In this little section on each page I will explain what happened to us along the way, so you can avoid the errors we made and hopefully repeat the things that worked well.
Our book started life as a little joke amongst friends when we moved to Austin, Texas. We lived in a street called Tossa Lane, which, as you can imagine caused more than it's fair share of embarrassment amongst our British friends, let alone the banks and other companies we had to change addresses with. It did, however, point out that there were a list of words that whilst you would not say them out loud in public, meant absolutely nothing to our American chums, and vice versa.
Of course we all know about fag and fanny pack and so on but the longer we lived in the US, the more words we found that caused embarrassment or were otherwise humorous.
So our little website appeared - to share our findings with our chums at home and abroad. The web address of the site was so obscure I can't even remember what it was - it was based on one of those freebie sites that teach the novice (like me) to learn html and get on the web.
Somewhat surprisingly - our little site received a lot of visitors and the content grew day by day until after about a year, someone suggested we turn it into a book. After a lot of thinking I finally printed it all off and sent it to loads of publishers in New York and got loads of letters back telling me it was rubbish. Politely of course!
Anyway - we returned to England and the project took on a new life when we moved the whole lot to our own little domain - www.effingpot.com - another story in itself (it's on the site if you are interested -> here). We rose up to the top of the search engine rankings, the visits increased and so did the requests for a printed version.
And so the quest to self publish began. At first I scoured the net, bookshops and other resources for clues on how to do it and basically found a reasonable book. It was full of fluff and not much real life stuff but with that and what we found out for ourselves we managed to do it. This site attempts to help you through the things we found out the hard way. And it's free!
Oh and the book - that's called The Very Best of British and has an ISBN of 0953696812. As with this site - you can read it all for free on the website, or buy the book at any of these outlets.
