UPDATE 7 October: Well, this has gotten a good deal more attention than I expected or wanted. I wrote this post simply because I was looking for a way to deal with all the emails from people who wondered why their pre-order for my book had been canceled, or why the order was delayed for up to two months, or why the Kindle text is gray (rather the black which it is in every other Kindle book I own). Of course, I am not responsible for any of these problems, but I have a publicly available email address, and the people who fouled up this book release enjoy the benefits of corporate anonymity. (I say that with earnest envy.) Rather than writing individual emails to everyone, I thought it was best to post something for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters — my most faithful readers — to which I could then point inquirers.
I have yet to receive any response from OUP to my questions, and I doubt that I will. The essential point is this: I wanted this book to get as many readers as possible, so I insisted that a reasonable price to be written into the contract. (Most of the books in the series cost two or three times as much.) I took OUP agreement as an indication that they too wanted this book to get a relatively wide readership. But their shift to a POD (Print on Demand) model means that a wide readership is effectively impossible. You don't get impulse orders for books that could take weeks or months to arrive. This makes me very unhappy, because I believe that Sayers's life is truly fascinating, and I also believe that I have written a vivid story that illuminates her career. A wide distribution for this biography could, I think, bring her back to public attention in ways that reveal her real and great achievements. But the decisions of the book's publisher means that it simply can't have the effect I had hoped for and worked for.
UPDATE to the update: I finally heard from OUP! If you have the Kindle edition and are annoyed by the gray e-ink, a new version is available now or will be very soon. If you delete the book from your device and re-download it, you should get the new version. I am also told that they will be re-proofreading the entire book and that later editions will incorporate the necessary corrections, but I have no idea when that will happen. Finally, while they tell me that the delay between your ordering and their shipping will shrink, as far as I can tell they're still going to be doing POD, which means that the books will rarely or never be shipped immediately upon ordering. I have pointed out that when The Detection Club appears next year it might be nice to have some copies of a biography of Sayers readily available.
The response from OUP was really quite gracious and genuinely apologetic. I am grateful to those who replied, and am trying to remember how difficult these times are for publishers. But I have to say, I am so looking forward to working once more with Princeton UP, who will be publishing both Tom and Wystan and my critical edition of Auden's Nones.
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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 Spiritual 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 of 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 know almost nothing about what has 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 — they didn't cancel, the outlets canceled for them, presumably because there was no ETA for the books.) 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 for that matter 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.
P.S. My author's copies came today. As I took them out of the box, I opened one to a random page — and immediately saw a typo. I quickly dropped them all back into their box, stashed the box in the bottom of a closet, and covered it with old blankets, Christmas lights, anything I could get my hands on. I'm hoping that in time I'll forget they're in the house.
P.P.S. I did, I admit, take note of the error: on p. 77 I have "thins" for "things" in a quote. Also noted by others: on xi "her should" ➡️ "hers should." On 94 "bring raised" ➡️ "be raised." If y'all are ultimately able to read the book and come across more of the kind, maybe post them here? I could then send them to OUP, though who knows whether anything will be fixed. Still, I could publish an "Errata" page on my website, which would be the least I can do.