Today's main post is at http://www.scriverart.blogspot.com since it's mostly of interest to that constituency.
But for the sake of bloggers, I will say that I took my "Twelve Blackfeet Indians" POD Lulu.com generated books to Barnes & Noble, knowing that they would not accept my table-top published books because they had no ISBN and therefore couldn't be managed by the B&N system. Since this particular Lulu.com book DOES have an ISBN, I thought it would be acceptable, but no. Now B&N has a NEW policy which is not to sell non-returnable books. Ingrams marks them on their database.
There are two factors: One is that print-on-demand has partly become so popular BECAUSE authors and publishers go broke when bookstores stock their shelves with returnable books -- wouldn't it be nice if all the groceries that spoiled or became outdated could be mailed back to the producers?
The other is that quality-control has always been the job of the publishers. Now that the publishers have abandoned quality as a criteria and only accept market research that indicates fat profit, they no long provide the bookstore gate-keeping which used to keep out what Wheeler calls "sludge." No one has time to actually read the book at the book store level.
But since it is not only bookstores that sell books, I took mine on down to the History Center, where they were acceptable even without ISBN. They were taken on a "consignment" basis, but I previously sold table-top books there, found it a good brisk place to sell, and always received prompt and accurate book keeping reports. I suppose you could say that the big chains, by insisting on returnability, were also taking books on consignment. The difference is that the History Center actually looks at the books and evaluates them personally.
The B&N manager, a handsome young man, felt badly. He wanted to carry the book. I told him POD was part of a plot to destroy his book chain. That didn't cheer him up. I told the clerk (overweight, goatee, young, many pierced earrings) the same and then told him that I was going to go use my corporate-sellout gift card at Starbucks, since the one in the B&N is a false front that won't take the card. He laughed at the irony. The manager did not. Managing a large book chain store is a thankless job.
Now I'm thinking about the new Lulu.com strategy of allowing authors to create shell "publishers" of their own and order their ISBN that way. I don't think Ingrams will be able to pick them out. Hmmmm.
Showing posts with label PRINT ON DEMAND. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PRINT ON DEMAND. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Monday, July 02, 2007
NEW PUBLISHING PARADIGM
I grumble all the time (probably defensively) that the paradigm most people have of writing is the Life magazine genius pattern they developed for Hemingway, Steinbeck and Picasso. Writing is seen to be a great eruction (careful how you spell that) from an inspired secret world that is as valuable as pearls and as self-generated.
Other forms of print, like directions, are treated with contempt. You can tell from the lack of care in writing them. “Ha! Understand THIS, you scum!” seems to be the basic attitude, and in four languages. But surely there must be something in between that is simply basic information carefully conveyed.
Then there’s the thesis approach to writing. One of my fellow students in seminary averaged ten footnotes to every page. Talk about covering your butt. I tried to launch out into some original theory but, partly because my life experience was so different from everyone else (esp. faculty), I was squashed in a hurry. The point of a thesis is not to be original -- it is to flatter one’s advisors.
There ARE books that are bought, not because they are works of genius, but simply because they are needed and useful. The people that want these books will go in search of them -- no need to beg for reviews except enough information for people to buy them. With search engines, little escapes notice.
Though I originally started out with the idea of the works of genius myself, life has taught me that genius is usually a matter of long, hard preparation -- finally presented with an opportunity. And I have the strong idea that many pearls of genius never get out of the oyster, so to speak. To publicize and sell is quite different from writing -- which is why publishing houses will probably go on existing -- just greatly changed. Now that they have shifted from trying to assess the writer to trying to survey and analyze their readers, they only have to broaden their understanding of what a reader is. So far, the conviction seems to be that readers are not quite genius enough to write books, but still exceptional enough to wish they did and to read the kind of books they would write if they could. Mostly living in college towns or Manhattan. The publishers haven’t changed their “paradigm of privilege” -- just slid it over to the readers.
When I was in the UU ministry and trying to “grow” congregations, which was what everyone insisted was the duty of the minister in the Eighties and which was defined in terms of member numbers, we used the rule-of-thumb that one in a thousand people would be a natural Unitarian. There were only two cities in Montana that even approached a hundred-thousand people and they would yield only a hundred people. Not enough to sustain a minister and building. But there are two cities in Alberta that number over a million citizens, which would predict a thousand Unitarians. Yet each supported only a modest 300 member church plus a small splinter. Still, as a rule of thumb for the commodification of an ineffable (religion), it was useful. So a publisher could think in those terms.
