So this is what it’s like

We’ve slipped out. We’re slipping out, emailing author friends, showing them the site, asking them to join. For 24 shining hours I felt that I was now ready to die with joy. Then the videos started playing up again, perfection” so hard to maintain, but MPS fixed them in thee days. (we’d held up the launch for a month waiting for the videos to play – but now they realised we were serious, and sprang and fixed them up in record time).

One of the people I emailed was The Copyright Hub in London. I’d heard Dominic Young at a conference talking about the new technology he’d been developing with his group for years, putting identifiers on creative works so that their internet use could be monitored. I loved it one of their ultimate aims is to make piracy useable to artists- if a pirate  uses a quote or a paragraph nor a book, the author gets acknowledged. Copyright has always been the Achilles Heel of the internet. I had  longed since the conference for his group to help us and put their identifiers on our books- but until we had a working site, I felt shy talking to him. But now with the site working at last,  I sent him  a link and Skyped him two mornings ago. He said he’d been waiting for a group such as ours that’s taking the internet in a new direction, the direction it next needs to go in.He thought with us that  it’s important that established creators have their own site, so they can manage themselves the creation and  use of their works.

Authors seem surprised and delighted. It’s one thing telling people why you’re trying to do- it seems totally another, having done it.

We haven’t got dozens of new books yet but it’s just past Christmas and New Year, and everyone’s at the beach! And not everyone has a manuscript in their bottom drawer ready to go, though plenty of people must have books out of print they’re longing to revitalise. But I mustn’t be impatient. Surely after all this time, i have learned how to wait.

So the launch will be at the end of next month, and by then we hope to be able to offer authors not only all that we planned and dreamed of, but the best copyright protection as well. Although it’s taken us four hard years, perhaps the timing of this copyright protection shows that  our timing, despite all its exasperations and frustrations, was meant to be.

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