In the world of my post-PhD life I am still doing research, on which more later, but also there is a desire and need to earn some monies. Happily, in February my second commercial book with Amberley Publishing will be released into the wild, Treasures of Roman Yorkshire.
I wanted to take this opportunity to look at, and talk candidly about, how the first one has went, as I think some of the issues and stats identified below are things that I wish more people brought up. The Archaeology of Roman York was published in July , the result of 18 months of writing and editing. In them I discovered that the resources available for studying Roman York were quite academic.
Obviously I had used them myself but this made me think about it from a different perspective. How would one start to learn about Roman York? This line of thought ended up in this book. I wrote the TAORY in the margins of my time β occasional evenings and weekends, jumping about between different paragraphs and chapters, as is my usual way. I write articles and reports in the same way: brain dump and throw in messy resources, start writing anywhere I can find the words and then use this as the framework to build the other stuff onto it.
There was no author advance, obviously, and I had no literary agent to broker the deal. I really enjoyed the process of writing this book and enjoyed the moments where I felt like I was doing something I was good at.
It was frustrating not to be able to use in-line citations or footnotes β the original work all had them in β because of the house style.
