I DID IT MY WAY

I wrote a book, and it only took me 20 years. One of the many crit­i­cisms that my wife has of me is that I take too long to get around to doing things. Nor­mally she’s talk­ing about things like paint­ing the ceil­ing, but in this case I have to say that she’s ab­solutely right. Twenty years is a long time to come up with a small book.

The book in ques­tion is ’Cat­alo­nia Through Eng­lish Eyes: 20 Years Liv­ing Among the Cata­lans’, which I’ve just pub­lished in time for Sant Jordi’s Day, the biggest day in the book in­dus­try’s cal­en­dar.

(So don’t for­get your best friend at Cat­alo­nia Today when it comes to buy­ing a book for your loved one this year.)

Any­way, in an in­ter­view that you can read in this issue of the mag­a­zine, I ex­plain why I wrote the book, which is a se­lec­tion of opin­ion ar­ti­cles such as this one that I’ve writ­ten for Cat­alo­nia Today over the past 20 years. Last spring was the mag­a­zine’s 20th an­niver­sary, which is when I got the idea for a book of opin­ion ar­ti­cles I’ve writ­ten about Cat­alo­nia, its peo­ple, cul­ture, pol­i­tics, and so on. In fact, not only has this book been 20 years in the mak­ing, it’s taken me an­other year to get to the point of pub­li­ca­tion!

But this col­umn is not about how easy it is to type the book’s title into Ama­zon and find it ready to be pur­chased at a rea­son­able price in just a few clicks. Ob­vi­ously, I would never abuse our re­la­tion­ship in that way. This col­umn – which I doubt will ever find its way into any sort of book – is about my de­ci­sion to self-pub­lish.

To begin with, the whole process of find­ing a pub­lisher for the book: the re­search, the emails, the phone calls, the train trips, the meet­ings, and with­out any as­sur­ance that I would ever con­vince any­one to pub­lish it, put me off and I just couldn’t be both­ered. What’s more, I didn’t want to pub­lish the book to win the Nobel prize or be­come a mil­lion­aire, I sim­ply wanted a keep­sake of my time in Cat­alo­nia and a book on my shelf with my name on it, some­thing to show the grand­chil­dren.

So I started to look into self-pub­lish­ing the book. Years ago, self-pub­lish­ing was con­sid­ered van­ity pub­lish­ing, which by its name gives an idea of what peo­ple thought of some­one who might stoop so low as to fund the pub­li­ca­tion of their own book. Those days are long gone and, thanks to the ad­vent of the dig­i­tal age, not only is self-pub­lish­ing now com­mon, many who have been doing it under the radar for the past 10 or 15 years at this point al­ready mourn the pass­ing of its golden age.

What­ever the case, there is a sur­feit of pod­casts, YouTube chan­nels and web­sites pro­vid­ing step-by-step ad­vice about how to go about pub­lish­ing your own book. There are nu­mer­ous dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­forms, dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing ser­vices and a mul­ti­tude of free­lance pro­fes­sion­als of­fer­ing them­selves as ed­i­tors, proof­read­ers, graphic artists and agents. It’s hard to imag­ine any­one pick­ing up a book that has caught their in­ter­est, whose cu­rios­ity is piqued by the blurb, who ap­pre­ci­ates the clever play on words in the book’s title, who finds the price rea­son­able, but who sud­denly sighs and re­luc­tantly re­places the book on the pile, un­able to pur­chase it be­cause it was not put out by a major pub­lisher.

It is still too early in my self-pub­lish­ing jour­ney for me to con­fi­dently say that it is the best way to go if you want a book pub­lished, but I feel that whether it sells six or 600 copies, de­cid­ing to do it my way was the right choice for me. Ei­ther way I’ll have a book with my name on my shelf that I can show my grand­chil­dren. I might have to ex­plain to them what a book is, but that’s an­other story.

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