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Publishing and Self-Publishing Seminar, 11 July

Join on our seminar on 11 July to learn about getting published and all aspects of self-publishing, from completing your manuscript to decisions about design and layout, through to the final print-ready files and publication.

Enterprise House, Bishop’s Castle, Friday 11 July, 10.00 am – 4.00 pm
£75 per person, please contact newbooks@youcaxton.co.uk

Programme

Morning
1) Welcome and introduction to self-publishing, Bob Fowke, Managing Editor YouCaxton.
Relationship between print technologies, publishing and self-publishing historically; the new print-on-demand and digital technologies and how they are affecting publishing today.

2) First thoughts: what is the readership?
* What is a niche?
* How will readers find out about the book?
* What title and subtitle?
* Discussion

Coffee

3) Preparing the manuscript
* Types of editing: structural, copy-editing, proof-reading.
* Use of Word: ‘track changes’ etc.
* Indexes, endnotes etc.
* Discussion

4) Agents
* What they do and how to find one.
* Straplines, synopses, first chapters.
* Back-cover blurb
* Discussion

Lunch break (45 minutes)

Afternoon

5) The Design Process
* Software used
* Fonts, margins, preliminary pages, contents lists, cost constraints
* Book covers, spines, ISBNs, barcodes
* PDF proofs
* Uploading print-ready files to printers.
* Discussion

 6) Production
*Print-on-demand and digital printing
* Litho and traditional print runs
* Production costs in relation to design, pagination, types of paper, colour etc.
* What can go wrong?
* Discussion

7) Marketing
* Pricing
* Publicity
* Time frame
* Launches
* Social media
* Reviews
* Discussion

8) Distribution
Amazon, wholesalers, bookshops

9) Final discussion

fiction

White Wolf
Nick Gosman

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 281 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-76-7
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
White Wolf
by Nick Gosman

In a story that pays homage to the latter-day frontier world of Jack London, WHITE WOLF recounts a lone woman’s struggle to survive in the arctic wastes of a forgotten land far from the world that most of us know or could imagine.

Here, in a purest space of bitter cold and uncompromising hardship, Migla is reborn. Forced to discover herself anew, her experience fosters a second catharsis and she becomes a different person.

Delving into her being to find the strength to survive, Migla comes to terms with her new life and falls in love with the animals and plants she encounters there. At times mystical and enchanting and at others deeply disturbing, WHITE WOLF is a treatise on the transcendence of the human spirit and the redeeming power of nature.

“All that is left of me is my robe and my spirit. Now I’m dying, I gave everything away. I don’t have anything to give you anymore. Only my robe and my spirit are in your hands. Now my tears come”

Wallace Black Elk



Nick Gosman gained an insight into what it takes to survive in the wilderness during his formative years climbing and mountaineering in Scotland and Continental Europe.

Since his early years wondering the world’s empty spaces with family and friends, wild nature has come to hold a deep spiritual resonance with the author, which he attempts to bring to his story-telling.
fiction

The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story

Michael McCarthy won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism.


 The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story
by Michael McCarthy

This is the account of an improbable and ultimately tragic love affair, between an arrogant and cynical drugs baron and an idealistic young policewoman. In fact, it was more than improbable, it was impossible. It could not have a happy ending. It was doomed before it began. Yet when in the end it happened, it was a true union of two hearts.

The remarkable love story of Gideon Horrocks and WPC Clare Sowerby is centred around a major drugs conspiracy, a multi-million-pound plot to flood all Europe with LSD. Set in a gritty and grimy location – the industrial Lancashire of the 1980s, in the early years of Thatcher’s Britain, with unemployment rapidly rising – it brings together two people each with great unhappiness in their pasts, who find, wholly unexpectedly, the possibility of a happy future together. Yet even as they do so, events are closing in on them, and an explosive climax is coming…

Told with remorseless pace, The Man On The Mountain combines two gripping and interlocking narratives – one about the fate of the most controversial of generations, the babyboomers, and the other about the power of love to reopen even the most tightly-closed of human hearts. And together they form a tragedy that is as unforgettable as it is extraordinary.
Published: May 2025
Paperback: 323 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781915972729
Available from Amazon

Michael McCarthy has won numerous awards for his environmental journalism as the former Environment Correspondent of The Times and the longstanding Environment Editor of The Independent. His book The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, Britain’s principal nature writing award, and also for the Richard Jefferies prize. His novel Fergus The Silent (2021) won the 2023 Creative Writing Prize of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, with the chairman of the judges describing it as “wonderful.” This is his second novel.

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livesinprint

Front-line Policing: Can, Worms, Open
P.C. Andy Vince

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 184 pages
Price: £9.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-74-3
Available soon from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
Front-line Policing: Can, Worms, Open
The problem(s) with Response Policing
by P.C. Andy Vince

Now retired, PC Vince writes about his experiences from a career in the Police spent entirely in uniform on the front line – ‘Response’ as it is known. During that time he attended incidents from cycling matters to murders, and everything in between.

He explains procedures and shows how the Police evolved during his career, and not for the better.

He takes the reader through the gates of a police station, behind the wheel of a police car, and into the 999 world, giving opinions and his own personal feelings about the development of what was, once, a very efficient service, and now is full of nonsense.

