Tag Archive | fashion prints

Spotlight on Susana’s Ackermann’s E-book

Five years ago while I was caring for my dad and had to sit with him in front of the TV for hours at a time, I wasn’t able to write stories and got very bored. (Yay Buckeyes! We love Alex Trebek!) Seriously, I wish I could do that with him now. He passed away in 2021.

One day I discovered a website with all of the Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts volumes from 1809-1828 available to download. Wow! Thanks for doing that, Internet Archive! (I just made a donation.) The issues are all fascinating, but I was particularly interested in the fashions. To find the fashions—of which there are four per month—you have to scroll through the rest of the issue. Which is time-consuming. I mean, I just wanted to scroll through all the dresses!

So it occurred to me that I could screen-shoot the fashions and keep them in a folder and maybe find something to do with them later. If I’d had anything more important to do, I might not have bothered. I mean, there are four fashions per issue, twelve issues per year, and twenty years of issues. That’s 480 fashions! But that part was kind of mindless and I could shout out “Go Michigan State!” every once in a while, and give my dad the impression I was paying attention.

When that was accomplished, I put on my thinking cap and tried to figure out a way to make these more accessible. Make a Powerpoint presentation? A Word document? A website? That’s when it occurred to me that I could put them in a book. E-book. Print. Whatever. Such a book would be useful to me and I figured it would be so to others too. And… why not add the descriptions as well? Of course, that would mean typing pages and pages of descriptions. Talk about time-consuming! But… I’m a fast typist and I didn’t have anything more important to do, so that’s what I did. I learned I could type and half-listen to Wheel of Fortune at the same time. A useful skill to have, don’t you agree?

More screen-shooting, this time the descriptions. Organizing the fashions and descriptions into folders, then Scrivener. Typing and more typing. Sizing the fashion scans. Then copying and pasting into Vellum. Spell-checking (and learning there are all different spellings for the words in those descriptions). And creating a cover.

By the time I got that far, it had occurred to me to add a few pages that might be useful to authors and readers and costume designers and whoever else purchased the book. So I added additional fashion comments, color coding pages, and historical contexts for each year.

The pages added up fast. To almost 1400! That’s quite a book, even more pages than one of Gabaldon’s Outlander books. I discovered I couldn’t upload a print book that size to Amazon KDP. So I checked out Ingram Spark and discovered that even with them, I’d have to break the books up into four volumes. E-X-P-E-N-S-I-V-E! But for those who prefer print books, they are available, at least.

No problem with the e-book, however. I was able to upload the entire book for people to use on their phones or tablets for a reasonable price.

And then it occurred to me that some readers might prefer to just flip through the fashions without all the text. Creating an image-only version was easy by that time. So there’s a single print book as well as an e-book of this one too.

Which means I ended up with SEVEN different versions! Readers can pick the one or more that works for them.

Ackermann’s Repository 1809-1828: the E-book

Frankly, I prefer reading on my phone. I don’t have to carry a Kindle around with me, nor a print book. My purse is heavy enough already. So my favorite version (and I have all of them) is the E-book. The comprehensive one. It’s easy to use the Table of Contents to flip to the year I’m looking for, and I can use the original description to help me with the description of the dress in my story. I have it with me wherever I am. I can open it up in my phone or my computer (whichever is most convenient). For this reason alone, I’m glad I went through all that effort. And because I think of my dad at the same time too.

All Regency Authors Need This!

Seriously. Am I wrong?

All seven versions and buy links can be found here. You might possibly find the print books at discounted prices at my Etsy shop. Or scan the QR code below for the Amazon buy link for the e-book. I hope you find it as helpful and entertaining as I do. Let me know!

Susana Ellis is a retired teacher, part-time caregiver, sewist, cook, and fashion print collector. Lifelong reading and a fascination with history led her to writing historical romances. She is one of the original Bluestocking Belles and a member of Regency Fiction Writers and the Maumee Valley Romance Authors Inc.

Regarding the Distribution of Regency Fashion Prints

Sep9

Ladies’ publications such as La Belle Assemblée, Ladies Monthly Museum, Lady’s Magazine, etc. were not merely fashion-oriented. Each issue had one or two fashion prints, a portrait engraving of some celebrated person (usually a woman) and perhaps other illustrations. Ackermann’s Repository, which was for ladies and gentlemen both, also had prints of furniture, homes, inventions, etc. The remainder of the publication consisted of articles.

I am not aware of any publication that consisted only of fashion prints, although people could remove the fashion prints and have them bound up together. I have one of these myself.

Correction: The Journal des Dames et des Modes was a weekly publication and thus there were around 5-6 fashion prints per MONTH.

