A Protocol for Making Backlist Volumes Respectable

A guest post by Gemma Coole, Publisher, CoolMain Press

In only two years, CoolMain Press, a micropublisher, has published eighteen superb books, all of them international bestsellers, including six previously published backlist books republished as ebooks. Among the other recognitions are prizes to our authors for literary quality and threats of lawsuits for truth-telling that no one else would risk.

Unfortunately, working with such long-established authors as Andre Jute Andrew McCoy means that many of the attractive volumes from their backlists that we want to republish are not available in any kind of electronic form. We must use optical character recognition to render printed books back to editable texts.

You might say, “But writers like Andre and Andrew, both from the Secker & Warburg stable, were surely superbly edited before their books were published.” Yes, they were. But optical character recognition is only 99% accurate, and that’s at best, with a truly clean, aligned scan of a page set in a font that the particular OCR you’re using just lurfs. I would love to see that fortunate concatenation of circumstances just once in my life! In practice the best and most expensive OCR (Adobe’s Acrobat) is 90% accurate. Think about it. OCR gets 10 or more out of every hundred characters and punctuation marks wrong, and of course it also gets any speck of stray ink or dirt on the page wrong, classifying it as a spurious character or, worse, an anomaly to be individually attended to.

The right way to proceed with the mess that OCR leaves one, is first to reduce the uncertainties to the maximum extent by enthusiastic use of the spellchecker built into all good word processors. Then reduce all consecutive multiple spaces to a single space. That’s the easy part but it can waste an inordinate amount of time to overlook it.

What’s left is then the most intransigent of the OCR errors, including some that are very difficult to spot unless each page is extremely carefully examined at good magnification.  Particular examples that my own eye just glides over — until the book is published, when they become knives in my heart — are reversed quotation marks, ticks for quotation marks instead of proper curliques, stops and commas  switched around at random, exclamation points turned into the digit 1, and hyphens exchanged for en and em rules. All these things matter.

After the spellcheck, it usually makes sense to find all hyphens and inspect each individually to ascertain which should remain, which are superfluous hyphens picked up by the OCR from the line-ends of the previous setting and turned “hard” when no hyphen is required, and which should be em and en rules to show broken thoughts or subsidiary material.

Next we need, for each book individually, to work out a set of algorithms which define the order in which quotation marks will be regularized. By this I mean that quotation marks should have all occurrences of straight ticks replaced by curliques, that they should all point in the right direction, and that, wherever possible, British single quotation marks should be exchanged for American double quotation marks.

This raises another question, apostrophes. In a solid pre-edited book from a classically-educated author and a leading literary publisher, one doesn’t need to look for spelling errors, grammatical solecisms, and the infuriating carelessness with apostrophes (tomato’s — aaargh!) one finds in the “books” that some conglomerates and too many indies put out. But correctly applied apostrophes can trip you up thousands of times in a single novel if you’re converting from single quotation marks to double.

So the algorithm you work out must in the first instance change all the opening quotes for each sentence which is dialogue, and observation of the text you’re working with will quickly show that there are two forms to search for, paragraph-quotation to open paragraphs and space-quotation after intervening description, in both cases right-facing curliques. Similarly, at the end of any unit of dialogue, there will be a stop, a comma, an exclamation, a question mark, or a rule, followed by left-facing curliques. You will now be left with some self-standing quotation marks which can be found as space-quotation and individually attended to. Anything else is an apostrophe or an error requiring editorial judgement.

Next, attend to the apostophes. Search for them one by one from the beginning of the volume and when you find an error, correct it for the entire volume by search and replace, then find the next error, until no more errors are found. At this point, you have reduced the errors in the OCR to the maximum extent possible by semi-automated means.

You still have a bit of a mess but at least the editor will not waste hours and days on what you can do with a computer in a few hours or even minutes if you’re organized or lucky.

Of course, at CoolMain, a tiny publisher, we would never have been able to publish so many hefty books in such a small period of time if it were not for the volunteer editors — currently Diane, Lisa, Lynne, and Sarah, with at least a dozen more who’ve helped on one or more books — working for the love of literature in Andre’s Editorial Menagerie on Goodreads.

I understand why the big publishers hate backlist books. It’s the cost of OCR. That makes me all the more proud of what CoolMain has achieved with very limited financial resources and the goodwill of the outstanding volunteers.

If you see a remaining error in a CoolMain book, please write to us: info at coolmainpress with the commercial extension. We will make the correction at the next edition.