Response bobbies will love their side of things being shown – the bosses and government, not so much



PC Vince joined the Police following time in the forces and other jobs. He spent his entire Police career on the front line in a smaller than average Police force. He is now happily retired.
livesinprint

Come and meet the Doctor
Hugh Thomson

Published: May 2024
Paperback: 110 pages
Price: £6.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-86-6
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
Come and Meet the Doctor
by Hugh J Thomson

Childhood in the north of Scotland was full of entertaining, and sometimes shocking events, and medical school in Aberdeen was a riot of fun and pranks as well as learning to be a doctor.

Frequent trips with my friends to the far north- west of Scotland opened the door to a number of adventures, and it was during my time as a medical student that I became a Christian, which was to change the direction of my life in years to come.

After four years in Aberdeen, I worked a further six years in Edinburgh before becoming second in command to transplant pioneer, Sir Roy Calne, in Cambridge. A year in the USA exposed some highly amusing differences in culture and language, and three months at the Chinese University Hospital in Hong Kong were a delight.

Finally, I became a consultant surgeon in Birmingham, only to step out of medicine to plant a church near the city centre, and teach the bible each year in Zambia and Uganda.

My midlife crisis was taking up boxing, and I fought in a number of tournaments before retiring to pursuits more appropriate to my age.



Hugh Thomson was born and brought up in Aberdeen, and graduated from medical school there in 1977. He subsequently worked as a doctor in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Cambridge, North Carolina and Hong Kong before being appointed as a consultant surgeon at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham in 1994.

He was one of the founding elders of City Church in Birmingham in 1999, and stepped out of medical practice to work full time for the church in 2002.

He is now retired and living in Birmingham.
Wellness

At the Heart of the Matter
Daniela Svampa Cowie

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 130 pages
Price: £10.99
ISBN: 9781915972835
Available from
Amazon

At the Heart of the Matter
by Daniela Svampa Cowie

In a world filled with noise and distractions, it is easy to lose sight of valuable elements. At the Heart of the Matter offers a collection of concise, impactful insights designed to inspire self-reflection and encourage mindful living. Covering a range of topics – from relationships and resilience to gratitude and personal growth – each pocket of wisdom is stripped of unnecessary fluff, allowing the readers to focus on the core message and carry it into their daily lives.

This book invites you to pause, reflect and reconnect with your true self in order to bring balance and power back into your life. Whether read in one sitting or savoured one page at a time, At the Heart of the Matter will leave you with a renewed sense of direction and bring forth the importance of making your life count.



Daniela is an integrative therapy counsellor and public speaker. Author of ‘A Reason To Love Me’, her raw heart-wrenching autobiography, ‘A Reason To Love Them – Breaking the chains of trauma’, a powerful outlook aimed at taking one’s life back, and ‘Pebbles of Inspiration’ a rich collection of positive quotes. Through her writing Daniela, an avid flag bearer of the message that nothing is insurmountable, aims to bring hope, love and strength to as many people as possible.


publicity

Stockton to Darlington Anniversary

The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened to the public on 27 September 1825, the first passenger train in the world. The anniversary is being celebrated  throughout this year with major exhibitions of both The Rocket and Locomotion 1 in the region

YouCaxton has published a number of books about trains and railways:

East Lancashire Railways by Nigel Jepson, published November 2024 https://www.youcaxton.co.uk/east-lancashire-railways/

Holmwood Station Scrapbook https://www.youcaxton.co.uk/a-holmwood-station-scrapbookjulian-womersley/

 

explore, fiction

Fergus the silent
Michael McCarthy

Fergus The Silent has won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism.
The chair of the judges, Richard Kerridge, leader of the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, said:
“This is a wonderful novel.
It combines a passionate and complex and at times disastrously painful love story, with a story about species loss and extinction, of a particularly ingenious and exciting kind.”

 Fergus The Silent by Michael McCarthy

In 1983 Fergus Pryng, an idealistic young naturalist, was sent to survey Lanna, remotest of all the Scottish islands, which had never been surveyed before, and discovered there something so remarkable that it would have caused a global sensation – had he disclosed it. But Fergus did not tell the world of his discovery. Instead, he devoted his life to keeping it a secret, for 17 years, sacrificing his career, his marriage and his happiness – until the threat of nearby deep-sea oil development forced the astonishing truth out into the open, with ultimately catastrophic results.

What made Fergus keep his secret, and whether or not he was right to do so, are the questions Michael McCarthy makes central to this extraordinary story, because they go to the heart of one of the key issues of our time – the increasingly tragic nature of the human relationship with the Earth. Fergus The Silent highlights this issue in a particularly acute way, in the story of one singular and solitary individual with an unquenchable love for the natural world, himself a tragic figure whose fate is unforgettable.

Published: November 2021
Hardback: 452 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781914424380
Available from Amazon

Michael McCarthy is one of Britain’s leading writers on the environment and the natural world, and has won a string of awards for his work as Environment Correspondent of The Times and Environment Editor of The Independent. As an author he has written Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo (2009) and The Moth Snowstorm – Nature and Joy (2015) both of which were widely praised, with the latter book shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize.
Most recently he has written (with Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren) The Consolation of Nature – Spring in the Time of Coronavirus (2020) which was chosen as one of The Guardian’s Nature Books of The Year. This is his first novel..

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