is the difficult bit…”

For me, writing a novel is relatively easy, despite the long time scale. The hard part is getting people to take you seriously by reading it.

I’ve already written two psychology books, but my experiences of the traditional publishing industry did not inspire confidence. After publicising my first book by speaking at two international conferences, the publisher went bankrupt just as the book came out – or rather, didn’t come out. So I then spent a lot of time apologising to irritated professors from obscure places. It took several years to get the rights back from this publisher – he had relocated to Florida, presumably to avoid the lawyers. No, I’m not making this up. Eventually, I brought out a second book, which did quite well for a year. Then the company was taken over by a large American corporation who listed all their British authors in very small print at the back of the catalogue, and I vanished back into obscurity again.

As for the world of fiction, it’s a bit like the world of beer in the 1970’s. A few large companies (breweries) dominate the market and forcibly market a rapidly decreasing number of authors (keg beers). Plus, I don’t tick many boxes. I’m not thirty-something and I’m not a celebrity gardener, soap actress, or failed politician. I’m not an Oxbridge graduate, and I’m not in the masons… putting it bluntly, I don’t know anyone in the world of fiction. JK Rowling was rescued from a bin by a junior assistant who persuaded her boss to take another look. I decided my chances of being rescued from a bin were decidedly slim, since the economic problems mean that most of the junior assistants are now on the dole…

As a reasonably competent DIY man and fixer of anything that goes wrong, I thought, well, publishing can’t be that difficult, can it? It’s not rocket science… is it?

…to be continued…