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Gemma Coole was a merchant banker until she realized her life’s ambition to become a publisher when she founded CoolMain Press with Bill Tremain. Among CoolMain’s bestselling, prizewinning authors  are Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin and Andrew McCoy.

Fear is the Best Diet

 

A guest post by André Jute

In the last two years I’ve twice had heart surgery. The first time I was cycling again on the third day but the second time I nearly died from a stupid, minor, unforeseen complication to do with an allergy to iodine which — you won’t believe this — doesn’t kick in until the second time you have the stuff injected into your body to act as a contrast in keyhole surgery to enable surgeons to see what they’re doing inside your body. Since then I’ve lost a stone in weight without even trying: I think twice before putting anything in my mouth, and on second thoughts put it down.

But what, you may ask, has this to do with my new book, which isn’t a diet book (I don’t write diet books — or at least I haven’t yet). I have been writing the series COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS for a quarter century, and just now the first volume, DREAMS, is being published. There are seven further volumes to follow: a series to suck you into the lives of the ten Russian and American families whose story this is, as it it all our stories.

As a young man I partook of lethal blood sports like auto and offshore boat racing, racing sailing yachts across the Antarctic Ocean and around Cape Horn, and I was a professional polo player during one of my political exiles in South America — and my politics were of the sort that causes governments to send assassins after you. Even in an office job, in advertising, I lived in such a pressure cooker that all my partners were dead of various stress-related diseases before they turned 33. Hell, it was natural for me to think of myself as lucky, a perpetual survivor, pretty near indestructible.

So, when I wrote about how the young idealists of the Bolshevik Revolution turned into the creators of one of the the most lethal tyrannies the world has ever seen, the Soviet Union whose eras are named for their Great Terrors, I often felt sorry for them, and that somehow gave me a better understanding of them.

Back in the Little Perestroika, during the Brezhnev years, I toured the Soviet Union lecturing on the applications of market-led statistics, then a new idea to Russians. You could still cut the fear with a butter knife; a decade later all my star students had been disgraced and a few shot.

In the series of eight books which make up COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS we’ll see how people lived, and loved, and raised families even through this constant haze of fear. It is one of the most impressive things about the twentieth century, that the human side of people, of families, survived the social engineering of the best organized and most brutal dictators the world has ever seen.

We’ll also see the flip side of the coin, how American families made something positive out of the constant fear which resulted from Soviet paranoia and empire-building during the almost half-century that we call the Cold War.

If you read DREAMS, don’t let the horrendous murders of Lenin and Stalin overwhelm you: notice that even monsters have a human side. It’s just another of the weird and wonderful revelations in this series of novels, together longer than War and Peace, which are all historically true. I especially enjoyed writing of the love of the schoolgirl Nadeshda Alleluyeva for Koba, which was Stalin’s name before he became a monster.

Ah, yes, fear. It turns out, on rereading DREAMS, that I knew about fear all along. See if you agree.

***

 

André Jute is a distinguished writer of novels and of non-fiction on the arts, engineering and cooking. The New York Times described him as “wild but exciting”. He is probably the most influential teacher of creative writing in the world through his WRITING A THRILLER, the choice of most professionals, which over many editions refocussed the thriller from plot to character. There are about 300 editions of his books in more than a dozen languages. He is married, has one child, and lives on a salmon river in Ireland. André is on Facebook and Twitter, and you can join him for conversation at the discussion group ROBUST. His blog is Kissing the Blarney, his publisher is Coolmain Press, and there is more information on his personal website. His current e-books are available at Amazon. His other current project, just starting, is HENTY’S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN, a collaboration with Dakota Franklin and Andrew McCoy, which will be free to read on Wattpad.

Interview with Dakota Franklin

Today I welcome Dakota Franklin, an author with CoolMain Press.

Welcome, Dakota! 

What's the earliest story you can remember writing?

Before I started school, my Dad told me to tell him a story and he’d help me turn it into a game on his computer. The story I made up was about a pilot protecting the president from dive bombers. My parents gave me my own Mac and by the time I was eight or so I wrote stories all the time.

When did you decide to make the move to "published"?

It’s a sore point. I run the large engineering consultancy founded by my grandfather. Writing is how I express myself, a private thing, I thought. I didn’t really need publication to validate something so personal. But my guru, André Jute, takes a hard line on a writer submitting herself to publication as a test of quality. He threatened to drop me. I couldn’t bear to go back to the worthless wankers I hired as creative writing instructors before him, so I agreed. There was an offer on the table from a publisher in New York but I didn’t like their attitude, so I went to CoolMain Press, where André is editorial advisor and Gemma Coole, the publisher, basically lets me write whatever I want.

