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All my life, I dreamed of being a writer. But when I was a kid, I didn’t think it was a dream I’d ever realize. In my mind, making it as a writer was like winning the lottery — a goal with such out of reach odds that I might as well set my sights on something more realistic.

So, I pursued my degree in psychology and set out to change the world that way.

But when I was 26 years old, I had a health crisis that robbed me of my fertility and left me bankrupted by medical debt. I felt lost and alone, completely broken down by the events that had destroyed the life I’d always wanted. So I started doing the only thing I knew how to do to help me through the pain of all that.

I wrote.

What started as a blog in 2009 eventually became a memoir in 2013. I self-published the day before my 30th birthday, and Single Infertile Female became a success by all self-publishing measures — and it helped me launch a full-time writing career.

Still, none of it came easy. Self-publishing a book is a deeply involved endeavor. At least, if you want to do it right. Anyone can string some words together and hit publish. But doing so won’t earn you money or accolades.

You have to be willing to take the process seriously to find that kind of success. 

How to self-publish a book

Today I work as a writer and developmental editor, guiding as many as 20 clients a year through the self-publishing process. 

I’ve created a list I give to all my clients so that they know up front what this process will require of them:

• Build your social media presence
• Prepare your draft
• Design your book cover
• Polish your draft
• Select a platform for self-publishing a book
• Format
• Establish copyright
• Obtain an ISBN
• Publish
• Market
• Write another book

Let’s talk about what each of these items means to a hopeful author wondering how to self-publish a book.

1. Build your social media presence

The truth is, you could write the greatest novel known to man. But without the use of social media, you’ll never be able to get it into anyone’s hands.

As a self-published author, marketing and building an author platform is your responsibility. 

You won’t have a team behind you taking on this task, so you need to be prepared to do that work yourself — which means starting now with your social media presence. You don’t have to be on every platform, but you do need to start connecting and building a public network as soon into your publishing journey as possible.

These people will be your potential readers, and cheering section, one day. Part of marketing a book comes down to first being able to market yourself. And that usually starts online.

2. Prepare your draft

You may think your first draft is flawless, but I promise you…it’s not. 

Self-publishing often gets a bad rap because some authors don’t take the time to truly polish their work. But in the traditional publishing world, a book might go through as many as 10 rounds of revisions before making it to print.

Hold yourself to a similar standard.

Consider hiring a developmental editor to help you work through some of the big picture issues with your book. Then utilize beta readers and critique partners to help you pinpoint any other problems you may have missed. Revise, bring in another set of eyes, and revise again. 

You will never regret taking one more stab at making your manuscript better, but you may very well regret leaping to publish too soon.

3. Design your book cover

If you’ve got some expert-level graphic design skills, fantastic! Get to designing your cover. But most authors lack those skills and will need to hire a professional to create something that will tell the story of their book in image form.

Because remember: Plenty of people do judge a book by its cover.

If you don’t know where to find a good cover designer, start by asking for recommendations in various online writer’s groups. You can also look inside the cover of indie books that have designs you like — most will credit the cover designer in those first few pages that contain other publishing information. 

4. Polish your draft (again)

Once you’re confident your revisions are complete, it’s time to send your book off for line editing and proofreading. 

Please know that no matter how skilled you are at spelling and grammar, you will still need a professional editor to catch your errors. Because everyone makes errors within their own work, even editors themselves. 

The human eye is amazing at glossing over mistakes when you know what you meant to say — so don’t trust yourself to catch those mistakes when the time comes.

5. Select a route to self-publishing a book

There are a lot of different options for self-publishing a book, all of which provide different benefits and drawbacks to consider. 

I personally published with CreateSpace years ago, because it made selling through Amazon simple. CreateSpace has since merged with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), if that’s a route you want to consider. Apple’s iBooks can also be great for e-book only printing, and Barnes & Noble Press and Kobo are other options as well.

As you try to decide which option is right for you, ask yourself these questions:

• Can you achieve your goals through this platform? (Do you care about Print books vs. ebooks? Because some platforms are e-book only. If you want the option of having a physical book, you’ll need to look for print-on-demand services as well).
•  What percentage of each sale will the company take?
• What protections do they offer to their authors?
• Where will your book be available for sale?
• Does the platform provide an ISBN?

