How to give an old book new life
Saved, my story of the save-wye campaign, only went up on Scribd two days ago. In that brief period of time it’s been made a featured read on the site and garnered close to a couple of hundred readers. Not bad for a book that is about a tiny village in southern England, and a controversial development project (no defeated) that, in theory anyway, only affected a couple of thousand people.
For the record Saved is my only self-published book. While my novels are published commercially around the world, this was a very focused project (though I hope quite a thrilling real-life story) that was never going to reach hundreds of thousands of readers. What was more I wanted the book out quickly, while the scandalous story of Wye was still fresh in people’s minds. So I typeset the book myself in Apple’s Pages and worked in conjunction with the excellent self publishing house Troubador to get it out just three months after the final word was written.
You can still buy physical copies from a variety of sources, including Wye News in the village and the Sellindge campaign. But they are, as one would expect, slow, so it made sense to look at a way of trying to find a new lease of life for a book which, if you are involved in some kind of environmental campaign, may well be of interest.
Scribd was the solution I hit upon. You open an account, upload your document (in this case in the form of the pdf of the original book) then upload it. Scribd does all the hard stuff of converting it into some kind of web streaming format. Then you can embed the book in your own site, let people read it in full and forward it to others. I also allow the entire book to be downloaded for free (you don’t have to do this). You will get a pdf if you do that (you will need to register for Scribd - for free - to get the file but it should be readable in most modern e-readers).
It’s been an interesting and worthwhile experience I think. Saved generated a lot of international interest, including an invitation - which I couldn’t take up unfortunately - to talk to an environmental campaign in Tasmania. Foreign readers can now grab the book for free and see if it’s of any use to them. I never wrote it for money in the first place, though it has covered its production costs, selling more than two thousand copies of its original three thousand print run.
Does Scribd have something for my mainstream books too? I suspect we will be seeing excerpts from all the Costa books here soon, not just the one from Dante’s Numbers you see here as an experiment. And perhaps something bolder too. I can’t talk about this yet but if you’re interested I suggest you sign up for the newsletter to make sure you are among the first to know - because it should be quite intriguing.
To see the Scribd page on Saved go here.
