Kentmere couple offer digital opportunity for budding writers (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Kentmere couple offer digital opportunity for budding writers

4:37pm Tuesday 4th September 2012 in Business By Helen Perkins, Reporter

A PAIR of book enthusiasts has launched a publishing firm to help budding authors take their first steps towards literary fame.

Robert and Rosamund Rid-ley, of Kentmere, have set up Waterlord Digital Publishing to put manuscripts in front of a digital readership.

For a fee, their business converts text documents into formats for e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

The pair was inspired by a book, published by six friends, which they found in a junk shop.

Their find, a 100-year-old account of backpacking adv-entures in France, convinced Mr and Mrs Ridley that they should do more to encourage new authors.

The pair researched its origins and published Dear Friends, Liebe Freunde as a response to the tales they discovered.

Mr Ridley, a former pupil of Queen Elizabeth School, Kirkby Lonsdale, now converts the typed docu-ments of modern authors into formats for publishing. He also provides novels with a unique International Standard Book Number.

The software designer, 56, said: “My wife has published books and I’ve converted them to e-readable formats.

“That form of publishing democratises fiction because it makes it possible to create a batch of books and offer them at a cheap price in order to become known as an author. It is a good platform for new writers.

“There is still a case of publishing some books in physical form, particularly non-fiction, but I think the future for novels is in e-publishing, where they are good value for readers.”

Mrs Ridley, 56, a former epidemiologist and Open University tutor from Man-chester, has written for newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Tele-graph, the Independent, Country Living, Cumbria Life, Cosmopolitan and Bella. Her novels The Widow Bird and Changing Places have both been published in paperback forms and online.