6. Format

When you finally feel like your book is ready and you’ve selected a platform to publish through, you’ll still need to format your book to that platform’s specifications. 

Most offer in-depth guidelines, but e-book formatting, especially, can sometimes be tricky. I formatted my own print on demand documents, but hired someone to format my e-book, mostly because I didn’t trust myself to set up the coding for things like clickable titles correctly. 

You can find a good e-book formatter in the same way you found your cover designer: by asking groups of self-published authors for their recommendations.

7. Establish copyright

I remember all too well staring at my screen and wondering, “How do I copyright my book?” But the truth is, whether or not to copyright your book is a personal choice. 

Under U.S. copyright law, written works are protected as soon as you create them. But if you want to register your copyright (and there are various reasons to consider taking this step, to include the fact that it may make your case easier to prove if you do have to go to court), you can do so by visiting copyright.gov and selecting “Literary Works.”

The cost for officially copyrighting a book is $85.

8. Obtain an ISBN

How to get an ISBN number for a self-published book is a question that can be answered a few different ways. 

Some self-publishing platforms, like KDP, will automatically provide you with a free ISBN as part of publishing with them. Otherwise, you’ll have to purchase your ISBN, either through Bowker or your local ISBN agency.

9. Publish your book

At this point, you are ready to publish your book! Congratulations.

Make sure you follow the guidelines of your chosen platform so that publishing goes smoothly and your book is available for purchase as soon as possible.  

10. Market your book

But your work isn’t done! In fact, some might argue that now is when the real work begins. Because writing a book is only half the battle — marketing it is your next task.

If you’ve built up a decent social network presence, you can start by marketing there. But you’ll also want to consider other options for getting the word about your book out there. Perhaps you could talk to a local indie bookshop about hosting a reading and signing. Or maybe you want to print up promotional materials to hand out to people on the street. You may even want to consider a giveaway with a copies of your book as the prizes.

There are countless ideas for book marketing that you could potentially utilize, but you need to be willing to commit to this part of the process if you want your book to reach as many eyes as possible.

11. Write another book

One of the best ways to find success as a self-published author is to keep writing. The more books you have to your name, the higher your sales will be — as fans of one book will flock to the others. This is how you build a name for yourself in the indie publishing world, and how you grow and expand as an author. So keep writing!

Self-publishing a book: How much does it cost?

Some people may see self-publishing as the easier route, but all of the tasks and expenses a publisher would typically take on, you are responsible for covering yourself through self-publishing.

Instead of getting an advance, you’ll be paying for various services and working hard to ensure your end product is flawless.

So it’s only natural to wonder how much self-publishing will cost you. In fact, some of the most common questions I get from potential clients are, “How much does it cost to self-publish a book on Amazon?” and “Is it free to publish a book on Amazon?”

The answer is complicated. Because, while, yes, self-publishing to Amazon is free through KDP, preparing your book for that moment is not.

All those editors, designers and formatters we discussed above? They cost money. And a lot of the time, it’s money you won’t see back.

It’s harsh, but true. A large percentage of self-published books will never make back the money that was invested into them.

This is why marketing is so important, and why it has to be a part of your self-publishing plan.

But as far as that initial cost investment, I always tell my developmental editing clients it will ultimately come down to how much work they are willing to do themselves, and how much quality they’re willing to pay for in terms of services.

You can save yourself some money by formatting your own book, for instance. But good editors and cover designers don’t come cheap.

On average, self-publishing a quality book will run you anywhere from $1,000 to $3500, depending on the rates charged by the contractors you hire to help you prepare your book for publication. And you do get what you pay for. So don’t pay $75 for editing and expect to receive back an error-free end product.

How to choose between traditional publishing and self-publishing

When you’re pursuing the path of self-publishing, it’s inevitable that you’ll ask yourself at some point, “Is it better to self-publish or get a publisher?” or “Will self-publishing hurt your chances of signing a traditional publishing deal?”

The answer to both questions is…it depends. 

When I published my first book, I never even considered traditional publishing. It was a memoir written by a woman in her 20s about a chronic health condition impacting the female reproductive organs. In other words: very niche.

I knew finding representation for it would be near impossible, and because the book itself was part of my healing process, I just wanted to get it out into the world.