More commonly, people would collect individual issues and have them bound together. I have quite a few of those, occasionally with an issue or two missing. (Somebody’s dog probably ate it or something.) If these were in a Regency home, however, they would be up to a year old, which is a long time in terms of fashion.

It may seem nit-picky, but I twinge when I read a story where a lady picks up Ackermann’s and pages through the latest fashions. The latest Ackermann’s would have TWO fashion prints.

Just a friendly FYI.

New Release: Ackermann’s Repository Fashion Prints: 1809-1828

Jun1

It all started last winter when I decided to begin collecting fashion prints. Not just images of fashion prints on Pinterest, but real antique fashion prints. The images are pretty, but the thought of having the real piece of paper printed and hand-colored by people two hundred years ago gives me a thrill. I feel as though touching it makes me a part of history (although so far I haven’t been whisked back in time, unfortunately).

As more and more little packages began arriving from England, France, Australia, and the U.S., I started to lose track of which prints I already had, causing me to have a few duplicates. Scrivener, an application I use for writing projects, seemed an obvious choice for organizing my fashion prints. I simply grouped the scanned images into chapters by year, thus making it simple to refer to when considering the purchase of new prints.

But what I really wanted was some sort of reference book with all the prints and descriptions to use in my writing projects. Those I purchased online were beautiful and extremely well done, but they didn’t include them all. I wanted a book with them all. I didn’t realize at the time how large a book that would be, or that it was probably an impossible task. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t thinking of publishing a book or anything. I just wanted to have them on hand.

So I started with Ackermann’s Repository, because I knew where to download issues from all of its twenty years. It was tedious going, but it gave me something to do in the afternoons when Dad and I were watching TV (I’m a caregiver in the winter), and I had to be able to switch my attention off and on when he needed something. I went through every issue and screenshot the two prints from each issue as well as the descriptions and fashion commentary. And a few other things I found of interest there. (Someday I want to go through and read some of the other articles and stories as well.) I kept everything in folders by month and year, and eventually I started typing out the text and organizing it all in another Scrivener project. It turned out to be a HUGE project: 480 fashion prints and over 200,000 words. (Fortunately, I am a very fast typist.)

About halfway through, I began to think perhaps other authors might benefit from having this information. It wouldn’t take much to format it as an e-book. It didn’t occur to me to put it up for sale until later, when several authors assured me they would love to purchase it. And frankly, the process of formatting so many images and text turned out to be extremely time-consuming, even when my plan was for an e-book only. Charging a few dollars for such a comprehensive project seemed reasonable enough. Little did I know how large the book was going to be. 1462 pages, to be precise. Amazon warned me it was a big file. I hope the buyers don’t have problems with it.

Eventually I mentioned it at a Facebook party, and everyone kept asking if it was going to be in print. Well, I hadn’t thought of doing that right away, but as long as I had all the files, I thought I might as well look into it. And when I did, I had some surprises coming.

First of all, Createspace won’t print a 1462-page book. In fact, Createspace’s limit is 480 pages. So I had to break the book down into four parts: 1809-1814, 1815-1818, 1819-1822, 1823-1828. Four books, in addition to the original monstrously huge e-book. Four books is four times the amount of work, but oh well. I plugged away.

That leads to the second surprise. Color books of 300-400 pages are very expensive. The lowest price Createspace would allow me to set was $46+, with zero royalties. That pretty much floored me. Who’s going to pay $200 for four books? But hey, they were already done. I couldn’t stop now.

However, it occurred to me that many potential purchasers might not be that interested in the fashion commentary. What if I put together a print book with only the fashion prints? Since there were 480 prints alone, the minimum number of pages I needed was 492. Createspace only does a maximum of 480. So I decided to check out Ingram Spark. Ingram will publish a wider range of sizes and pages than Createspace, so I initiated the process. Ingram will do an e-book for the same price as a print book, so that’s how I ended up with another e-book (with the prints only) as well as another print book.

Seven. That’s seven versions in all. Does that sound excessive? Of course it does. But through it all, I learned so much. I hope historical fashion connoisseurs will find at least one of them useful.

And now… I think I better get back to writing stories.

P.S. I also created a Regency fashion print Facebook group. Here’s the link if you are interested: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2216340281934103.

Also, today at 4 p.m. EDT, I’m hosting a release party for my Ackermann books. If you’d like to attend, you must first join the group above, and then you’ll have access to the event. Guest authors include: Ella Quinn, Heather King, Caroline Warfield, Jude Knight, Louisa Cornell, Bluestocking Belles, Cora Lee, Cerise DeLand, Collette Cameron, Rue Allyn, Lizzi Tremayne, Victoria Vane, Elizabeth Ellen Carter, Aileen Fish, and Sherry Ewing. Will I see you there?