How did you find the experience of seeking a publisher?

I understand that many writers have difficulty. I can understand why, having seen the bullying attitude of the New York editor I was supposed to work with. I’m glad now I insisted on going with André to Gemma. It looks like I won’t lose out financially for my “obstreperous stubbornness” either, as the jeremiahs forecast, because there is already an offer to adapt my series RUTHLESS TO WIN for television and then for film.

What inspired you to write the current release?

All the volumes in my series RUTHLESS TO WIN are complete, selfstanding, long novels with individual, different lead characters. The lead characters in all the other books are secondary characters in any one of the novels. Because it is a character based series, regardless of the appearance of being all-action novels, the moment I have a character that will carry a big novel, most of the really hard work is done, because from the character flows her problems, and from problems follow action towards solutions, which someone resists, and that’s a story. So, when I saw this hillbilly “lady racer” in one of the lower NASCAR series bring up her breakfast before a race, and then tap the flick knife in her pocket for reassurance when she noticed I saw, I had a character. When the previous book was finished, I looked over my characters waiting to have books written about them, and this NASCAR racer struck me forcibly.

By now I was so inculcated with André’s fabulous method of letting everything flow from the characters, I just put Flicka Revere on page 1 at a crisis in her life, and NASCAR FIRST, just launching, just about wrote itself. You’ll see when you read it.

I have a part of another book also just out, on which I collaborated with André Jute and another CoolMain bestseller, Andrew McCoy, on the story of a character someone else created. HENTY’S FIST•1 GAUNTLET RUN, which is free to read on Wattpad, was a lark to write, and is a lark to read.

What are you reading now?

I have almost zero time for reading. My work is all over Europe and I live in Switzerland. I hit the road at 5a.m. every morning and return home about 7p.m. After that I give all my attention to my family (one husband, one daughter) until bedtime. So I write in the car, when the three associates who travel with me don’t require my attention. I’m the fastest driver among us, and we’re always in a hurry, so most of the time I have the wheel. Generally I dictate to the stenographer who travels with me, or to programs on our computers which transcribe what I say to text. Add in reading time for my professional literature, and that lot doesn’t leave much time for reading anything except editing my own texts. My bedside books for the fifteen minutes I read before sleeping are currently HENTY’S FIST•1 GAUNTLET RUN, to get the good bits I missed while I wrote my sections and didn’t have time to read everyone else’s, and the complete poems of Emily Dickenson.

What are your current projects?

There are nine complete novels in the RUTHLESS TO WIN series, complete in the sense of having been given over to the publishers and editors. There is a tenth novel, currently stalled because I can’t proceed until André works out how to break it up into several novels; there’s that much involving material. Yesterday I took the day off to celebrate the film offer. Today I feel refreshed and have, after weeks of shillyshallying, decided to write the story of Henry, who is in the process of becoming an English duke; he’s a racer too, of course, because my series is set again auto racing. That will be called THE LAST GENTLEMAN RACER. But Henry’s is a love story, and a story about a cruel man who beats women, and a story about the law of libel. Oh, and lots of racing, because Henry is moving up a class as a racer too. Because my books are so character-based, I write only one at a time. When I have an idea for a new character, I write a very short draft opening chapter, or some notes, and then leave it at that. That’s why the opening chapters of all my books are so dramatic, and so short, because they’re time out from a previous book!

Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?

I’ve been writing the series for 16 years. I’ve learned how to pick the best advisors and then not to argue with them except on matters of principle. I’ve learned that what a writer does best is write. It’s a very satisfying process. I really don’t know how I would manage if I had to handle all the many elements that other writers have to take care of, if I didn’t have so many committed, ultra-competent helpers.

Tell us a some little tidbit about yourself that we don't know.

On weekends I wear my 15 year-old daughter’s castoff clothes. I’m the trendiest mum for 300 klicks in any direction!

Great! Thanks for stopping by.

Thank you for inviting me, Anne.

~*~

DakotaFranklin is a high performance vehicle engineer. Her series RUTHLESS TO WIN has been on best seller lists internationally since first launching at Christmas 2011. There are currently four books out, and the series is under offer for television and feature film. The first of the series, LE MANS, was voted the Winner, Best Action/Adventure in the Best of the Independent eBook Awards. The latest in the series, just launching, is NASCAR FIRST. Dakota is also the co-author of HENTY’S FIST•1 GAUNTLET RUN, which you can read free of charge on Wattpad. That’s Dakota’s photo on the cover of LE MANS. Dakota welcomes reader contacts.