Self-publishing was absolutely the right choice for that book, and at that point in my life.

But today I’m shopping a fiction novel I’ve been working on for two years to agents. It has commercial appeal and is a concept I’m really proud of. Plus, I see traditional publishing as the next step in my career.

So for this book, and at this point in my life…traditional publishing is the dream.

Every book is different. If you’re trying to decide whether traditional publishing or self-publishing is right for you, you need to do some soul searching and really get honest with yourself about your book (is it something an agent is going to feel confident in selling?), your goals (what do you hope to gain out of this publishing process), and your future aspirations as a writer.

Self-publishing has proven to be a very viable career path for some. And traditional publishing is right for others. There is no single best answer here.

As far as whether self-publishing today will hurt your chances of traditional publishing tomorrow, the answer is yes — for this book. But not for future endeavors.

Once you self-publish a book, it’s usually off the table for agents and publishers to consider. Unless it’s a massive success (selling tens of thousands of copies), most won’t even give it a second look.

But having self-published a book won’t hurt you at all when trying to sell a different book to agents and publishing companies in the future. In fact, if your self-published book did well (sales in the thousands) it could actually help you, because those numbers prove your ability to be part of the marketing process.

Should you choose a small press?

While researching your options, you may have come across authors mentioning having published through small presses. 

This is a version of traditional publishing that doesn’t typically require an agent, as small presses tend to like working directly with authors. Small presses are also often more open to taking niche books and working with an author’s unique vision.

You would pitch your book to a small press in much the same way you would to an agent, with a query letter, synopsis and the first few pages of your manuscript (or whatever their submission guidelines request). If they’re interested, they’ll ask for more.

But there are two important things to keep in mind when publishing with small presses:

1. The first is that they often only print a few books a year, which means you could be put on a waitlist that is several years out before your book will be published. They also tend to have small marketing departments, which means you need to be prepared to market your own book as aggressively as you would have with self-publishing.
2. The other thing to be aware of is the fact that there are a lot of vanity presses masquerading as small presses.

“What’s a vanity press?” you may ask? Well, these are publication companies that will offer to publish your book — for a fee. They will usually charge you thousands (more than you ever would have paid for self-publishing) all for the vanity of being able to say you have a publisher.

Avoid them at all costs. Not only will they charge you more for the services you could have gotten cheaper with contractors you found yourself, they will also take a far greater percentage of your royalties than you would have had to give up through self-publishing. And you’ll lose some of the rights you would have maintained through self-publishing.

On top of all that, the marketing services they offer are nothing more than blasting your book to their wide network of authors, who all paid the same thing you did and are simply hoping to see their own books advertised.

This is not how to self-publish a book, it’s how to get ripped-off in the process of self-publishing a book.

Now, there are plenty of small presses that aren’t vanities, and many of them are lovely to work with. But do your research if you decide to pursue this route, and don’t go with any press that is asking you for exorbitant amounts of money to help you with self-publishing a book.

Have you ever self-published a book? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.

Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock 

The post How to Self-Publish a Book: A Guide for Aspiring Authors appeared first on The Write Life.

That or which? Which one do you use…and when?

It can get confusing, so much so that often you just chuck one in and hope it was the right choice.

And let’s let you in on a little secret: Usually you can get away with it (at least with non-copy-editor types). That’s because most other people are also a little shaky on the which vs. that concept…plus, nowadays, few people are real sticklers about it any more.

That vs. which — It can be tricky!

It makes sense. Initially that and which were used interchangeably.

Then, in the early 1900s, grammarians, most notably the Fowler brothers, decided there should be a rule about using them “correctly” and not interchangeably, and, well, that was that. (And which was which…)

The rule has now become so ingrained in modern usage that nitpickers and strict grammarians will seize on an errant that or which and think you don’t know how to write properly. (You do, of course. We’re sure of it.) Yes, even though it’s not a true crime against grammar, it’s often treated as one. 

That’s why, instead of just picking one and hoping you nailed it, it helps to know the traditional that vs. which rule that so many people still adhere to. So here goes …

When to use that and when to use which: A definitive guide

Let’s start with a super-truncated version of the rule espoused by the Fowlers and many other grammarians: That and which are both used to connect a clause to a sentence. If the clause is necessary to the sentence, you use that. If it’s not, you use which.

