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A month ago my first book was published and released into the world and I wanted to reflect on the past few weeks. The Residents of Romiley Road is self-published, which means that as well as writing every word inside the book (based on months of extensive research that was all completed by me), I formatted it, edited it, designed the front cover, and submitted it to Amazon and IngramSpark to be produced. It also means that I am solely responsible to getting word out about th

Website News I had hoped that by now I would have uploaded information about all 83 of the families. Unfortunately, due to ill health (an ever present companion of the entire process!) the progress has become somewhat glacial, with only 56 families completed. I am still adding a few each week though, including the Moss Family at Household 52 James Potter Moss worked as a mechanic at Oakwood Cotton Mill and the family spent some time living in the cottages built for the worker

It feels like forever since I uploaded the book onto the publishing websites but the day has finally come and the book is available to buy in paperback and ebook. The journey has been a bumpy one. The first stages of researching and discovering felt like speeding down a smooth hill. Every new find pushed me on to dig deeper and the immersion into Victorian Cheshire was fascinating. I hadn't written anything aside from emails since university so beginning to turn those finding

Pre-order the paperback here Pre-order the ebook here or here With the release of "The Residents of Romiley Road" coming up in just over a fortnight's time, I've been busy trying to get the word out. I have contacted the local library and Serenity Booksellers to see if they would be interested in stocking it. I am hoping that a few people might request the book so they'll be more inclined to buy a copy or two! But the most lovely interaction I have had came from the Friends o

When I first started this project I did a little market research and discovered that the last book published about Romiley history (Frank Beard's Romiley Pictures of the Past) was in 2001. 25 years ago. So would you believe that another local resident has written and published a book about Romiley local history?! It will be published a few weeks after mine and appears to be based around photographs instead of the 90,000 words of fanatical research about one section of one str

The past week has been intense as I received the proof copy of the book and set about reading it from cover to cover (for what feels like the 20th time at this point) with a notebook beside me to jot down anything that was obviously incorrect or that perhaps wasn't quite right. Here are some of the errors I found: "The continued..." (should have been They") "We are once again at the Duke of York.." (I had shuffled the chapters...this was our first visit) "working class" (shou

This week I completed the third edit of the book "Residents of Romiley Road" and I began to think about formatting it. It was at this point that I realised that I wished I had done this before I began. Different sections of each chapter need to be formatted in different ways and I found that my double indents looked ridiculously large in paperback. So I have been laboriously checking every section of every chapter to ensure that everything looks the correct size and is justif

I have just published the page for Household 20 - The Renshaw Family, which means I am 24% of the way through the 83 households. I am trying to spend equal amounts of time on the website and working on the book, along with making TikTok videos for each of the households (I'm up to household 6 there), but the heat is not helping! It looks like another 30 degree day today (86 in Fahrenheit) and very sunny. For anyone who knows me from TikTok, you'll know that I have severe bron

I have just completed writing the page for Household 9, John and Ellen Robinson. I remember thinking that they would make the final cut and have a chapter of their own in the book, but as it happened they didn't quite fit. As a result, I haven't really looked at their stories for such a long time and it has been interesting rediscovering them. I had completely forgotten about the workplace accident that killed Hiram Robinson (John and Ellen's son) at 40 years of age and which

I am currently making my way back through all 30+ chapters of "The Residents of Romiley Road" to make little tweaks, take out anything that doesn't work, and of course go down some very late in the day rabbit holes just to be 100% sure that I haven't missed any vital information. The first three chapters (not including the Intro) are the three longest chapters, with the most interesting of the residents (in my opinion). 13,594 words in total. I did find a mistake in the Ridgw

Today I am officially beginning the third edit of The Residents of Romiley Road. It will hopefully be significantly quicker than the first two edits but I will be checking very carefully for 0s instead of os after finding a number of these shocking mistakes on the 2nd pass. I'm generally very good at spotting mistakes in books, to the extent that my immersion into a book can be ruined by spelling and grammatical mistakes. I also made the decision to cut a whole chapter. It wa

Of course the sensible thing to do would be to complete the Romiley Road book and get it published, or perhaps make some more #romileyroad content for TikTok. I find sensible is often outweighed by interesting or fun. And doing something new is generally more enjoyable than completing something old. So making a website has been the focus this week. I had always planned to make a website for the project but had no idea how to do it. I'm very much still learning. I'm flabbergas