It has taken me a little while (four years) to work on a pet-project of mine. It is a play called "Zenobia: Queen of the East" and I have nearly finished writing it. Recently I got in touch with an illustrator who has drawn up a contract, and we are going into business together: 50/50 on all profits. I have decided to unilaterally bypass the publishers completely, and fund the project myself. This is because other authors I have heard of have received very little in the way of returns for getting books into print, mainly because Amazon do not pay royalties, much as Spotify does not. Alas, there will be no digital copies published anywhere on the internet (so nobody can simply print out the work and have it bound themselves). As a result, each copy will be unique. They will be illuminated manuscripts (I will have to write out every single book individually of course, with only the flowers, ivy and vines, letterheads and cherubs being mass produced). Each of the sentences will be written out (in my beautiful handwriting) in a variety of dark colours, greens, violets, dark blue, etc. Each manuscript will have a starting bidding price of around a thousand pounds, and the illustrator has agreed to go halves on all the costs for binding the works. I have found a local book binder and even have a book on how to bind books myself, so as to reduce costs. I shall watch her very carefully as she binds the fist copy, and learn how to do it myself. The first book is actually my translation of Tacitus' Agricola, and the second will be Zenobia. After that I am looking at translating Virgil's Aeneid and also (my favourite) Ovid's Metamorphoses. I will lift myself out of poverty, through hard work and self-reliance.
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