Now for a few more details: You use that and which to connect two different kinds of clauses — essential clauses (aka restrictive, defining, or integrated relative clauses) and nonessential clauses (aka, logically, non-restrictive, non-defining, or supplementary relative clauses). 

Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s what, clause-wise:

An essential clause is a clause that is, as you may have guessed, essential to the meaning of the sentence. It contains vital information about the subject of the sentence. And it’s literally an integral part of the sentence — that is, it isn’t set off by commas. Traditionally, when it’s an essential clause you use a that (or, if it’s a person, a who).

I need to get the car that is in the garage.

The clause “that is in the garage” is essential to the sentence because it tells us exactly which car I need to get. There can be other cars, but I need the specific one that’s in the garage.

A nonessential clause is, yes, not essential to the meaning of the sentence. It adds color material, information that adds texture or detail to the sentence but that isn’t ultimately necessary. It’s set off by commas and can be deleted from the sentence without having any impact on the meaning whatsoever. A nonessential clause gets a which.

I need to get the car, which is in the garage.

In this case, the clause “which is in the garage” is telling us a little more information about the car, but isn’t vital to understanding the sentence …the thrust of which is simply that I need to get the car. 

There are some exceptions to the that vs. which rule!

Needless to say, since it’s English we’re talking about, there are some caveats.

Caveat #1: If there’s already a “that” in the sentence, most writers will follow up with a “which” even if it’s opening an essential clause.

Take William Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, he writes: “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This is much more euphonious than the clunky (but correct) “That that we call a rose…” And if it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us. Even the grammarians who wrote the initial “here’s how to use which vs. that” thought there were times the rule could be bent.

Which leads us to caveat #2, a very important point: Nowadays most style guides, usage manuals, and dictionaries agree that, when it comes to that and which, the old rule isn’t the end all and be all anymore. They give us quite a bit of latitude, saying we can eschew the traditional “always use that with essential clauses.” Yes, some copy editors and sticklers might disagree, but they’re fighting a losing battle. The new general rule of thumb is simple, and makes life a bit easier: 

Use which when it’s a nonessential clause…but take your choice of that or which when it’s an essential one. It’s your call — whichever you think works best stylistically.

Yes, the (grammatically pure) times are a-changing. And now, that is that…which is to say, we’re done. 

This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase through our links, you’re supporting The Write Life — and we thank you for that!

Photo via Undrey / Shutterstock 

The post That vs. Which — The Answer to Which One You Should Use (And Why) appeared first on The Write Life.

‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’, begins William Shakespeare in sonnet 144. Although this sonnet appears in the section of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence that is principally concerned with the ‘Dark Lady’, sonnet 144 is noteworthy for discussing both the Fair Youth (from earlier in the sequence) and the […]

The post A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144: ‘Two loves I have of comfort and despair’ appeared first on Interesting Literature.

Many poems deal with the visual: with things seen and observed. There are also some fine poems about sounds, and things we hear, whether it’s a voice, a footstep, or the sound of rain pattering upon a roof. But what about touch, arguably the most intimate and sensual of all […]

The post Six of the Best Poems about Touch appeared first on Interesting Literature.

 

On a cool morning in August 1988 Jonathan sprang past the cleaning lady on his way up the stairs. He had been to the market to buy a bag of bread rolls and a bunch of flowers. As he hurried up, taking the stairs three at a time, he ran the forefinger of his left hand along the water lily tiles in the stairwell, holding the flowers and the bag of rolls in his right. The flowers w ere for Ulla, who turned twenty-nine today. She’d put up with him, as she expressed it, for three years now, although he thought he was actually the one who had put up with a lot.

Ulla was still in bed. She knew it was already nearly ten, and she’d realized that Jonathan had gone out for the rolls. She was still in bed because today that was her prerogative. She was thinking about a doll’s house with a library and smoking room that she had seen in a shop on a nearby street: it could be destroyed at the touch of a button and was intended as a form of therapy through which children could channel their destructive urges. Ulla had always been interested in toys: figures with smoke cartridges at the back, wind-up animals that bared their teeth. People could buy little guillotines to celebrate the French Revolution. She could get hold of one and suggest it to the museum director as an exhibit.

