What publishing my Grandad's war diaries taught me about writing, editing and publishing a book.

My grandfather, John Teague started to write a diary when he was 16. When transferring his paper diaries on to the computer after retirement he wrote, ‘My habit of keeping a detailed diary appears to have started in June 1938, when I was 16.’ He kept a diary until well into his 70’s. Of great interest to us as a family were the diaries that spanned the second world war years.

He stored the diaries until he was in his 80s, then carefully typed them up and threw them away!! For his 90^th birthday the family decided to get nine copies created and printed, one for each member of the family. He was very pleased with the result but unwilling to have the book printed because of ‘libellous remarks’ he had made about various officers in the RAF, although we assured him that they would all have died by then!

After his death in 2022, at the ripe old age of 100, we discovered a box of wartime letters from his parents that he had kept hold of all his life. We decided that we would collate the diaries and the letters and publish them, alongside some photographs. My aunt, his daughter, started to do the painstaking work of transcribing the letters and collating the book, and I later took on the task of editing the copy into something printable. Having these boxes of letters, the computer files and photo albums were great historical resources, but they needed collating and the story we were telling needed to be planned.

When I first took the manuscript for review, I was surprised at just how much work remained! Despite hours of transcribing and typing up by my aunt, there were still hundreds of inconsistencies within the manuscript. Dates appeared in different formats, military terms were sometimes written differently, capitalisation varied from chapter to chapter, and place names were not always presented consistently. On their own these were, at first glance, minor issues but adding them up, they created a manuscript that felt untidy and required significant additional editing before it was ready for publication.

I knew I needed the help of an editor and was grateful for the help, but I quickly realised that editors can only work with the information they have in front of them. Some passages that were intentionally written in a particular way were corrected because they appeared to be errors. In hindsight I needed to have given clearer directions or prepared the manuscript better before handing it over.

The London phrasing, the historical expressions, the wartime terminology were sometimes "improved" to make them read more smoothly, rather than leave them as originally written. The result was that I then had to spend time reversing some of those changes to restore my grandad’s original voice.

The experience taught me that there is much that can and should be done before sending your manuscript to an editor. I recently started to test using AI to ‘proofread’ my latest historical WW1 book. It is vital that I preserve the transcript documents from The National Archives, but equally that it is easily readable.

For example, AI found that I had numerous different date formats and spellings of ‘court-martial’. Once it reported those errors I could go back and correct those once in the document – using Find and Replace. Whereas the editor gave me a report which identified the same issue multiple times in a very large document.

By creating an AI system to pre-check my manuscript I have got the document into a much cleaner state, which means that when I send it to an editor for a final proofread that it will be much quicker and lower cost to complete. (To be clear, AI did not write the book, the system I created was to get AI to report errors and inconsistencies, so that I could decide.)

Once we had the edits complete, there were many other decisions to be made. The book cover, the book size, layout, print specifications and costs all needed assessing. A decision we made about font size cost us money because of the cost of paper – if I was redoing the book today, I would make the font smaller!

If you're sitting on family diaries, memoirs, letters or local history research, there is a huge pleasure and satisfaction to be gained from getting the information from the family archives into published book. Through my book coaching and Power Hour sessions, I now help other authors navigate their own book publishing journey, whether it is to understand how to use AI for transcription and editing, get to grips with the self-publishing route or have some accountability through the process.

I know that when I held the completed book in my hands for the first time, when I read out extracts at a local Literary festival and when I handed a copy to my children, that I had done something very valuable with his story.

We had preserved his legacy.

John on his 99th birthday