This Way To Posterity

One advantage of self-publishing in the UK, if you comply with the law, is that your book will be preserved for posterity in six major libraries. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, issuing a book to the public (whether it has an ISBN or not) means you must provide a copy to the British Library and if requested to the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales and the Library of Trinity College Dublin. And those extra copies will be requested in my experience. If you give your book an ISBN and it's listed on the Neilsen database, an email from the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries will surface in your inbox. You send your five copies to the Agency and it distributes them to the above libraries.

I draw attention to this because none of the articles I've read about self-publishing mention that this is going to happen. That as well as writing the book, editing it, grappling with the cover design, publishing it, marketing it and so on, you're going to have to donate these six copies to the state. And if you're using print-on-demand, that means buying the copies yourself from Amazon, Lulu or whoever produced them for you and posting them to the Agency. I sent a copy of my book The Last Days of Dad to the British Library a few days after publication and was half-hoping to be overlooked by the Agency. Alas, the email landed. But it could be said that we get off lightly in the UK. Some countries demand more, the worst case being Poland where a publisher has to provide 18 copies to various important sounding libraries.

Nevertheless it is surely an advantage to have libraries which not only preserve copies of our books, but record their existence in catalogues which can be accessed by anyone online. And which will go on doing so for centuries to come in some form (he said optimistically). Also, imagine if you can, an author whose book, despite its obvious brilliance to anyone who cares to read it, has sold only thirty copies. Hard to believe, I know. The 'posterity libraries' keep open the chance that one day that author's work will be 'discovered', its merits recognised and a wider audience reached beyond the air-conditioned vaults. Wishful thinking? Probably. But that we have national libraries which demand to keep our books, which go out of their way to get hold of them, is a recognition in itself that what writers produce is valuable. Incidentally, I used to think that 'posterity' meant 'forever' but it doesn't. It means 'for all future generations of people' which is enough for me.

The Last Days of Dad has only existed for two years, but can already be found in the catalogues of all the libraries I've mentioned above. When I saw the entry in the catalogue of Trinity College, there was a typo in my name which would have prevented anyone searching under Author from finding the book. I emailed the Library one evening to ask if they could possibly amend this error, hardly expecting it to happen overnight. I was astonished to received a reply the next morning apologising for the error and confirming that it had been corrected. 

I will come clean now and admit that I used to work for the British Library which might suggest a certain bias, but I was impressed to be treated with such respect. Don't they know I'm just a self-published author? Don't they know that the 'publisher' Tombuktu Books exists in name only? The point is - they don't discriminate. Our national libraries by virtue of the legislation that underpins them are wonderfully democratic. It doesn't matter what class you are, what ethnic background, what gender, what your sales figure are - if you issue a book to the public, they want it. Long may their 'requests' continue. But please - no more than six copies.