Before we start

A short prologue to the Handheld Diaries

Dec 19, 2024

Before we start

The Handheld Diaries is a highly compressed account of the seven years when I was the driving force behind Handheld Press. It’s based on emails, my reading diary, the Handheld newsletters which we sent out each month to subscribers, and (most importantly) my contemporaneous work logs.

I haven’t included everything from the work logs because that would be very boring, and often irrelevant, as my logs were both a record of what I did and notes of what I had to not forget to do and what I had asked other people to do. To show you how dull a raw log entry would be, here’s the full entry for 8 August 2018:

Amazon asked for Petersen contract: scanned and sent.
Mike set up the three pages: Kingdoms (needs ebook links), So Lucky (needs ebook links)
Negotiating with David K, Toby, Melanie & Monica about Oxford visit date.
CBS sent bill, set it up to pay on 31 Aug.
Sarah L to send final Intro for What Not by end August.
Sent Keldberg ebook to Neil for RoC prize.
The Danes sent me invoice for second part of Keldberg advance, asked D to set it up with bank.
Tablet sent me invoice for wrong amount.
Chased Devon on SL proofs. To send Nadja the corrections on Thursday
Asked Midas PR for an entry form for Wellcome, to chase next week.
Rang Berlin, to ring on Friday morning
Conor sent revised text about the Calamity, to read
Scanned Ch 1 Zelda, Harriet to proof the OCR text

If you can get past the shorthand and abbreviations you can see that on that day I was working simultaneously on six books at different stages in production, trying to negotiate for a seventh and shoving forward the work on several marketing and accounting matters. The dull stuff clogs up the trails of books that the reader will have been following from earlier entries.

At that descriptive level that day looks really dull, but at the same time my publishing life was tremendously exciting, because of the books. I believed and still believe in the books I chose to publish, because they are fabulous stories that should be read and loved again by thousands of people. The books were the reason that I set up Handheld in the first place. I hope that the Diaries give a sense of why I did this for seven years, and what it was like setting up a publishing house from nothing but savings and decades of reading and thinking about old books.

I’ve tried to trace the progress through production of each book that we published, from the beginning to publication, and often its life beyond that. I’ve included the ups and downs and (some of) our mistakes, and the spin-off projects that seemed essential, imperative or just a good idea at the time. I haven’t included the long discussions about books that we ended up not publishing after all, because the other people in those conversations would probably prefer me not to. I’ve occasionally changed a name to prevent their embarrassment, and I have avoided using surnames as much as possible, to be reasonably opaque about identities. I decided against including anything from the Handheld social media accounts, because that would be too much material reproduced out of context. However, we were very active on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and (less so on) Tiktok, and I had a fine old time posting spontaneously more or less on topic. We had a lot of followers: maybe you were one of them.

I want to emphasise here how much Handheld relied on the work of Nadja Guggi, now Robinson, of Messrs Dash + Dare who was with me from the beginning as Handheld’s designer, and Judith Wise, who joined me early on as a freelance publishing assistant and marketing hand. Sharon Oldham and Mike Butcher from Siserone were my constant reliable support from very early on in all things IT, web and data. Much later I had the happy experience of working with Emer O’Hanlon and then Amy Howard, who ran our Instagram and Tiktok accounts, one after the other, and helped Judith and me with marketing. Above all I relied on my husband David Marsh, who became Handheld’s financial director, book-keeper, logic patrol, emotional support bucket and devil’s advocate. Handheld could never have existed without him.

Before we start

A short prologue to the Handheld Diaries

Before we start

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