When Vine Deloria, brilliant rabble-rouser, had a new book about Indians coming out, he asked his publisher how many copies they expected to sell on Vine’s home reservation. “None,” said the surprised publisher. “There are no bookstores there.” Like children, assuming that books are sold only in bookstores and shoes sold only in shoe stores. But maybe some shoe stores would sell books, if they were about Nike! Shift from selling the book qua book to selling the book by content.
So Martin Murie sells his gentle conservation stories in bait shops, service stations, bars, general stores, and whatever else kind of establishment in northern New York might intersect with people of the right sort. The principle is exposure to an assortment who will self-select, rather than zeroing in on only the largest cut. (The Big Box stores in Montana say they will not stock MAC products because they are only 10% of the computer users. I tell them that if they would set aside a corner for MAC products, they would gain 10% more customers. But they are controlled by corporations far away. I buy on the Internet.) I didn’t know until recently that Ivan and Carol Doig started out selling “This House of Sky” from their car while driving around Montana. That was twenty-five years ago and it was necessary to impress the publisher by guaranteeing sales themselves.
We’ve gotten way off on the “best seller” conceit, believing that a book that’s not a best seller is not worthy. People check the lists in The New York Times Book Review or The Globe and Mail or Amazon, and think that tells them something about the value of the book. “If everyone else is reading it, I should read it!” So the point is not the book, but chatter about it. Maybe that’s a leftover from being in a college class where everyone reads the same thing at the same time. The great thing about this “long tail” notion is that it ought to help break up this prejudice, which is really a way to sell the entities who make up the lists. Can’t reading be a private and unique affair? Aren’t there many books that I love dearly but wouldn’t suggest to others because I strongly suspect they wouldn’t strike the same chord?
After I was fired from teaching in Heart Butte and stranded on my mother’s sofa in Portland, I went down to the library and checked out every book I could find about how to get a job. One of the most useful said this brilliant thing: “Half the people out there will not hire you. Your task at this point is to figure out where the other half are and how to make contact with them.”
With my Lulu.com books, I’m clearly aiming at Blackfeet and the people who visit the reservation or who love the people or who are part of the 8,000 member Blackfeet diasphora. Useful books about history and place. Local shops, schools and blogs seem to be the natural methods. The newspapers are afraid of political implications. These books are not appealing to the tides of wealthy and romantic white people who surge through the state, buy slick magazines that advertise hot tubs and McMansions. The writers who do sell to those latter folks are a circle that doesn’t really like to admit newcomers anyway.
With the University of Calgary Press book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I’ve hedged my bets. Cowboy artists, sure -- not just the artists but the battalions of people who staff the museums, galleries, and “historical centers.” Not just cowboy artists but lovers of classical sculpture. Montana folks, right. Alberta people, who have just discovered he was under their noses all the time. Blackfeet. And then there’s the love story.
The old advice about “write what you love” still holds true. Let’s hope the people who respond to that will find out the book exists.
Other forms of print, like directions, are treated with contempt. You can tell from the lack of care in writing them. “Ha! Understand THIS, you scum!” seems to be the basic attitude, and in four languages. But surely there must be something in between that is simply basic information carefully conveyed.
Then there’s the thesis approach to writing. One of my fellow students in seminary averaged ten footnotes to every page. Talk about covering your butt. I tried to launch out into some original theory but, partly because my life experience was so different from everyone else (esp. faculty), I was squashed in a hurry. The point of a thesis is not to be original -- it is to flatter one’s advisors.
There ARE books that are bought, not because they are works of genius, but simply because they are needed and useful. The people that want these books will go in search of them -- no need to beg for reviews except enough information for people to buy them. With search engines, little escapes notice.
Though I originally started out with the idea of the works of genius myself, life has taught me that genius is usually a matter of long, hard preparation -- finally presented with an opportunity. And I have the strong idea that many pearls of genius never get out of the oyster, so to speak. To publicize and sell is quite different from writing -- which is why publishing houses will probably go on existing -- just greatly changed. Now that they have shifted from trying to assess the writer to trying to survey and analyze their readers, they only have to broaden their understanding of what a reader is. So far, the conviction seems to be that readers are not quite genius enough to write books, but still exceptional enough to wish they did and to read the kind of books they would write if they could. Mostly living in college towns or Manhattan. The publishers haven’t changed their “paradigm of privilege” -- just slid it over to the readers.
When I was in the UU ministry and trying to “grow” congregations, which was what everyone insisted was the duty of the minister in the Eighties and which was defined in terms of member numbers, we used the rule-of-thumb that one in a thousand people would be a natural Unitarian. There were only two cities in Montana that even approached a hundred-thousand people and they would yield only a hundred people. Not enough to sustain a minister and building. But there are two cities in Alberta that number over a million citizens, which would predict a thousand Unitarians. Yet each supported only a modest 300 member church plus a small splinter. Still, as a rule of thumb for the commodification of an ineffable (religion), it was useful. So a publisher could think in those terms.
