Learn about our publishing plans and our new (temporary) schedule for YouTube English lesson uploads.

We’re excited to announce that we plan to self-publish an e-book for English learners. The writing has started and we’re experimenting with tools we can use to make it available on smartphones, tablets and computers.

To allow time for writing we will be publishing videos every other week. So we’re continuing with our plans to make new YouTube videos, but for a while we’ll be publishing a new video every other Friday instead of every Friday.

We really appreciate all the support and love we receive from our viewers and hope you will keep watching and learning from our videos. We have hundreds of videos on our channels and we hope you’ll explore them.

Some of the English publishing vocabulary that comes up in this video includes:
longhand
manuscript
commission
royalties

English publishing vocabulary

When Vicki gets an idea she has to write it down right away.
Hello everyone. I’m Jay.
And I’m Vicki and we’re talking about publishing this week.
And we have an important announcement!
You probably don’t know this but Vicki used to write text books for people who are learning English.
A lot of the books I wrote are very old now.
Which was your first book.
This one. It was published in 1982.
That was long before we had digital publishing.
Books were all made of paper back then. And there was no internet and no Amazon website.
We didn’t have computers in our homes either, so how did you write it?
In long hand. So just writing with a pen and paper.
Didn’t you type it?
Only when I’d finished. I didn’t have a typewriter so I borrowed one to type the manuscript.
The manuscript is the document.
It’s a book before it’s been printed.
And how did you publish it?
Well, I didn’t publish it. I wrote to a publisher and said I’ve got an idea for a book and I sent them a sample.
And they liked it?
No! They said we’re not interested in your idea but they liked my sample and they said we want a book on different topic. Can you write it?
So you got a commission.
Yeah. A commission is when an author gets a request to write a book and they get paid.
And they paid you royalties?
Yes, every time they sold a copy, I got a percentage.
How much?
Not much. I can’t remember. Perhaps 10%? And we didn’t have email back then, so I had to post the manuscript to them.
You sent it by mail?
Yeah, it was a big pile of papers and I went to a shop and made a copy.
Luckily photocopiers had been invented.
And when I had to make changes, I literally cut and pasted the manuscript.
You know how on a computer we have the commands copy and paste. Well, they come from the time when we did it by hand.
But the publishing industry was pretty quick to adopt computers.
So what was the first book you wrote on a computer.
I don’t know. Let’s have a look. Perhaps this one! Hang on. I’ll tell you the date. 1991. I had an Apple Mac and it was great because I could save the manuscript on a disk. It fitted in an envelope so I could post it to my publishers and I didn’t have to spend hours in the photocopy shop. And then email came along a few years later, and also video. I wrote some video courses.
Not YouTube videos because YouTube didn’t exist back then.
No. But I wrote a lot of English courses for Oxford University Press and they used to have a video department.
They published the videos on cassettes like these.
Yeah, and then later DVDS. Videos were very expensive to make back then. We had lots of actors and a big crew. So different people for cameras, sound, lighting ….
One of the reasons we can make videos for YouTube now is because the cost of video equipment has come down.
Yeah, and we’re the crew. You’re my crew!
Cost isn’t a big problem.
Finding the time is our problem.

Publishing Plans

And that brings us to our announcement. Vicki wants to write another book.
This time I want to write an e-book that we’ll publish ourselves – so I’m going to try self-publishing this time.
This project is different to our normal YouTube videos.
The great thing about a book is it can be more structured and organized. So we can design it to help you progress.
We want to make an even more powerful learning tool for everyone who likes Simple English Videos.
It’s a very exciting project but there’s one big problem. I need time to write.
And we want to go on vacation this summer, so time is short.
If only there were 30 hours in a day ….
So we’ve been looking at Vicki’s schedule and looking for ways to make more time.
It’s hard because we want to keep making YouTube videos too.
We feel like we’ve gotten to know many of you and we’ve made a lot of new friends here and lots of you have told us you look forward to our videos every week.
And we really appreciate all your encouragement and support. It’s very inspiring for us and you give me lots of ideas.
Did you go back to sleep?
No, but we do need to make time so here’s the thing. We’re going to make a new video every two weeks instead of every week.
That way we can stay in touch with you AND I’ll have time to write.
And we can carry on making videos. There are lots we want to make.
Yeah. I have a big list.
So that’s our plan. We’re going to publish a new video every other week.
And in between, we hope you’ll watch some of our other videos.
There are hundreds of videos on our channel so you probably haven’t seen them all.
You have no excuse to stop watching and learning!
And then in not too many months Vicki’s new book will be available online as an e-book.
I’ve already started work on it and we’re experimenting together with tools we can use because we want you to able to use it on your computer, tablet or smart phone.
So we’re not going anywhere. We’re working on a great project, and we’ll be making a new video every other week.
So make sure you’ve subscribed to our channel and clicked the notification bell so you don’t miss them.
Does that bell work? Because some viewers have said they haven’t been getting notifications.
YouTube has been making improvements to their notification system. They say it’s better now but it works best if you allow them to send messages to your phone.
So click that notification bell and please share our videos with your friends. Bye-bye now.
Bye.