Deborah Cooke: Author

While I’ve been travelling – both virtually and in real life – I’ve been thinking. This is always a scary proposition, but those of you who understand how adamantly I refuse to think technically will be truly afraid when you find out what I’ve been thinking about.

I’ve been thinking about archives, specifically about archived originals of my books.

First, let’s review. Once upon a time, authors pounded out their manuscripts on typewriters. There was one copy of the ms – unless the author typed it out again – which made its way to the publisher, was copied, red-lined, marked up, and tossed back to the author at some later point in time. The typesetter at the publishing house typed in the entire book one more time, with all the nifty typesetting codes to make it pretty. The original – much battered – ms was returned to the author once the book had gone to page proofs or even to print, and this poor battered ms is still known as Foul Matter. (I kid you not.) Then the book had a shiny new life in printed form.

Of course, even though I sold my first book around about the time that dinosaurs walked the earth (1992) I wrote my first book on a computer, then printed out a copy of the word processing files to send the book to the publisher. At that point in time, some unfortunate typesetter still had to type the whole thing in again, but by the late 90’s, publishers were requesting electronic delivery. Now, electronic delivery is the way of things (and presumably there are typesetters out of jobs.)

So, my original delivered manuscript existed in a bunch of forms:

1/ as a digital file. (Although back in the dark ages, computer software and hardware couldn’t handle having the entire book in one great whonking file – generally, each chapter had its own file.)

2/ as the print-out version from my computer

3/ as the copy/line edit, which was a photocopy of my print-out that had subsequently been marked up and red-lined

4/ as page proofs, which were output from the typesetting department to show the final pages of the book

5/ as the book itself. For me, these were mostly mass market editions.

and finally

6/ as the foul matter, which landed on my doorstep with a sad thump sometime around the time the book was printed.

Now, if you kept all of these copies for as many books as I’ve published, you’d need separate real estate for warehousing. I figured that I had lots of copies and would do the easy modern thing – I kept disks with the digital files on them, and several “archive” copies of the finished book.

Sounds good, right?

How about if I tell you that some of those disks are 5.25″ floppies? Or even 3.25″ floppies? Or recorded in applications that are no longer supported, created by companies that no longer exist? One of the things that Microsoft does really well is allow the carry-forward between versions and applications – it is an archivist’s dream in that way. I, however, have always been a dedicated Mac girl. And I realized recently that many of my precious back-ups are useless as anything other than Frisbees.

Uh huh.

This wouldn’t be an issue if the books were being perennially published by the house that had bought them in the first place. For much of my backlist, this is the case – the rights haven’t reverted and I doubt that they will revert to me. But as some rights do revert, and I’m faced with the opportunity to place them again – to place them again in a market that routinely passes digital versions around and NOT paper versions – I had to give my storage scheme a think.

The archives were in bad shape, so I made a new plan. I got lucky and found a cache of old digital files that can be converted to current applications and versions with a little work, and I’ve loaded up on paper to print them out as well. So, I’ll have a digital version in Word on cd and a paper version in plain old English for the vast majority of my books. Fortunately, I’ve thought of this in time and have only two books that I may need to type in all over again. But as media change, and software may not support previous versions, this kind of back-up is something all writers need to think about.

And that’s just the archived stuff. What about work in progress? I have a different system for that. Do you?

How do you back up your work, while you’re writing it and once it’s done?