The next work

The book has not quite sunk without trace. Amazon send me a few pence every month, resulting in the need to fill in a tax return this year, which was quite a trauma! I have to fill in a USA declaration that I don't need to pay US tax, but Amazon.com tax me anyway, so my few pence are taxed twice. If I want to reclaim the two dollars I paid our friends across the Atlantic, I must get a tax lawyer. Perhaps I can offset it against gift aid.
As our eyes have turned to other parts of the world, so I have felt far removed from India. Vietnam and Cambodia were great, even if James did get a nasty bug in Dubai, but as we clean out our collection of books in an attempt to get rid of a storage unit (only James could think it a good idea to keep books in a storage unit) I am still bugged by the fact that there is no readable history of South India.
So why not write one, as I have already done half of the work? Not only that, we have several thousand photographs sitting around, a few of which are good. This is what retirement is for, I suppose. There is an urgency in doing things, but not much at stake if it all goes pear-shaped.
I am once again surrounded by dodgy research and my head is exploding with unpronounceable names, none of which translate easily into a Western alphabet.
I have got as far as the outline of Chapter 4 and it still hasn't got very interesting and I have a suspicion that we might need to go on a research trip again.
Back to the Pandayas, Chola, Cheras, Vijayanagras, Ays, Pallavas, Ezhimalas and anyone else who had a fiefdom in South India BCE. There are quite a few!

History through objects

I have been enjoying Neil MacGregor's programmes about the history of Germany through a series of objects selected for a new exhibition. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dwckb)

It got me thinking about what I would choose as representative of the periods and cultures of Kerala. How do you avoid the magpie-like selection of shiny objects? Many of the lists which already exist choose items of cultural importance, like the Aranmula mirrors which are made of bell metal, and which take days of polishing, or items collected from traditional dance forms like Kathakali. Certainly, some of these things would be important and representative, but they did not necessarily mark important changes in, or description of, the way in which the people lived, which is really what history is about.

How many should there be? I could probably manage more than 10, but fifty might be beyond me. So, I have set myself the task and designate the Bellarmine jar in my last post as item number one, even though it is chronologically adrift.

More reader feedback- a map.

Another suggestion from my reader- have I got more than one? was that I included a map of my travels. I have done this by means of a page, rather than a post so that it is always there. I have also included a map of the backwaters, painfully drawn from a variety of sources before such a thing was available in India. How things have moved on!

Comments on Amazon

Although I have sold a few books and some Kindle downloads I am not getting many comments on Amazon yet. I put this down to the fact that there are a lot of pages to slog through and possibly that people are being too kind to tell me what they really think.

I have gleaned one 5* review from someone who will remain anonymous and who pointed out the perils of too much boring detail. Ah well!

It is hard to start marketing something which seems to have gone off on its own and doesn't want to belong to me any more. I wrote it because I wanted to and now telling the world about it is difficult and a little embarrassing.

Perhaps when the summer is over and I am shut up in my shed in the rain I will be a bit more energetic about telling the world. Until then my excuse is that without reviews I can't start to shout loudly to the world in general.

Whatever next?

Now that I actually have the book in paperback form the question arises, what next? I never wrote the thing to get it read, particularly, but now it is out there I feel I ought to do something to let people know there is yet another travel / history book about India for them to enjoy.
Publishing was hard enough, but marketing is yet another new game to play and one with which I am not exactly comfortable.
I recently had the experience of sitting in a room with several acquaintances who enthused over the fact that I had written a book. Some of them had been to South India and were genuinely interested, but others seemed to think that writing a lot of words was an achievement in itself. All very embarrassing!
The dreaded Amazon gives many tips and articles on marketing, all of which hinge around having reviews on the site. I think that is going to be a very slow process. It is not a short book and most of the people who have bought it so far (thank you friends!) as far as I can tell, may not necessarily have bought or read yet another travel / history book about India. They have bought it because they know me.
I feel as though I have stripped off in public. I really wouldn't mind severe or negative reviews, I don't think, as long as they were honest. No reviews at all is really scary. Letting it sink without trace is such a relaxing idea!

At last the paperback is going to appear.

I've finally pressed the button on the paperback of my book and it will be out at the end of the week! These last couple have weeks have been like one of those dreams where you keep trying to do something and then get sent back to the beginning to do it again.
My proof copies arrived in three days, printed and delivered from the US and it was really weird to have a solid copy in my hands. The cover has worked OK, much to my astonishment, and I thought that, after four proof reads, I was home and dry.
I found a mistake the first time I opened the book and all the page numbers on the first couple of chapters had gone squiffy- again. I was rapidly losing the will to live, when enter Richard. My friends from Stroud arrived in their caravan for a week of forts and military tunnels, and while not crawling around underground and when it was raining they volunteered to proof read for me. Richard used to edit very long technical documents and in no time the poor old proof copy was bristling with markers and covered in pencil. Just what was needed! He did a very thorough and accurate job and I can't say how grateful I am.
He didn't get all of the typos, inconsistencies and bad grammar, however, as I proof read it again, for the fifth time and found a couple more daft things. Then back to Amazon to fight their review process and go round in circles a couple more times before I finally pressed the button today!
This is it folks, warts and all and very scary.
It will appear in about three to five days and then the real work begins if I want anyone to buy it. That's a good question.

The Paperback is on its way!

At last, after about ten attempts, I managed to produce a file which was acceptable to the non-humans at Amazon Create, and then acceptable to the human file checkers.
The non-humans seemed to have the most awkward requirements, each check coming up with a different,and increasingly obscure, problem.
The last objection was that some characters were appearing as squares on page 2. There never has been any text on page 2.
In desperation I produced a Word-translated .pdf file and after some grumbling, this was OK.
The next job was pricing. Boy is it expensive to produce print-on-demand books! Having had to choose a price structure which effectively makes me want to apologise and say I'll lend everyone who wants to read my book my own copy, I had to go with the arcane methods and choose a price which means I won't exactly get rich on royalties, but that was never the idea.
So now I am waiting for the proof copy to make its way from America, bearing in mind that the 4th of July will hold everything up.
Still, hate Amazon as you might, I can't fault their systems on this. There is no other way I would be able to have a real book in my hands and a world-wide distribution.

Not finished after all.

Still struggling to complete the paperback version of the book! The next job is the cover. I have so many photos I don't know where to begin.

I have also been touched at the messages from people finding the book and giving congratulations for actually finishing it. It's not done yet. Daunting.

Chinese fishing nets, Fort Kochi

This picture possibly encapsulates the changes in Fort Kochi over the last few years. The LPG terminal sits at the mouth of the inlet, finished but unused, while the fishing nets, first used here in the fifteenth century, according to legend, go up and down as they always have.

Finished at last!

After nearly three years of slog, I have finished the book and uploaded the Kindle version to Amazon. The paperback will follow as and when I can grapple with the technical complication, but I hope it will be soon.
The point was to write the book. The idea of people reading it feels strange, although I hope they do.
I suspect I won't feel that I have finished until I have a copy of the paperback in my hand!

Everyone asks, why and what is Muziris? Muziris is the semi-mythical port in South India which was used by the Greeks and Romans in the trade for pepper. Semi-mythical, in that although it was known and written about by contemporary poets and traders, the site of Muziris is not reliably known.

MB Muziris

The ancient trading Empires which had contact with Southern India are many, and each one has left relics of itself all over the country, but these are often elusive and difficult to untangle. They are undeniably romantic, as is the idea of India itself. The reality is sometimes different, as our experiences trying to do business there shows.