Blog: The World of Books

The World of Books

When I wrote my first book over a quarter of a century ago it was a full-on physical process. I typed the manuscript on a word processor, took a floppy disc down to the printers in town and paid cash to have the book printed, double spaced, on eighty-gram paper. Three hundred pages, tied up in string, weighed a hefty two kilos. I parcelled it up in a box and sent it by Royal Mail to my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ion Trewin. He sent it back three weeks later with glorious hieroglyphics in the margins indicating where he suggested I make changes. That led to another version of the book, draft two, which went through the same process and was sent back to London a month later only to be returned with the copyeditors tweaks and changes. The next time I sent it back it returned in a huge envelope as galley proofs, those magical A3 sheets that lay out the book, two pages at a time, with trim marks in the four corners to show you how big the book will be. As they are so large, galleys are usually folded in half, not with a crease but simply turned over on themselves so they have a glorious undulating shape when you unfold them. Galleys never cease to enchant me. When the book finally arrived through my letter box in October 2000, I held in my hands a solid object which was the sole product of nearly three years of hard work.

Fast forward almost twenty-six years and the whole process of book production and consumption has changed. The research has moved on too, with online access to so much material, some of it highly unreliable, but the writing process for me has not changed. This time, however, I had a co-author, the Everest historian Jochen Hemmleb. He and I fortunately work in a similar manner. I still type my first draft in the same way and I edit now, as I did in the late 1990s, by hand. But once I have made my changes and sent the manuscript off, by pressing ‘send’ on my email, the steps that once bore the idiosyncratic marks of an individual editor now are marked electronically with tracked changes. It is still a creative process, and I love working with editors, proof-readers and, particularly indexers but I do miss the galleys.

There are new steps in book publishing now which have slipped in organically. The first is the e-book which captures between 20 and 30 per cent of the market depending on whether the book is fiction or non-fiction. The second is the audiobook. This accounts for somewhere between 9 and 12 per cent of sales and is a growing market. Several of my books have been turned into abridged or dramatized audio versions in the past but only two are full-length audiobooks. A recent conversation with a friend, Helen, who had listened to one of my books and found it less than satisfactory, led me to reading The Everest Mystery myself rather than choosing a professional reader. It seemed a bit arrogant to assume I would be able to do it but with a little help from some wonderful friends, I took it on. Over the course of three days in late March, I recorded nine hours and fifty-two minutes of audio with a producer called Dan who took me patiently through the whole process.

Mindful of Helen’s criticism of pronunciation of foreign words and general delivery, I decided to take some advice. First stop was a tutorial with professional voice coach, Elspeth Morrison, who happens to be one of my oldest friends. We were at school together. I recorded an excerpt for her and she critiqued it, which was brilliantly bruising. She also gave me tips on how to warm my voice up, how to look after it so that it didn’t get tired (don’t talk too much), what to drink and eat, and how to sound as natural as possible. That was the most difficult bit, after not talking too much.

The Everest Mystery, it turns out on closer inspection, has names in over a dozen languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Russian and two texts in Latin. Should the Latin be read in the style of the 1920s or in today’s Latin my friendly classics professor from Oxford asked me? That is when I realised I had to take this seriously. With thirty-seven Tibetan names I needed help. Oxford is full of brilliant academics who are generous with their time, and I found Ulrike Roesler, Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies who coached me not only on pronunciation but on the meaning of names. It was fascinating and quite moving to learn about the way Tibetan names arise. Then I had to turn to Chinese, which I found a lot trickier. My nephew is married to a Chinese woman, Lily, who was only too pleased to teach ‘Auntie Beetle’, as I am known, to pronounce names like Luoze, Qu Yinhua and Wang Fuzhou. I suspect she will hear very western versions of the names if she listens to the recording, but I did my best. I surprised the producer by being able to pronounce Ffordd Ddwr and Llandyrnog convincingly. A lifetime of listening to my late father enunciate Welsh names helped greatly in that respect and was a lovely reminder of his phenomenal linguistic abilities.

Once settled in the studio in Soho, I set out the tools of my trade for the day: a flask of peppermint tea, a bottle of warmish water, cough sweets and a cushion to place over my tummy to stop any unwanted gurgling interfering with the recording. The studio was a soundproof box with a chair, an iPad and a microphone. Stage fright wasn’t an option. I just had to get on with it. It all went swimmingly until I ate a chocolate ginger biscuit in a break and developed a horrible dry cough. Dan handed me a banana, forbade chocolate from then on, and told me to slow down. Over the next three days I read my way through the book from beginning to end, my cheat sheet of tricky words by my side. By lunchtime on the third day, I had finished the epilogue. All that remained were the credits for the UK and US editions. I stepped out into the spring sunshine and made my way to Euston station, only to find it closed. I would have shouted with rage, but I had lost my voice.