Hello friends and supporters and friend/supporters,
I wrote my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers because (a) I wanted to write another biography, (b) I had many thoughts about Sayers I hoped to share, and (c) I wanted to collaborate in some way with my dear friend Tim Larsen. Since Tim edits the Religious Lives series at OUP, it seemed that I had a way to do all these things at once.
I wrote the book — an experience that gave me great delight — and sent the manuscript to Tim, who in return gave me exemplary advice, correction, and encouragement. (Later on he went far beyond the call of duty and wrote the “keywords” for each chapter, as per OUP demand.) Tim was a great gift in every respect.
I was filled with dread when I learned that the editing of the book would be left to a company called Newgen, which had caused me great suffering when I worked with OUP-USA on The Year of Our Lord 1943. But, after a rough start, Jackie at Newgen proved to be smooth, courteous, and professional.
In other respects this whole experience is by a considerable distance the worst of my publishing career. And let me be clear about this: with twenty books and hundreds or essays, articles, and reviews under my belt, for trade and academic publishers, there isn’t much about the author’s side of publishing that I don’t know. And I certainly know the difference between the thousand natural shocks that publishing is heir to and a massive cock-up.
OUP was so silent in the months after I submitted the ms. that I finally decided to pull the book and try to place it elsewhere, but they talked me out of that. So we continued. When it was time to copy-edit and typeset the book, my mother was dying, and dying in a particularly terrible way, so I suspect that my concentration on the editing process was not as acute as usual. (And even at my best I miss things.) But, I thought, if some errors get through, we’ll get them fixed for the second printing. I was assuming that the editorial staff at OUP, in addition to the staff at Newgen, were reading the text, but I now doubt that that happened.
Then came pub day, or non-pub day, as it turned out. I won’t rehash those details — most of you will have read the story here — and I still have learned almost nothing about what has occurred and has not occurred. I did learn one thing, though: OUP is publishing this book print-on-demand style, which means that they don’t print copies until they get orders, which in turn means that when you order a copy of the book, it will actually become available whenever the printer can get to it. Might be days, might be weeks, might be months. (I keep hearing from people whose orders from various outlets have been cancelled.) If I had known that in advance I never, ever would have agreed to publish this book with OUP.
I now have zero confidence in OUP’s ability (and willingness) to get the books printed and distributed in a timely way, to address the problems with the Kindle edition, to incorporate corrections into future editions. I can’t trust them to do any of it, and I can’t fix the issues myself.
Though my mother had very little money remaining when she died, there are issues with her estate that still need to be settled; my wife, though she has healed from her recent surgeries, remains chronically ill; I am trying to make a success of my last term as a teacher. I do not have the wherewithal to deal with the crazy train known as OUP.
So I am done with this book. I am not going to promote it, talk about it, deal with it in any way. As far as I am concerned I never wrote it. (Am I ignorant or apathetic? I don’t know and I don’t care.) Those of you who want to read it in print will probably be able to do so eventually; those of you who want to read it on Kindle may or may not be able to deal with the gray e-ink, which may or may not be fixed. There’s nothing I can do, so I will go back to blogging — and writing Tom and Wystan.