 

*

 

Now Jonathan was banging about in the kitchen, and shortly afterwards he broke in on the muffled drowsiness of her doze, pulled aside the curtain with a clatter and sat down on the edge of her bed. Congratulations were in order. Jonathan got through the embarrassment of the little ceremony by uttering awkward clichés and stroking his girlfriend vaguely with his right hand, much as one might close the eyes of the dead, while simultaneously laying the breakfast table and setting out the boiled eggs with his left. He had to stand to light the candles and arrange the bunch of flowers, which brought the little ritual to an end.

He poured the coffee and shook the rolls out into the bread-basket. Then he extracted her birthday present from his wallet: a tiny Callot etching that depicted someone being sawn into pieces. He gave her the postage-stamp-sized etching and watched her closely to see what she would say about him giving her such a beautiful present. Bullseye! Ulla devoured the quartering with her eyes – ‘Sweet!’ – and leant it against the candlestick so she could look at it again and again. Then she drew her boyfriend down to her and gave him kisses like fiery little coins, holding his head in both hands as she did so.

When he was restored to freedom he took the post from his jacket pocket and sorted through it. Five letters were addressed to the birthday girl, two to him. She sat up, spread a roll with honey and read the letters, the contents of which were as you would expect.

Jonathan clumsily opened his two letters with his forefinger. One was from the Santubara car factory in Mutzbach – junk mail, presumably – the other from his Uncle Edwin in Bad Zwischenahn. It contained a cheque for more than two hundred marks and the suggestion that he do something sensible with it on this day.

‘Treat yourselves to something,’ his uncle wrote. ‘Enjoy the good things in life.’

Conflicting emotions prevented Jonathan from showing the cheque to his girlfriend, who was busy with her own letters. He left it in the envelope and quickly slipped it into his pocket.

Ulla was from an orderly family; she had money in the bank and gilt-framed ancestral portraits. Jonathan, however, was born on a covered cart in East Prussia in February 1945, in an icy wind and sharp, freezing rain on the trek away from the Eastern Front. His young mother had ‘breathed her last’, as Jonathan put it, in the process. ‘I never knew my parents,’ he would say, usually with indifference. ‘My father was killed on the Baltic coast, on the Vistula Spit, and my mother breathed her last after giving birth to me in East Prussia in 1945.’ As far as suffering was concerned, this guaranteed him an unparalleled advantage over his friends.

That cold February, when calamity struck, his uncle had been driving the cart with its makeshift carpet roof, the pregnant woman tossing about inside the straw. When she went into labour he knocked on farmhouse doors to no avail, and so she died.

Her corpse had been set down quickly and without ceremony in the vestibule of a village church, beside the hymn board with its wooden numbers, and then they had driven on. They had come across a sturdy peasant woman who had lost her child, and she had nursed Jonathan in its place in return for a seat in the cart. Jonathan pictured this as well: the heavy woman sitting in the cart, with himself at her large breast, and the picture more or less corresponded to the reality.

I was suckled by Mother Earth, he would reflect on occasion, and he would stretch, feeling new strength in his veins.

Today Uncle Edwin had sent two hundred marks – the new Avanti sofa bed had been a hit.

Treat yourselves to something? That should be possible. In the meantime Ulla had read her post: from her overbearing mother, her passive father, her psychologist brother in Berlin, and Evie, her goddaughter, whose birthday letter – ‘how are you, I am fine’ – was awkwardly written and decorated with ladybirds. She got out of bed and went over to the bookshelf, where the present she had given herself was standing: a 1950s Danish vase, which the two of them now admired. It was held up to the light, turned this way and that and praised as ‘frightful’. When they had finished with it they stood it on the window ledge alongside various other monstrosities, items that had once been dirt cheap but now had a certain value, or would have if left for a few more years.

Jonathan was embraced again, assured that his little Callot etching had been ‘just right’, and then dismissed. So he went back to his room, which he was happy to do, as the birthday girl was now making phone calls and he had no interest in one-sided conversations.

Jonathan sat down on his sofa. He blew some fluff from the table then stared off into the distance towards the bright window opposite and the portrait of the plump child on the grubby white wall.

He yawned, and his gaze drifted across the weird linoleum geography of his floor. He saw the Isthmus of Corinth, that hair-raising cleft in the rock; he saw a little ship, and steep rock walls to left and right. The water is flowing, he thought, and the ship glided down the canal as if caught in an undertow.

