Venturing onto Pinterest

As an experiment, I’ve set up a couple of boards on Pinterest for images related to my books. They’re both works-in-progress, but have a look and tell me what you think. I’m something of a newbie when it comes to Pinterest, so I’d appreciate any suggestions you can offer me on how to improve them.

The first is for Susan. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of Susan herself, or her husband David Whybrew. But I’ve included a few of the people mentioned in the book, as well as many of the places, such as the Ship Inn in Adelaide and the barracks in Dublin. It’s still quite a small collection. I’ll be adding more pictures as I find them.

Screen shot of Pinterest Board for Susan: convict's daughter

The other relates to the book I’ve just finished. While I’ve been writing it, I’ve collected lots of pictures of Perth in the years between 1895 and 1910, as well as some of the people involved in the story.

Pinterest board for Perth 1895-1910

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As a subscriber you’ll receive a monthly newsletter, ‘The Scribbler’, straight into your email inbox. The Scribbler includes interesting articles not published anywhere else, useful tips and hints, and news about what I’m writing. You can read a sample here. I’ll also send you a link to download a free information sheet, ‘Eight online resources for history lovers’.

What next?

A couple of weeks ago I put the finishing touches to my latest book and uploaded it to a publisher. That should have produced a sense of satisfaction. Two years’ worth of research completed, 85,000 words written, rewritten and polished. Instead I felt more like muttering, “Good riddance, I never want to see that wretched book again.”

Woman typing c1906
Young woman typing, c 1906

Not that I haven’t enjoyed writing the book. But I’d just spent several days trying to get the footnotes looking half-sensible. The publisher didn’t require any particular style of footnote at this stage, but since it’s a non-fiction book, I did need to demonstrate that it was properly sourced.

The problems started when I moved the manuscript from Scrivener, the programme I used to write the book, to the word-processing programme I was using to edit it into the format the publisher required. Suddenly my nicely formatted footnotes appeared with Roman numerals. With over 300 footnotes, that didn’t look pretty. Who numbers a footnote ‘cclxxxviii’?

Several hours later, armed with information gleaned from various websites and forums, I got the footnotes numbered correctly. But then I noticed that every time I closed the file and re-opened it, a space would be added in front of each one. Deleting the spaces was futile, they just kept reappearing. More Googling and asking questions on forums revealed that this was a known quirk of the programme I was using.

To cut a long story short, I eventually managed to solve the problem using a different programme. The book is finished, the file is uploaded, and now I’m waiting patiently (because what else can I do?) to see if the publisher will accept it. And wondering what my next project will be. Stay tuned.

Keep up to date with what I’m writing by joining my Readers List.

As a subscriber you’ll receive a monthly newsletter, ‘The Scribbler’, straight into your email inbox. The Scribbler includes interesting articles not published anywhere else, useful tips and hints, and news about what I’m writing. You can read a sample here. I’ll also send you a link to download a free information sheet, ‘Eight online resources for history lovers’.