You might have seen from my Instagram recently that I've been slowly starting work on a new eBook. What you may not have realised is that it's actually my third one in a series that I started a few years ago, and which has been on pause during the past few years due to me moving to my parent's place and then buying and moving in to a house with my husband.
 |
| SOE agent Nancy Wake |
I started writing this eBook series during a point in my life where I REALLY missed university. Specifically I really missed the various research projects I'd juggled for my courses during both my BA and my MA (I hold both in Ancient History). Both my dissertations were on aspects of the lives of women in the ancient world, so I was already interested in women in history.
One Christmas I received a copy of Lisa Hilton's "Queen Consorts", which is about Queens of England from Matilda of Flanders (wife of William the Conqueror) through to Elizabeth of York (wife of Henry VII). After I read it my Mum asked a question about one particular Queen - Catherine of Valois. Catherine was the wife of Henry V, the hero of Agincourt, but she had made a second marriage after Henry's death, to Owen Tudor. Through her, and a timely marriage between the Tudors and the Beaufort family, Henry Tudor rose to prominence and eventually was able to claim the English throne.
My Mum had always wondered how Catherine, a Queen by marriage and a French princess by birth, had come to marry a minor Welsh nobleman. She didn't have the time to read a biography of Catherine of Valois, and even if she had, such biographies have been rare (until recently) and difficult to find. I was able to answer her question and it got me thinking - how many other women wanted to know the same thing? How many women wanted to find out more about other women in history, but just didn't have the time? How often was our own history so inaccessible to us, that our questions were going unanswered?
In the end I settled on doing a series of small eBooks that featured multiple interesting women. Each biography is short, only 600 to 800 words, because they're meant to be easy to read. You can pick up and put down the book as and when you want. You can read it on the commute in to work, or look at a chapter or two before you go to bed. Most importantly they're simply to raise awareness of just how many awesome and amazing women there have been in history, and in the future you can then do your own further reading on the ones that interest you! I wrote biographies on thirty different women, so that for people interested but short of time, they could easily read the book in a month by doing just one small chapter a day!
I always try to make it as diverse as possible, so it's not all just boring English women. I've covered the ancient world and more modern, and countries including Japan, Egypt and Korea, as well as a selection of European women, and African-American women who fought slavery or faced significant discrimination while trying to just make people's lives a little better or a little easier. Through my research I've found even more women to write about, what's started out as a list of a mere 100 or so women has increased significantly over the past 18 months, so I now have a massive alphabetised notebook with women across continents and centuries to write about.
So now that I have a house and got my wedding done and dusted, it's time to start dedicating time to my eBook series. Another thirty women will bring me up to a total of ninety biographies, only ten away from one hundred! And after that, the first two hundred won't seem quite so daunting :)
My eBooks are available on Amazon for just 99 pence (because I need to earn a tiny bit of money to fund more books, but I want to try and make the books as affordable as possible!), you can find 30 Women in History Volume 1 and Volume 2, and keep an eye on my history Twitter account for more information on the progress of Volume 3!
