THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!

I have decided to firmly commit myself to the 21st century whilst still espousing those good old punk ethics of do it yourself, so I have signed up to Kindle and Amazon's Create Space for self publishing.

I had a number of texts which I had preapred but which had sat around in cupboards for some years, occasionally being added to, and decided that the time had come to act.  Several articles in the paper after the new year told me how easy it was to self publish, especially e-texts, so I decided that the time had come.  I had some solid free time in which to do it so i gritted my teeth and sat down at the PC to get the books out there.

The major lesson is: it's really easy provided that you have the texts set up right in the first case.  I hadn't; too many bad habits from self-taught typing.  My sins included:

• using tabs to indent rather than the ruler thing at the top of the page in Word;
• not using 'Styles & formatting' to create levels of titles and just using bold/ italics and positioning to do it myself;
• no first line indent on paragraphs.

These were the main ones- and the big time commitment was simply going through the books weeding all these things out. That made my eyes hurt but once it was done, the rest was very simple and quick.

Once I was signed up (again easy peasy) I just had to upload the Word document and cover and let them do the rest.  In truth, the cover was the other issue- it had to be presented as a jpeg or gif file: I had designed some nice looking covers (well, I thought so anyway), but they could not be read as they were.  How do you convert Word to jpeg?  Microsoft don't tell you, but Mr Internet (as ever) had the answers.  Again, it wasn't difficult at all- just a few stages to master- and then it was all smoothly completed.

SO, the adverts: what is up there?  I have so far e-published 3 books:

1) Estrays & executions- a collection of my published articles and essays on the development of the laws of distress and execution and on agrarian byelaws.  I look at such issues as the origins of 'legal custody' and the campaigns of resistance to levies of distress that formed part oof the political campaigns against tithes and the poll tax;
2) Customs' duties- a full length study of village and manorial byelaws regulating the infrastructure of field and home; and,
3) Lost by translation- a book about language and the invasion of North America.

Only the first of these is a 'Bailiff text', of course, but there will be more to follow:

- my two new histories of 19th century bailiff law; and,
- the second edition of my Common land.

All the details are on Amazon of course, plus the author page and other information.
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