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.

My Opinions on Lending, Borrowing and Piracy

I know you've all been dying to hear my feelings on the matter, so in light of all the discussion on several of my author boards in recent weeks, I've decided to post a little note on the topic of "piracy" and "sharing" and "lending" and "ebook libraries," etc. Okay, so maybe you haven't been dying to know, but you're going to hear, anyway, 'K?

I should preface this whole discussion by saying that my opinions in no way reflect those of my publishers. They protect copyright, and I appreciate them for it, and I try to follow their policies as closely as I can, since I signed a contract with them and I wish to honour that relationship. Thus, anything I write here does not trump my agreements or change the publishers' desire/actions to protect their investments.

Having said that, I personally go back and forth on the subject.

I admit, I'm torn. I get the sense from others that I should possibly be outraged, like so many of my colleagues, when my books get read for free. I understand this feeling, I really do. When I see one of my books circulating for free, I sigh a little with disappointment. On one hand, it's kind of nice (as a new, little author) that people want to read my book, but it's disappointing that they'd rather not pay for it.

I get paid very little for my work, as it is. This is not my "day job," and I don't live in luxury. In fact, I teach on contract, and I struggle a lot of the time to keep the roof over my kid's head and food on the table, just like everyone. I don't write books for the money, but it would be nice if I got some bread out of publishing them. So, while it's great that people are reading (which really is a dream come true in its own right), it's also discouraging to see free copies going around when I make so little money for creating them.

Don't get me wrong here. In light of being perpetually broke, I also understand that it's hard to afford books at times. I sympathize, believe me. This is likely what saves me from "outrage" and keeps me in the "exhausted sigh" range. It's just not an easy time for anyone right now.

Now, piracy is a different issue from lending. Lending sites don't carry the files; they just match-make lenders with borrowers. Piracy sites hold the file and feed it out endlessly, which is a harsher sort of bummer.

Lending books is a time-honoured tradition, so it's harder to be annoyed by that. I've borrowed paperbacks from people, and I've lent some, so the word "lending" is difficult for me to cry over.

In fact, as a newish author, lending has a nice ring to it. There's a major part of me that thinks how wonderful it would be for someone to turn to their friend with one of my books and say, "Hey, take this - you'll like it!" That's the kind of "marketing" money can't buy, and is worth much more than its weight in gold.

The ebook lending sites are not quite that, though. There, it's strangers lending and borrowing, without the personal recommendations and shared enthusiasm. I still hope it can lead to new "fans," but it's hard to say. Somehow, it just seems different than a couple of sisters swapping paperbacks, but I think I need some more time to figure out how I feel about it.

For now, I guess the word around the block is that ereaders and distributors allow for this, so it's not illegal. So, for the time being, we kind of have to grin and bear it no matter how we feel, and hope for the best. For me, the best outcome is that people borrow one or two, enjoy my work, recommend me or buy my other books. That wouldn't be so bad, come to think of it.

(I should note that I have very little actual knowledge of how lending works, but I'm pretty sure it's not the end of the world. From what I gather, only certain Kindle books are available (which might actually work in the "little" author's favour, if the Big Pubs opt out), and only for 14 days at a time. I've heard B&N only allows ONE lend-out per purchase, EVER, so if that's true I don't think that's much of a threat. (I don't know for sure how many times you can do it with Kindle books, since I've seen different answers.) But, as I say, I don't have hard knowledge, so who knows? My gut says, though, Amazon would be all over lending sites and forums if they were a major drain on profits.)

(ETA: I have since discovered that Kindle books can also only be shared once.)

However, as an aside, I must say I'm not keen on the word "library" for actual file share sites. Libraries pay premium prices for their books and materials, and often buy multiple copies and eventually replace worn ones. Ebook files don't wear out, so it's a different kettle of fish. Eventually, someone could wait around and read my entire opus without anyone paying a dime, theoretically, if ARCs if my books are the root source. (This would be my not-so-good outcome, obviously.)

That's a bit alarming, the speed and eternity of it all. This is where file sharing squicks in a way paperback lending doesn't, I guess.

But I have to admit, while the poverty-stricken me would like the royalties, I cannot come down on the anti-lending side. Would everyone who "borrows" (or straight-up pirates) my book buy it, otherwise? Likely not. But does that put a rosy ring around file sharing? I honesty don't know.

I see good; I see bad. It's how I generally roll.

There is one final thing in all this that weighs on me, though. I know I can't be the only writer who's considered quitting due to the sometimes-low compensation in this business. (Most small pub and self-pub authors don't get advances, so we depend on royalties, which is a crap shoot.) I will always write, since I love it, but I struggle often with whether publishing is worth it. There are better paying second jobs, that's for sure. Or, I could finally get some sleep with my "spare time." Does diminishing the already meager pay-outs for authors discourage productivity? I'm not sure, but it's something I worry about. Yes, I know libraries and friend-sharing has always been with us, and books kept being made, but I wonder if file sharing could be what will drive the genie back in the bottle on indies and small publishers. Sure, there are less gate keepers in publishing today, or at least more gates available, but maybe the pirates will be what knocks "little" authors out of the ring instead. Will the burnout rate keep climbing?

The "everything online should be free" trend is something to consider over the coming years, in my opinion. It's not the whole issue-enchilada, but it's something to think about.

So, after all that rambling and prevarication, what am I left with? I'd love it if people bought my books, but I'm not foaming at the mouth over the whole thing, especially the lending. It might well have some benefits, even if it's frustrating when sales aren't great as it is.

I'm actually kind of okay with people wanting to "borrow" one of my books to see if they might like the others, to be honest. A little flattered, even. But, I would like it if that borrow led to a purchase at some point, I admit, or some other form of reciprocity. Thus, maybe this is my best wish: If you read one of my books for free, and I won't ask how, and liked it, maybe you could leave a review some place. That way, I still get something good out of it. That would lessen my indecision, I think.

In the meantime, I guess my only conclusion is that things happen as they happen. I'll just keep on writing, and not worrying about sales, or sharing. Out of my years of experience on this earth, the only piece of advice I've ever come across that really sticks is this: "Keep on trucking."

In other words: Keep calm and continue writing (and reading), folks.

And, regardless of how you come across my books, I do hope you enjoy them. In the end, that might be the only profit I can really hope for, and the only one that lasts.