{"id":12114,"date":"2021-03-28T03:52:38","date_gmt":"2021-03-28T10:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/windpilot.com\/blog\/en\/?page_id=12114"},"modified":"2021-06-21T05:05:51","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T12:05:51","slug":"peter-foerthmann","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/windpilot.com\/blog\/en\/windpilotbooks\/peter-foerthmann\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Foerthmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

PETER FOERTHMANN, AUTHOR: HOW AND WHY?\u2028<\/strong>
\n\"\"Writing about my favourite subject is nothing new for me. I have been at it for a good 25\u00a0years and have given full rein to my knowledge, thoughts and musings. The book Self-Steering Under Sail <\/a>has been translated into six languages and downloaded and digested over a million times over the last 22\u00a0years. This \u2013 I sincerely hope \u2013 will have helped to make an apparently complex subject a little more accessible and comprehensible: the physical laws underpinning the workings of windvane self-steering systems are not in themselves especially difficult to grasp. Modesty fails to prevent me from pointing out that this book must have reached a far larger readership than most technical writings, a realisation I find particularly satisfying at a personal level because the book eventually found its audience without the involvement of conventional publishing houses and their conflicting agendas.
\n\"\"I say the book eventually found its audience because bridging the gap between author and sailor proved far from easy. Initially I did go down the conventional route, so I had all the joy of trying to satisfy publishers, editors and bean-counters and wrangling over the finer points of content, the precise number of pages, the choice of photos, the layout and so on. The relationship between lone author and super-hierarchical publishing behemoth can easily become very unbalanced and not everyone involved has the self-confidence to refrain from abusing their house’s power to try to cow non-compliant content producers. The outcome in my case was a shiny book contract promising me monetary rewards that came nowhere near reflecting the time actually invested. The mismatch struck me as almost comical \u2013 but if anyone was laughing it certainly was not me!\u2028
\n\"\"Thus disillusioned, I moved on in the hope \u2013 a hope I imagine all authors share deep down inside \u2013 that in having my words committed to paper in book form I would at least be capturing for myself a splinter of immortality. That would be something nobody could take away! The title “author” suggests membership of some sort of elite community and there are certainly some, in my experience, who happily wield this supposed status to boost their social standing. Having discovered that becoming an author will not be boosting their economic standing, I suppose they feel perfectly justified in trying to wring something else from the deal
\n\"\"The financial argument for writing a book generally fails to stack up in any way and there cannot be many authors in Germany who are able to keep the wolf from the door with royalties alone. Personally, I suspect there are probably just two! Is this the natural state of affairs, I wonder, or a contrived bottleneck that simultaneously maximises income and regulates market access?
\n\"\"The publication of Self-Steering Under Sail launched me into a world of trouble. I ended up spending two and a half years defending (a few short passages) of what I had written before the High Court in London, along the way growing a much thicker skin and experiencing a couple of major revelations. First of all, I discovered that, far from being dependent on publishers, I could manage perfectly well without one \u2013 and actually I would be much better off in all respects if I did. Once the initial shock began to wear off and l had time to reflect, I also realised that our journalist friends could not be relied on to ferret out and disseminate the facts after all and were by and large out for themselves. I learned my lesson well and the memory burns just as bright more than two decades later.<\/p>\n

A singlehanders fight<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n