December 2019

Over the years I have been impressed and humbled whenever I hear about my book being used as a text for an official course or programme. I’ve heard of its use in Austria, Australian and Netherlands, to name a few.

Its use on a course by Tom Overmans at the Utrecht Business School has involved me more closely than most. Tom’s course is designed with various guest speakers, one each week of the ten week programme. Because the course uses my book as one of its set texts he asked me if I would be the guest for one of the sessions.

These sessions were held using Zoom (back before COVID-19 made video conferencing an everyday part of work). It was great fun for me to talk to a group of about 20 students about the book. They had some questions about the content and my thoughts on current public financial management issues; and some questions about how I came to write the book and why is there an owl on the cover?

In December 2019 I made the effort to attend the session in person, on a day trip from Manchester. That happened to be a couple of days after Routledge asked me if I would be interested in a third edition of the book.

I was surprised after so long to be asked about a new edition. I had come to assume it was a book that they did not see as a viable commercial prospect any longer. However, being flattered (or is it vain) I said yes.

When I said yes, I did not think then it would take over three years to get the third edition into the world. It took almost a year to get through the publishers’s commissioning process because it was 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic changed everything.

The pandemic also changed what I put in my proposal. It became obvious that any new edition had to reflect the fact that effective public financial management is essential for governments to be able to deliver the services their citizens expect in a crisis. (This is of course equally true in normal times but it is not so visible.)

July 2021

I finally got a signed contract for the third edition on 2 July 2021. This was for a  manuscript of 130,000 words to be delivered by 31 December 2021. If you’ve read the earlier entries in this diary you will know that it was inevitable that I would fail to meet the contractual deadline…

January 2011

About two weeks into January 2011 I took my manuscript, on a thumb drive and as paper, to my editor at his office in London. I don’t think I had to deliver it personally, but I wanted to because I had never actually met my editor.

The office was not in a fancy part of the west end of London. It was in a grimy part of east London, close to a massive roundabout.

I asked Terry, “What happens next?” I assumed my manuscript would be sent to some academics to be reviewed and quality-assured, like a journal article.

He said, “I’ll send it to production tomorrow.”

I panicked a little. If I’d known it was not going to be reviewed by experts I might have checked it more myself. But it was too late. The snowball was rolling downhill and there was no stopping it.

March 2011

Whilst it was the case that there was no peer review of my manuscript, it did go through a copy edit.

I am impressed at the work of copy editors. They read the material so closely and check everything. They sent back the manuscript to me with a list of queries. Almost all of them related to the references. They spot where the year is different in the text from the reference list and where author names are spelled differently. They also spot citations in the text where there is no reference in the reference list.

I don’t think my manuscript was too bad. There were two or three queries per chapter.

May 2011

After the copy editor is finished the manuscript goes to the typesetters. I guess this is much easier to do, and more accurate, in the digital age than when metal letters were assembled in racks. Authors are sent the proofs as a PDF and have a few weeks to go through every page and mark up any mistakes or other changes.

If you’ve never seen them, there are special typographic marks used to tell printers about changes to be made. As well as correcting spellings there are symbols for when to add or delete spaces, when to emphasise text and so on. The editors marks are set out in ISO5776:2022 (CHF155 if you want to buy it) but you can learn the basics from the internet. I’ve attached the two documents I was given by the typesetter showing what the marks are and how they are used.

The publishers emphasise that they only want errors to be corrected. This is not the time for an author to decide to add a few paragraphs here and remove a paragraph there.

There were not many changes or corrections for me to make but there was quite a bit of work creating the index.

The index could only be done once the book was typeset and page numbers were known. I could have allowed the publisher to do the index but the fee would have exceeded a year’s royalties. It took me a couple of days to do the work. I would think of keywords, search for them in the PDF and take note of the pages that were found.


July 2011

Finally, the big day came. The first edition was published on 11 July. A few days before that a parcel arrived at my home with my free copies of the book. There were three hardback and six paperback. The paperback cover image is attached to this post.

I kept one of each and gave the others as gifts to people who are important to me. Most of those recipients would not, I know, actually read the book. My mum, for example, has no interest in public financial management. But I did not know if there would ever be another book with my name on the spine.

July 2009 to February 2010

Non-fiction publishing is not the same as fiction publishing. In 2005-06 I wrote a novel. It was set in a city council and was called 'Power, Corruption and Lies'.

The way fiction publishing works is that first you write the book and then you send it (or usually just the first three chapters) to agents and publishers and hope they like it enough to ask to see the rest of the manuscript. JK Rowling was rejected 80 times before getting a contract. I gave up after about 30 rejections.

Those rejections came after I wrote 8 drafts of 100,000 words. That’s a lot of effort. Non-fiction publishing, I was relieved to discover, works the other way around: you get a contract before you write the manuscript. This is much more time-efficient.

The way to get a contract is to send a book proposal to the publisher. A book proposal is a lot like a business case. In it you have to explain the core subject matter and approach and back it up with a description of the audience for the book (the market), analysis of similar books (the competition) and your social and professional networks (the sales strategy). Appending a draft chapter to prove you can write clearly can help, too.

In 2009 I wrote a proposal for a book that would explain public sector financial management to non-accountants. I had in mind something like the business books you see in airport booksellers. It was called ‘Ten Rules for Managing Public Money’.

I sent the proposal to 3 academic publishers. One said no thanks. The second said it was a good idea but they did not know how they would sell it. And Routledge said they were looking for a finance book to fit into their Masters in Public Management series. (This is a much better feeling that getting 30 rejection letters!)

The process from this initial acceptance to getting a contract is somewhat bureaucratic. My first editor, Terry, had to take the proposal to a committee for approval to issue a contract and he could not do that until he had verified the idea. This required sending my proposal to some academics (anonymous to me) for their comments and advice on the idea.

I was sent the comments from those academics and in December 2009 had to produce a revised version of my proposal. It was this version that Terry took to the committee and, in February 2010, I was issued a standard book contract. This required me to deliver a manuscript of up to 125,000 words for a book called ‘Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector’ by 31 July 2010.

For this new instalment of Professional Diaries I have the pleasure to welcome Gary Bandy.

‘Helping accountants to write better’ is the statement on his Linked’In page. Not a small feat for us consultants in the PFM realm, struggling to keep a fine balance between being analytical and being clear in our assignments.

Gary is a chartered public finance accountant and has worked as a freelance consultant in public financial management for public sector and voluntary organisations since 2005. As well as advising public organisations on any aspect of their financial management he teaches at university level and he writes books, courses and articles (find out more at https://wordswithfigures.com/ and https://garybandy.co.uk/ ).

His diary, among other topics, will focus on the process that led him to publish the third edition of his book ‘Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector’.

Dear Gary,
The floor is yours. We, PFMBoarders, will follow your posts with great interest in the coming weeks.

[A reminder to the readers: diaries are not meant for a conversation, we have the fire-side chat for that in the PFM Board. Yet any registered PFM Boarder is free to make a comment on any of Gary’s posts below.]

I suppose this is a good example of Cost Benefit application, but it raises the question of the legitimacy of a monarchy irrespective of the CBA.  Should a monarchy exist anywhere in the world today even if it is just a constitutional one as in this case?