Talk - Self-Publishing

Is self-publishing worth considering? In this workshop Nick de Ville offers, from personal experience, his reflections on self-publishing. 

For the most part publishing, like many other aspects of the contemporary commercial world, is dominated by International conglomerates. Their lists are dominated by popular genres, celebrity tell-it-alls and other predicable best-selling genres. True, there are small and fringe publishing houses dealing with specialist markets and all manner of esoterica, but is one of them right for you? And if you’re a writer who doesn’t want to develop a deep and wide understanding of the publishing world to locate an appropriate target for your work, sending your work to agents or publishing houses can be a pretty soul-destroying experience. 

Perhaps you think writers who need to turn to self-publishing are simply not good enough and should rightly feel discouraged from harbouring the ambition to get themselves into print, yet even a cursory look at the history of literature shows us that many significant authors first self-published.  These are some examples: John Locke, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Luther, Marcel Proust, Derek Walcott, and Walt Whitman. 

This talk will offer some reasons of why self-publishing is a really good idea, and aims to explain some of the requirements and pitfalls of the self-publishing process from manuscript to book.

Nick de Ville is a retired academic who has published four novels under the nom de plume GJ Babb. His fifth, CONQUEST’S CONQUESTS or Socio-Political Policy in Modern Britain As A Game Of Two Halves, will be published this autumn and the synopsis is below.

CONQUEST’S CONQUESTS

or

SOCIO-POLITICAL POLICY IN MODERN BRITAIN AS A GAME OF TWO HALVES

Politics needs men and women of experience - citizens of high repute and sound judgment. Vice-Chancellor Professor Clifford Conquest is one such, a conviction Labour politician in the making.

Conquest is invited to become an advisor on the future of university education to Labour MP Marcus Lancing. He soon begins to fear that those defending the bastions of Socialism are being driven to madness by Think Tanks, Specialist Advisors, Chief Future Officers, the Commentariat and the Battle of the Civilisations. The Tory government, he has no doubt, already has.

On his way to a parliamentary seat, Conquest finds himself increasingly immersed in a world of double-dealing beset by the industry of bad conscience.

He skirts scandals aplenty; knows how to ride the zeitgeist, and surely his battle-hardened experience of universities, where revolting students, ideological strife and botched management are everyday hazards, has fully prepared him for political life?