When Vine Deloria, brilliant rabble-rouser, had a new book about Indians coming out, he asked his publisher how many copies they expected to sell on Vine’s home reservation. “None,” said the surprised publisher. “There are no bookstores there.” Like children, assuming that books are sold only in bookstores and shoes sold only in shoe stores. But maybe some shoe stores would sell books, if they were about Nike! Shift from selling the book qua book to selling the book by content.
So Martin Murie sells his gentle conservation stories in bait shops, service stations, bars, general stores, and whatever else kind of establishment in northern New York might intersect with people of the right sort. The principle is exposure to an assortment who will self-select, rather than zeroing in on only the largest cut. (The Big Box stores in Montana say they will not stock MAC products because they are only 10% of the computer users. I tell them that if they would set aside a corner for MAC products, they would gain 10% more customers. But they are controlled by corporations far away. I buy on the Internet.) I didn’t know until recently that Ivan and Carol Doig started out selling “This House of Sky” from their car while driving around Montana. That was twenty-five years ago and it was necessary to impress the publisher by guaranteeing sales themselves.
We’ve gotten way off on the “best seller” conceit, believing that a book that’s not a best seller is not worthy. People check the lists in The New York Times Book Review or The Globe and Mail or Amazon, and think that tells them something about the value of the book. “If everyone else is reading it, I should read it!” So the point is not the book, but chatter about it. Maybe that’s a leftover from being in a college class where everyone reads the same thing at the same time. The great thing about this “long tail” notion is that it ought to help break up this prejudice, which is really a way to sell the entities who make up the lists. Can’t reading be a private and unique affair? Aren’t there many books that I love dearly but wouldn’t suggest to others because I strongly suspect they wouldn’t strike the same chord?
After I was fired from teaching in Heart Butte and stranded on my mother’s sofa in Portland, I went down to the library and checked out every book I could find about how to get a job. One of the most useful said this brilliant thing: “Half the people out there will not hire you. Your task at this point is to figure out where the other half are and how to make contact with them.”
With my Lulu.com books, I’m clearly aiming at Blackfeet and the people who visit the reservation or who love the people or who are part of the 8,000 member Blackfeet diasphora. Useful books about history and place. Local shops, schools and blogs seem to be the natural methods. The newspapers are afraid of political implications. These books are not appealing to the tides of wealthy and romantic white people who surge through the state, buy slick magazines that advertise hot tubs and McMansions. The writers who do sell to those latter folks are a circle that doesn’t really like to admit newcomers anyway.
With the University of Calgary Press book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I’ve hedged my bets. Cowboy artists, sure -- not just the artists but the battalions of people who staff the museums, galleries, and “historical centers.” Not just cowboy artists but lovers of classical sculpture. Montana folks, right. Alberta people, who have just discovered he was under their noses all the time. Blackfeet. And then there’s the love story.
The old advice about “write what you love” still holds true. Let’s hope the people who respond to that will find out the book exists.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
PRINT THAT, RUMPELSTILSKIN!!
The print on demand machine called Espresso is as close to me as Edmonton now -- that is, a long day’s drive. Of course, Edmonton is two or three times as large as any city in Montana and the machine will be on the campus of the University, so it’s most likely to be used for textbooks which these days are often compilations from chapters in a number of published books (often themselves theses developed into books) which are likely to be useful only for one professor’s course. Even conventional textbooks have a limited lifetime in a context where science is moving fast. In fields like the humanities, a book like Mimesis or Elements of Style comes back to usefulness if it ever leaves. But consider the immense changes in knowledge triggered by genomics -- the new insights arrive daily.
Anyway, I already have a print-on-demand machine: my trusty computer. I’d better give it a name. How about Rumpelstilskin? I can download early anthropology about the Blackfeet that has long been out of print. Or government reports that I had no idea existed until I used a search engine.
Most of the people who are objecting to print-on-demand are thinking in terms of the quality of the book itself or the problem of people finding out that it exists in the first place. They are thinking about the unfamiliarity of digitization and not about what digitization implies in some other ways. For instance, what does it do to international barriers when books, like music and movies, can be invisibly shipped across traditional national boundaries?
Speaking from experience, one could only buy Canadian books by going up to Canada or by already knowing a Canadian bookseller to contact via mail or the phone. Even in the latter case, the book had to be shipped with all the paraphenalia of stickers and declarations -- to say nothing of the cost. When I’ve tried to take my little homemade books across the line, I was stopped and harassed by the border agents from Canada claiming that I was damaging their markets by smuggling in illicit US products. Now when I go to Canada, it is the US people who accuse me of somehow bringing back terrorist-related materials. So I just don’t go to Canada anymore. Instead, I buy on the Internet.
