Authors

concise.press is looking for history enthusiasts, teachers, and academics wanting to create concise versions of public domain historical texts for publication.

We are starting out on this journey with a concise version of Herodotus - The Histories and selected the George Rawlinson transaction as the base for our version. Our next publications are likely to be Suetonius - The Twelve Caesars and Arrian - Alexander the Great.

There may be a historical text that is a little too long for popular consumption that you have been encouraging others to read - so why not contact us and we can help you create a concise version for publication.

The text must be in the public domain so 75 years must have elapsed since the death of the author or translator (it may be less for some other countries). If you are very close to this date - remember that the start date of the public domain is the beginning of the year following the 75th anniversary of the author or translators death. Our George Rawlinson translation of Herodotus was made in 1858 and he died in 1902 so we know that this version is in the public domain from 1 January 1978 despite the book still being in print in a nice hardback edition from Everyman.

We look to help you select and create the concise version and encourage you to create a simple text-only document for us to review as you go along. We hope to build a community of history enthusiasts, teachers, and academics to add some synergy to your creation efforts. Once the version is complete we will pay for proof-reading, typesetting and publication of the book as a paperback and hardback. The publication is available on amazon and from bookshops and education distributors.

We encourage you to supplement the book with blogs, videos, podcasts and other social media and provide a platform for you to do so easily. After the launch you will need to encourage sales and again we hope that our network of like-minded history enthusiasts and professionals will help the success of the publication.

We are a publishing house and so will have the copyright of the book but we want to build a community with the higher aim of encouraging people to read original historical texts and translations. We recognise that some of these publications will not sell enough copies to make a profit and others will. As an estimate - the profit for each sale will be around £1.00  and the costs of proof-reading and preparing the book for publication will be around £500. So the profits from the first 500 sales will just cover costs. Our publishing deal with you will share the profits depending on how successful the publication becomes. 

Please subscribe and contact us for more details and to discuss your potential contribution.