Writing a book is hugely enjoyable, but a with anything worthwhile is also an immense challenge. I’m very close to the end of work on what’s turned into a labour of love and the final stages require both patience and attention to detail. Our team of archaeological volunteers has worked on the island of Alderney every summer from 2008, barring 2020 during the pandemic – and almost losing 2021 too. For much of that time we were investigating the site known as the Nunnery, long suspected of starting life 1700 years ago as a Roman fort. I wrote a short annual report on our discoveries as we never knew whether we’d be back, and writing up as you go along is the wisest course. I’ve come across too many archaeologists who died before writing up their work, leaving long-suffering assistants the task of making sense of heaps of notes and diagrams.
Ultimately it became clear we had enough evidence to bring everything together into a single monograph. I’d begun drafting chapters many years ago but when I retired from my museum post in 2019 it was clear the time had come to write up what we’d done. Two more seasons were needed in 2021 and 2022 as there were key questions to answer in part of the site we’d not previously been able to dig. We were approached tentatively by a publisher around the time we started planning the book seriously.
By 2025 we had a working 65,000 word manuscript, about half the 100 illustrations we needed and interest from BAR Publications, the world’ leading archaeological publisher. We ticked the illustrations off one by one – re-taking this shot from this angle at this time of day to improve on photographs where the lighting or resolution wasn’t good enough. Team members with access to CAD software worked up my pencil diagrams, others produced ‘artist’s impressions’, reconstructions and drone shots.
Draft 9 of the manuscript did the rounds of selected team members as ‘alpha readers’, leading to more editing and cleaning up. This was accompanied by a paste-up of the diagrams, some of which were still at sketch level. Most publishers require diagrams and captions to be separate from the main manuscript, only combined with the text at page layout stage.
The next stage, a little nail-biting, was to send the next draft to the publisher. In turn they passed it to selected experts for Peer Review, essentially to judge whether the book made sense, was original research and didn’t contain major holes in its evidence. It was a relief to receive a positive review with only a couple of nudges towards sections that would benefit from more work; it grew by 5,000 words. We already had a fairly strong steer on such things as length, format, use of appendices etc. The book was written in accordance with the publisher’s style sheet so was in good shape.
With all the illustrations now ready I have to tweak them into the exact format and also complete a register of all copyright permissions received. One novel clause in the contract is that there must be no generative AI employed for either text or illustrations – the content must all be genuine, original or fully credited. Draft 12 of the manuscript is off to be edited by archaeologist Dr Phil de Jersey. Once his notes come back, I’ll need to look at the book once more before it goes to a professional copy-editor. Further down the line comes the page proofs, but step by step we advance towards publication.
Coming up this summer there will be pre-launch offers, advance publicity, then a string of launch events and lectures. If all goes well A Late Roman Fort on Alderney, Channel Islands, will be published this autumn.
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More thoughts on the technical processes behind writing a non-fiction book are on the Writing Tips page.
Drone shot by Alan Perks, diagram by Jon Langlois.
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