An Update and a Poll

I am switching gears...

Last two weeks I was completely swamped, racing to get my latest book, The Great Holocene Transformation, ready for publication. First, I had to work through the copyeditor comments and suggested changes. Then, I needed to produce high-quality hi-res graphs, suitable for publication. As the book includes 60 figures, this was a huge job.

I enjoy writing books (which helps to explain why I wrote ten of them now, not counting multi-author volumes that I edited). But once you are done with the writing, you have to deal with the boring stuff, and that’s not fun. But necessary.

In any case, the book has now been turned to the typesetter. Then, it will go to the indexer, back to the typesetter, and finally publication. I am publishing it using my own boutique publishing house, Beresta Books. By the way, do you know the difference between indie publishing and self-publishing? Unlike with self-publishing, I don’t do everything myself, instead hiring the professionals. These include the typesetter and the indexer I mentioned, plus two levels of editors (one working on macro issues, the second on copyediting), a book cover designer, an artist-illustrator, and a web designer. My roles are two: I am the author and the publisher. In fact, I sometimes publish books on which I am not an author, for example, the 2019 book The Seshat History of the Axial Age.

We are about to publish the second installment in this series, The Seshat History of Moralizing Religion later this month (I’ll write more about it soon).

If you are interested in how I got into indie publishing, take a look at these post on my blog archive:

My Venture into the World of Indie Publishing

My Indie Publishing Venture: the Saga Continues

Indie Publishing ≠ Self-Publishing

Now that this big whale of a job (I am referring to The Great Holocene Transformation) is done, I am switching gears to start working on what I promised when launching this Substack (see About). Specifically, my plan is to select a contemporary country and do a structural-demographic analysis on it. In this I will be helped by a member of my research team, who will be supported by the proceeds from this Substack’s subscriptions.

The question to you, readers, is which country should we focus on? Given the paucity of funds, we can only do one now.

Hmm, Substack limits the number of items to 5. OK, feel free to make additional suggestions in the comments.

Next real post will be on deep historical roots of today’s geopolitics.