If you are submitting two different manuscripts, of course you get two sets of rejections. Todays’ was for the POW non-fiction book. A very kind email from an agent whose submissions were closed anyway and who still read the first 50 pages. A little troubling though that there was praise for the idea of varying my ‘novel’ by using letters. This is a history book that I am editing, full of original correspondence from 1941-1945.

The remaining Far Eastern POWs are in their 90s and it is now, as these men reach the end of their lives, that their children and grandchildren want to understand what they lived through. These documents need to be made available, so I think self-publishing has to be the route. The materials – letters from many sources, memoirs, linking passages and illustrations would have been better presented and pruned with professional advice, but I can’t spend the next ten years tinkering and waiting for rejections.

I have self-published once before, but the world has changed (e-books etc). So I have downloaded a free up-to-date guide. Just have to pick up the bag and get marching.