I promised something big this week and I’m sure this will not disappoint. Malcolm and I sat down last week for about half an hour over Zoom to discuss Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement. It’s our first foray into attempting to produce video content to promote our books, and while I’ve been left with no desire to make a full pivot from books to video, I am very pleased with the result.
As well as discussing the subject and themes of the book itself, we talked about the lessons we can learn from this historical episode, the foreshadowing of Anthony Eden’s later successes and ultimate failure, and how to think about (and write about) history. I learned a little something myself about Malcolm’s own connections to Anthony Eden, which I’ll leave you to hear about for yourselves.
So without further ado, here is the interview:
I’ve also edited the interview into a series of shorter — mostly under four minutes — vertically-oriented clips if you’d like to pick the questions that interest you the most. You can find them on both our Youtube and Instagram accounts.
Will you be doing this for all your books?
We’ll be keen to do something like this for any author who is prepared to give it a go, yes. Aside from some very frustrating technical issues — which we’ve now ironed out and have good contingency plans for in future — this was a pretty straight-forward process. Not everyone will feel comfortable on video (you might notice I’m a bit fidgety and I’ve had to cut several of my questions down quite aggressively to get to the point), but with the option to edit out anything that doesn’t work well, and any mistakes, it’s certainly something I’ll be encouraging authors to give a try. Will it help us sell many more books? Who knows! But I think it really helps both actual and prospective readers to get a sense for the people behind a book, and to get an author’s broader perspective on it. I’ve spent my career talking to authors about books they have written, are writing, or want to write and I’ve always found it fascinating to have an insight into how and why authors write, as well as to speculate on the wider connotations and lessons of a book that don’t really fit within the confines of the book itself. For example, in our interview, Malcolm and I dwell briefly on the parallels between Eden’s plan to address the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), and the IJN’s own subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s a fascinating and stimulating topic to discuss, but one that would be rather too tangential to cover in the book.
Technically the bar to producing this kind of video is remarkably low. It requires no more equipment than is necessary for a camera-on Zoom call, and the editing process took roughly one working day on my end, in spite of me never having done anything like this before. I would expect the quality of what we can do in this realm will only improve as we take on the lessons of experience.
The advantages of flexible publishing
I won’t belabour the point, because it’s generally boring reading people telling you why the way their business does things is so great, but I do see this as a concrete example of a point I’ve made in the past about how we offer our authors a flexible and personalised approach to publishing. Recording video interviews will not be for all of our authors, and we don’t have the expertise or resources to produce something ultra-slick and well-edited, but this is an example of where we can work quickly and flexibly to try something new. We hope it will help us to sell books, and we also believe it will help our authors make an impact with their readers. We’re also open to other suggestions for things we can try with any of our authors. We don’t have to go through a long procurement process, or get buy-in from multiple departments, we can just decide something is worth a go and give it a shot.
If this has inspired you to pick up a copy of Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement we’ve kept up a list of all the sites that we know can supply it here and if you’re in the USA or UK (sorry to everyone else, it’s our distributor’s constraint, not ours) the best place to buy a paperback copy is bit.ly/EdenMurfett where you can get a 20% discount.
Equally, if this has inspired you to submit your own book project for our consideration, please do get in touch at proposals@tbarnpress.com.
