I wrote THE GRAVE AND THE FIGURE EIGHT  in the early seventies in longhand in about 14 thick 8" by 11" student notebooks, skipping every other line for revisions.  I did some revising, but I looked at the ms. and realized that this book would probably rival WAR AND PEACE in length.  Because of my teaching duties and the extreme unlikelihood of anyone publishing such a long work from an unknown, I put it aside and reworked it in the first decade of the 21st. century.  It was taken by a publisher who accepted unknowns, but the price was set so high that few would buy it!  This occurred when ebooks were getting underway. ((It's  available as an ebook now).   I can't prove the following, but I suspect that the company set prices  so high so that the authors would buy books at a discount (still high) and try to sell the publications on their own.