When I retired from teaching in 2010, I decided that one retirement project was to convert my books into ebook format and release them online; I was able to do this as the copyright on each book had reverted to me. Why did I want to do this, though? Partly, it was vanity; I wanted people to read my books, especially those who hadn’t the first time round. There was also the fact that it was an opportunity finally to produce the versions I really wanted, to sort out the glitches or poor editing decisions (or those that I thought were poor, anyway) like putting the Author’s Note at the beginning of Emerald, where it gave away far too much, rather than at the end, where it was meant to be. And, partly, I confess, there was the thought that maybe, just maybe, I could make some money out of it… There was a little bit of all these in the decision; I’d like to think that it was the second one that predominated (getting the damn things right), but I’m not sure I can give a totally objective assessment of my motives. Anyway, for all these reasons, I decided to go ahead.

Easier said than done, however, because the contents of the books had to be converted to digital format and although the books had originally been written and edited using a wordprocessor, the actual text files were now seriously out of date. I had written all of the novels on an Apple II computer, using Apple Writer, which had been saved onto floppy disks (those old five and a quarter inch things – remember those?). These had already been converted to a RISCOS format for an Acorn Archimedes computer (my next computer), so that they could be edited using First Word Plus, but by the time I needed to access the text for conversion, I had subsequently been using a PC desktop, before returning to Apple for an iMac desktop. In other words, the Acorn disks were about two generations out of date and I could not find anywhere that could convert them even to a PC format, let alone a Mac.

So I adopted a brute force approach. I took a copy of each book, and sliced the pages out of them using a Stanley knife, even though this seemed almost sacrilegious to someone who loves reading as much as I do. The pages were then fed, chapter by chapter, through a printer/scanner using an OCR scan, which converts the image of each page into text that can be edited using Word – to say that this was all a lengthy process is something of an understatement. Each document then had to be proof read and corrected before I could even think about any revisions – but revisions there would be, as the passage of time had revealed a number of flaws in each book. Some were merely typos, but in others (for example, The Faust Conspiracy), the weaknesses were almost embarrassing in terms of characterisation or narrative style, and so here was a chance to produce an Author’s Cut, as it were. Most of the books, however, held up pretty well and only needed to go through a re-polishing, but one book, Gold Run, co-written with Ralph Gordon, was left out of this process completely, both for legal and aesthetic reasons; this will not be coming out as an ebook. (I might be doing another blog entry on this later, but, there again, maybe not…)

There are software packages available to convert Word files to ebook format, or you can have it done by an ebook publishing company (obviously, this costs money, and, most of the time, the book covers can cost as much as the book itself, especially if you want anything half decent). Which is another point – you can’t use the original print covers for ebooks because of copyright issues. I’m using the print covers on this website for the moment as I am not offering the books for sale personally, but they can’t be used on the ebooks without the publisher’s consent. Once the new covers are available, they’ll replace the old ones on the website.

Present state of play: my agent has come up with some figures for ebook publication, but the covers still have to be sorted out. Once that happens, the ebooks could be out in a couple of months after that.