Ramsgate all Change Railways in the News at Ramsgate and the confessions of an occasional dauber.

One factor with local history is that things tend to be related, so if you find something on the internet, by or browse local books – what’s the phrase? One thing leads to another – or at least one book, post or map enhances the other. So I have no reservations about putting in the link to map of Thanet I published the other day, to help people understand this post. Here it is http://michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts3/9ac32c40.jpg

I recommend coming into my bookshop in Ramsgate and having a browse of “Ramsgate all Change Railways in the News at Ramsgate” if you can’t here is the link to buy it online http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/ramsgate_all_change.htm

Here are some pictures from it 

and an 1830 map of East Kent i.e. before the railways came.

I have been out and about buying books as my bookshop is closed on Thursdays, id manage so skive off for a bit and do a bit more to my to my

Watercolour painting inside Canterbury Cathedral, it really is a case of spot the difference with this one as I only painted for a short time.

Some problems and questions relating to this one, looking down the left bit of the painting there is now some scaffolding in the way of part of it that wasn’t there when I started the painting, so do I try and mock up finishing what I can’t see or do I try and paint the scaffold in instead, over the top? Another is the painting reminds of someone else’s style but I can’t think who, any ideas? And the last one is the Thanet question. So the idea with this painting was to paint something that you couldn’t really photograph, here is the link so me trying some panoramas of what I can see from where I am painting it https://goo.gl/photos/k1SUfB8oBcRBH5T19 so the question is. Can anyone think of any views in Thanet that I could paint that would be pretty much impossible to photograph?

and her are the books that have just gone out in the bookshop http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/cakes-in-bookshop.html

A Publishers Thoughts on Ripping off Authors.

As a small publisher with a fairly successful range of local books, authors often come to me either for advice on getting a book they have written published or asking me to publish it for them.

I only publish books that relate to East Kent, this is partly because of the limited amount of time I have and partly because I have neither the distribution nor the promotional facilities to deal with a national title.

Although I have to admit that recently I have been considering setting up a publishing business to produce books for a wider area, geared up to selling through the big national chains.

Anyway that aside and coming back to my existing publishing business, let us say that you write a book about some aspect of Thanet’s history and bring it to me for publication, what happens essentially is that I pay you money in the form of royalties not the other way around.

The normal deal is that I pay the authors who write the books I produce 10% of the cover price of the books I sell.

For example let us say that you write a book about Ramsgate Railways as Dave Richards did, now Dave isn’t computer savvy, so he came along with pictures of various aspects of our railways attached to sheets of text that he had typed out. This produced most of the makings of the book “Ramsgate all Change”, I then did the publishers bit, this varies from book to book, in this case it involved scanning the pictures into the computer, and finding some more to add to the ones he had already got, typing out the text into the computer, adding to some of it and rewriting some of it, taking a photograph of Ramsgate Station for the cover and putting the whole thing together in a form that my printers could turn into a book.

After various stages of proof reading by Dave me and several other people that happened along at the time the book was born.

The price of the book relates mostly to the cost of the materials, although I tend to make it a bit more expensive if I think a large proportion of the copies will be sold by post rather than in the shop. What came out was an 88 page A4 monochrome book with coloured cover selling for £7.99.

So if I sell 100 copies this means a combined selling price of about £800 this means I pay Dave £80 it’s not really rocket science and if you print 88 pages of A4 and an A3 coloured card wrap around cover and tot up the price of the materials, you will appreciate that there is no fortune to be made for anyone in this arrangement.

So where does the ripping off of the author come in you may wonder? This is when the author tells me that he has found a publisher that will publish his or her book for a price. By this I mean the author pays the publisher money and the publisher publishes the book, normally the book will be the authors first novel, by now my alarm bells are ringing.

I always tell the author concerned to go to a big chain bookshop like Watersones and look amongst their fiction for sale and see how many books published by the publisher concerned are actually for sale on their shelves, invariabley the answer is none.

Although there is nothing new in vanity publishing this is something altogether else where the publisher is giving the impression that that they can sell books, when on investigation they have nowhere where the would be likely in practice to sell them.

Ramsgate All Change

I noticed yesterday, when I came to print more of the local books that were running low, that I had sold quite a lot of Dave Richards new book about Ramsgate’s railways Ramsgate All Change. So I have published some more of it up in the web for you all to share click here to see it

BUILDING THE RAILWAY VIADUCT OVER MARGATE ROAD

I am still working on David Richards new book “Ramsgate All Change” about the railways in Ramsgate, I hope to have it out next week, what I lack however is any pictures of the construction of the main line railway tunnel to Ramsgate Sands Station, or any contemporary newspaper articles about it, any help with this would be much appreciated. Anyway here is another snippet from the book to share with you all.

BUILDING THE RAILWAY VIADUCT OVER MARGATE ROAD

In sinking the foundations of the piers of the viaduct across the Margate Road, in four out of the five, the engineers discovered after they had commenced that they were faced with problems. In the case of the first pier, they had not gone down far when to their amazement they discovered a disused chalk pit, which at some remote date had been loosely filled with ashes and rubbish and forgotten. That had to be cleared out and properly filled. On the next pier they discovered a relic of the First World War, a huge dug-out. That had to be explored and filled. Next, an old sewer, which they had to bridge, and when they imagined their difficulties overcome, they dug down to a water main, which also had to be bridged.