Ros Barber
Who are you?
Ros Barber: scholar, novelist and poet, holder of the first UK PhD to focus exclusively on the Shakespeare authorship question. Debut novel The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre 2012, St Martin’s Press 2013) was winner (in manuscript form) of the Hoffman Prize 2011, long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) 2013, and winner of the both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award 2013. Director of Research for the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, a Visiting Research Fellow in English at the University of Sussex and part-time Lecturer in the English & Comparative Literature Department of Goldsmiths, University of London.
Can you describe your Leanpub books? Are they in-progress or complete? What types of books are they?
I have one, Shakespeare: The Evidence, just published last week and a very long way from complete. (I estimate 8% - that might be generous). It’s the first book to look at the Shakespeare authorship question from both sides, corralling all the evidence, arguments and counterarguments of those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him - and those who don’t. There is a huge amount of evidence and argument to pull together here - but reader involvement is going to make it easier to achieve a fully comprehensive, updatable resource.
What do you think about Leanpub?
Leanpub is incredibly author-friendly and a great way of building an audience for your book and getting them involved. It’s especially helpful where you have a project, like mine, that will benefit from - even rely upon - reader input.
Why do you use Leanpub?
A friend suggested it would be perfect for what I had planned - a comprehensive, hyperlinked and updatable e-book that corrals a vast amount of knowledge into a concise, well-defined format. I’m particularly happy about the ability to release the book in instalments: not only can I make much of it available long before it is finished (allowing me to capitalise on a recent surge of interest in the authorship question) but I can make it a much better book by getting feedback as I go along.
How did you discover Leanpub?
All down to that friend and a simple cup of coffee. Sometimes a cup of coffee is priceless.
What’s your favorite Leanpub feature?
The ability to ‘publish early, publish often’ has to be the tops. It meets my needs both as a perfectionist and as someone who is incredibly impatient.
How have you reached out to potential and existing readers of your books?
Social media, mostly. I enjoyed making a Youtube trailer for it - it’s had over 400 views in less than two weeks. Twitter might prove useful in the long term, so long as I’m gentle. But I’ve also used my real life contacts, written a press release, had a summary placed in a conference programme, e-mailed my mailing list, done interviews with bloggers in my field of interest.
What are your thoughts on the Lean Publishing approach? What types of books, and what types of authors, do you think it is good for?
Clearly it began with coders - and it was a coder who recommended it to me - but it can go to many places. It seems an excellent platform for non-fiction projects generally. Any project that will benefit from the expertise of its readers is likely to do well here.
How long was your first Leanpub book when you first clicked the publish button? Would you publish earlier or later next time?
22,000 words. That seemed a substantial enough chunk to ask for money and to give the reader a good idea of what they will be getting. I think it was the right time; I had to feel ready, and also have the time available to promote it.
How can we improve Leanpub?
Keep listening to your authors and being as responsive as you currently are.
And for those of use who want to quote poetry, it would be great to have a version of the A> tab that honoured line-breaks. Currently I have to make all my quotes double-spaced.