User talk:HighKing/Archives/2013/November

Blackett
Dear HighKing,

I've just spotted your ref. to self-published sources on the "Blackett" page and, although I can appreciate the reasons why such sources are normally frowned upon, am wondering if on this occasion I might be able to persuade you to relent. (I should add that I'm not a major Wikipedian and if it's bad form to write to you in this way please accept my apologies and I'll shut up.)

My reason for adding the "further reading" reference to our book, A History of the Blacketts, is that no other book encompassing the family overall has yet been published. References to individual branches of the family do occur in 19th/early 20th century works on north-east England by Surtees, Hodgson etc, but the only books focussing on the Blacketts are: a) "My Name is Blacket", self-published in 1983 by the late Nick Vine Hall,an Australian genealogist and broadcaster, which concentrates mainly on the Australian branch, and b) "The Ship that Came Home" by A. W. Purdue, published by Third Millenium Publishing in 2004. This chiefly covers three wealthy branches of the family and the properties they occupied. We of course acknowledge both publications in our book, which is fully indexed and referenced.

At the outset we discussed with Third Millenium the possibility of publication by them but the book is of such specialised appeal that our sales estimate of 500 copies, (which looks like turning out to be pretty accurate), was too small to be of interest and we therefore opted for self-publishing. The book has, however, been bought by a number of institutions, including Newcastle University (3 copies), Durham University (who initially ordered 1 copy, then subsequently, to our delight, bought 6 more), the Chapter of Ripon Cathedral, etc. It is currently being peer-reviewed by the history department of Leeds University.

I've obviously compounded the problem by including a link to the page at www.theblacketts.com where the book can be ordered and I can understand why you've changed that to our Amazon.co.uk page. My reason for including our site and not Amazon was because we sell through Amazon (and also through Gardners, the major UK wholesaler) purely to the UK market. Overseas orders, which account for about 25% of our total sales to date, can be placed only through our site, as sales through Amazon etc would cost the charities who'll receive all profits from the book too much in commissions and only partially-recovered shipping costs.

The Blackett Wikipedia page does need additional citations etc. It seems to have been set up some years ago and when time permits I'd like to improve it. Before doing so, however, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the above.

Cheers,

Allan Kirtley Al kirtley (talk) 17:13, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Allan, anybody and everybody can edit here. And they regularly do.  To that end, over the past decade, the editing community have developed a bunch of rules for aspects of editing.  At first the sheer volume of rules can appear daunting, but there's really only a small handful of core rules that *must* be followed.  All the rest are flexible to some degree.
 * Some articles are very specialized or have a very narrow scope. Finding reliable sources for those articles can be tricky.  The rules are laid out at WP:SOURCE and the larger article is WP:Verifiability.  --HighKing (talk) 11:16, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks for the link. From note [9] it seems it would be better for me to await the peer review of the book by Leeds University. They publish reviews only every 6 months but if we get a satisfactory review that would appear to get over the normal self-published problem. if I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, though, please let me know. Al kirtley (talk) 12:48, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd agree with that summary. As to linking to your own webpage, WP:EL sets the rules for external links.  --HighKing (talk) 14:49, 23 November 2013 (UTC)