He snapped out of it and read the letter from the Santubara car manufacturer. As it turned out, it wasn’t junk mail but a serious job offer. A Herr Wendland from the factory’s press office wrote that they had been admirers of his discerning prose for quite a while now and were wondering whether Jonathan might fancy a trip to East Prussia; Masuria, to be precise, in present-day Poland. The Santubara Company wanted to set up a test-driving tour for motoring journalists to convince them of the outstanding quality of its latest eight-cylinder model. Any such tour would, of course, have to be carefully prepared in advance. Would Jonathan care to help with this? He could go along on the initial preparatory tour, check out the local culture, see whether there was anything worth visiting in the region – stately homes perhaps, or churches or castles the existence and histories of which might add something to the itinerary. Then he could write an insightful piece about the trip, say twelve pages of typescript

– ‘Masuria Today’ – which they could use to convince journalists that it might be interesting to look around that godforsaken region and take the opportunity of test-driving the new eight-cylinder car at the same time. He would have completely free rein, and they could offer him five thousand marks plus expenses. Travel and accommodation would, of course, be included, so that would be five thousand plus VAT. The precise sum was negotiable.

Masuria? Poland?

Jonathan’s first reaction was no! If it had been a trip through Spain or Sweden, then maybe. But Poland?

No.

On the other hand, five thousand marks . . . And negotiable? Jonathan took down the 1961 edition of the Iro World Atlas

– which he still used simply because that was the one he had – and opened it at the map of ‘German Eastern Territories Under Foreign Administration’. Quite a sizeable chunk, East Prussia. How strange and unnatural the line was, drawn straight across it with a ruler. You saw that sort of thing on maps of colonial Africa or the Antarctic, but in the heart of Europe? It reminded Jonathan of dissection lines in pathology, scalpel incisions in a woman’s flawless white body.

Here was the Vistula Spit, where his father was killed, and the Curonian Spit. Pictures from old geography books came to mind: wandering dunes, elk, a fisherman sitting on his upturned boat mending a net, amber mining.

But the plague arrived by the light of the moon, Swam with the elk across the lagoon.

Jonathan looked for the village of Rosenau, tracing the road with his finger. Here: this was where it happened. This was where he had first seen the light of day, at the cost of his mother’s life. Here, in this village church, was where she had been set down. The young woman had been buried in the churchyard, by the wall perhaps, beneath a laburnum. There was a single photograph of her still in existence, one that had survived their flight. It had been taken at the 1936 Olympics: a young girl in the uniform of the League of German Girls, beret at a jaunty angle over one ear. Jonathan had stuck it to the wall with a drawing pin. The last picture of his father, a young Wehrmacht lieutenant in field uniform and service cap, lay in a folder alongside Jonathan’s birth certificate and bicycle insurance policy.

The tour would start in Danzig, said the letter from the Santubara Company. He would fly from Hamburg to Danzig, where the tour car would be waiting. He could then make notes at his leisure.

Danzig? thought Jonathan. He could use Danzig for his essay on Brick Gothic: ‘The Giants of the North’. The Marienkirche was one of the northern giants still missing from his collection. Lübeck, Wismar, Stralsund: he had seen these cities with their medieval colossi, and that was all well and good, but he had no first-hand sensory impression of Danzig, and it would be difficult for him to describe it in an essay.

If he accepted the commission he could kill two birds with one stone. As well as earning some money he would be acquiring knowledge at the same time, which, in turn, could later be converted into more money.

Jonathan washed his hands as meticulously as a surgeon, looking out of the window all the while. A class of school-children was swarming on the other side of the Isebek canal, a teacher anxiously herding them together – ‘Don’t fall in!’ – while up in the sky a huge aeroplane was coming in to land at Fühlsbüttel.

I’m here in Hamburg, and I’m making a living, thought Jonathan. What’s East Prussia to me? And a single great image arose in his mind’s eye, of Uncle Edwin entering the church with the dead woman in his arms – where to put her? – and setting her down on the steps. The folds of her white dress stained with blood.

 

 

The above is an excerpt from Walter Kempowski’s Homeland, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins, and available now from Granta Books.

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