We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve settled on a cover design for Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement!
As well as our “blurb” text for the back cover:
As Foreign Secretary in Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet in 1937, Eden didn’t believe in appeasing the German and Italian dictatorships or the militaristic Japanese regime. Instead, he wanted to confront their aggression head on. Faced with growing Japanese assertiveness, including the launching of an undeclared war on China in July 1937, Eden appealed to the US for help. He believed sending an Anglo-American naval force to the Western Pacific would demonstrate that the democracies were not spineless, but were prepared to stand up for what they believed in. Was this a viable alternative to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, now notorious for its failure in the face of fascism?
Historian Malcolm Murfett tells the story, using a wide range of primary sources from the UK and US archives, of Eden’s push to persuade Roosevelt’s administration to be more assertive in the Pacific. He reveals the diplomatic dance both sides engaged in, each unsure of the other’s reliability, of their own ability to commit, and tied up in their own internal struggles for policy dominance. We get a real insight into how two once-and-future allies managed each other’s expectations, as well as the wider strategic parameters within which they were operating.
With eerie echoes of our own times, Murfett explores the challenges involved in both international diplomacy, and foreign and security policy. How standing up for principles and values can become compromised by the requirements of Realpolitik, and logistical constraints.
That looks and sounds amazing, when can I buy it?
There will still be a few weeks to wait, I’m afraid. A few things remain to be completed.
First, the index — which I talked a bit about last week — is partially complete. Malcolm is dealing with some of the more complicated entries at the moment. The index for this kind of book follows something like the 80:20 rule, in that 20% of the indexed items have about 80% of the occurrences in the text. Anthony Eden, in particular, appears on significantly more pages than not, so Malcolm is doing some disentangling of what we might call the “power entries” before we go ahead and typeset the index.
Second, while we’ve already had readers go through the manuscript to help us review it pre-publication we’ve also sent it to some readers who we hope will enjoy it enough to provide us with their endorsements. If they do, we’d like to include some of their thoughts as quotes in the preliminary pages of the book. We’re giving them a little longer to get back to us.
Third, once these aspects are dealt with, we’ll then need to formally finalise the files for publication within our chosen publication platform. If our test run last year is anything to go by, there will be some gremlins to deal with at this stage, and once those are out of the way there will be a wait of a week or two before we’re able to order books. Finally, we’ll want to eyeball these physical copies before the book is available for public orders.
None of these things should take very long, of course, and the index is being prepared at the same time as we await the readers’ quotes, but all in all it’s likely to soak up all of April, and perhaps a little of May too.
Publishing in Realtime
While I have you here, I wanted to say a little bit about why we’re telling you all of this. My sense has long been that the production process can feel like a bit of a black box, even to the authors going through it, and indeed to their commissioning editors. Also, one of the questions I’m most commonly asked is something along the lines of “how long does the production process take?”.
At Routledge I would always have given an estimate of 5-6 months (actually, it used to be longer, but they have gotten notably faster over the years) for most books. For Tithebarn, we knew we could do it faster than that, but we’ve been wary of giving an equivalently concrete typical range. Partly because we haven’t yet published in sufficient volume for an “average” to be very reliable, but mainly because the process is so fast that even a small obstacle, hiccup, technical challenge or a busy weekend can have a noticeable impact on a timeline measured in weeks.
As such, I thought it might be helpful to be very transparent about how this manuscript is moving through the process of production with us. Sometimes it can be useful to see not just a hypothetical, but a real time case study in motion. For anyone who’s keeping count, it’s been two weeks since I first posted an update about this, and that was within a week of getting the go-ahead from Malcolm to begin production work.
Will all manuscripts take much the same amount of time as this one? Not necessarily. Malcolm is a seasoned writer whose work requires relatively light editing, the manuscript is around 57,000 words — ie not especially long — and he is very quick to respond. On the other hand, I’m getting to know the features, constraints and work-arounds for the publishing software and platform we’re using better as we proceed, so some of the fiddlier elements should get smoothed out.
At the very least, I think these updates should give you a sense of how we work, what we do, and what sort of timescales we work to. I hope they also give you a sense of our transparency and overall ethos. I’m very aware that when I state what needs to be done and how long it should take us, that I’ll be here again a week later telling you whether it has happened and if not, why not. I’ve actually found this quite helpful and while I probably won’t keep doing it for every project going forward — certainly not in as much detail — it’s definitely helped me to keep things in order as we proceed.
More news will naturally follow in due course, and once we’ve got things setup we’ll be very keen to tell you how you can buy the book. In the meantime, if getting caught up in the excitement of the process has convinced you to commit to your own book project, please do get in touch on proposals@tbarnpress.com.
