Virtually none of my books is currently available. I'm afraid they never got the distribution that other similar books get. My book with Pete Best, 'The Best Years Of The Beatles', gives a completely different insight into Pete's life than the previous book 'Beatle!' and is quite lavishly illustrated, but it was only published in Britain and soon went out of print. I believe copies are still available from Pete Best's own site and I asked Roag to request all the original film of the book from the publisher. I spent about 20 years compiling my encyclopedias, but apart from 'The Beatles Encyclopedia', which was originally published in America by Hyperion, the rest had little distribution in the States. They include the revised edition of the Encyclopedia and the encyclopedias on George, John, Paul and Ringo.
The books on George, Paul and Ringo are still available at
www.merseybeat.co.uk at less than half their original price - and signed!
I've had bad luck with my books - lots of times the corrections I made were never done. In a book with 500,000 words and hundreds of dates, occasionally a printer would put 1968 when it would be 1962 and so on - and although I'd correct the proofs, often they wouldn't be corrected. With the original encyclopedia all the reviews of Beatles publications weren't used, all my colour photos of the Beatles were lost with the publisher, with the revised edition the publisher lost 40,000 words - and so on. With my original Mersey Beat book in 1977 I didn't get my set of original copies of Mersey Beat back, so I went to the publishers office and found them spread across some shelves in the basement - with half of the issues missing!
For an insight into author's publishing problems, I now give authors a forum to write about their books themselves in the 'Rock Books' section of
www.merseybeat.co.uk