At one time I couldn’t sell used Canadian books on the US side, both because no one knew what they were about anyway and because the dealers couldn’t figure out how to value them. Now I can sell them on the Internet. When I looked for Kutkos, the book written by my fourth grade teacher in Portland, Oregon, who was a Chinook Indian, I found it in an Irish bookstore, and when I wanted a copy of Sacred Paint about Ned Jacob, an artist who was here in the Sixties, I found it in Australia. They tell me the best market for Bob Scriver’s book, The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains, is in Germany and France. (Up to $800!) It’s written in English but is basically a photo book and educated people in those countries are likely to speak English anyway.
Anyway, I’m interested in environmental issues, which belong to the ecosystem which is continuous from Yellowstone up to Edmonton, and in the Blackfeet whose nation was unnaturally cut through by the 49th parallel. I want to note that the Canadian resistance to Yankee invaders is strong -- maybe justified. But I still use books and other materials from both sides of the border.
There has in the past been a “gentleman’s agreement” among Canada, England, the U.S., and probably other English-speaking countries, that they would not “poach” on each other’s territory, to use a metaphor from the elite classes of Britain who enforced the boundaries of “their” territory with armed game wardens. But now the gloves are off. My book to be published this fall by the University of Calgary Press (Bronze Inside and Out) must be distributed in the US through the University of Michigan because a published book is a physical entity that can be controlled in shipment. But what about the digitized version? (In fact, what did we say in the contract about digitized versions?) Of course, my Print on Demand books through Lulu.com are already digitized. They do not have to stop at the border if they are downloaded and the printed versions, if Lulu.com finally acquires a printing center in the US, won’t have to either. (At present they are printed in Britain. Maybe the US industry doesn't want them here.) What about advertising? Won’t that be international commerce?
And what about the U of Oklahoma Press and the U of Nebraska Press who have dominated the market when it comes to books about prairie artists? Of course, these two presses had first refusal. The U of Calgary Press may be opening a broad new market for itself, but they are small -- will they be overwhelmed?
I had not realized how much of a barrier existed between countries until I was doing grad work at the University of Chicago and discovered that the Powell’s Bookstore there had a trove of “object relations” psych books. (Winnicott and co, “teddy-bear” attachment theory) In this country there wasn’t enough interest to justify a publisher picking up these books or maybe the shrinks in this country didn’t like the competition, so they just weren’t available. In fact, one wouldn’t know they existed. (They do now. Lady Di said she was raising her children via Winnicott methods.)
No doubt uneducated non-readers (I suppose one might be educated without reading and one might read without becoming educated) think that a book is an object and only that. But there’s a bait-and-switch in this story. When Bob Scriver started out as a taxidermist, he had a wrangle with the IRS. (He continued with wrangles all his working life, since they are an excellent example of the category above.) When a customer failed to pay for a mounted head, leaving Bob stuck with it and not much market since the persons who want such things usually want them only because of the associations with an exciting hunt and a personal coup, he tried to take the $60 fee off his taxes as a loss. But the IRS said no. He was only allowed to take the cost of the materials: a bit of tanning acid, glass eyes, some clay and paper mache, and glue. A few dollars. Not even the labor. But when the heads were just sitting around the shop as inventory, waiting to be sold, they were valued at $60 or what the customer would have paid to have the head mounted. Heads I win, tails you lose.
This is the way books have developed: the physical object is worth something when sitting on the shelf. Digitized, it is as though it no longer exists. We probably have not even started to digest the implications of this. To some people it implies that the author has also stopped existing.
One possibility is that the governments, China-style, may try to impose virtual borders in the book trade between countries. These borders could have serious impacts on Internet use. They will have the excuse of security, of course. The effect will probably be to considerably heighten the value and simple charisma of the books.
The ways books are advertised will change. Already the traditional ads in the newspapers and magazines have been diminishing and reviews have fallen to blogs where any book review can be found through search engines but no review can be easily judged for fairness, insight or consistency. The biggest restrictions will be among English-speaking countries since foreign languages serve as a natural barrier. Traditionally, sharing a language has meant MORE freedom and friendship, not less. More print will go to voice, pod-cast style, so people can “read” while fixing supper or driving or running. Of course, this will affect the style of the writing and maybe encourage such things as adding sound effects. I don’t think it will become fashionable to have a talking author head on your iPhone.
Later I want to come back to the distribution and advertising side of publishing, which is what publishers used to do. I think of one of my favorite stories: a new drill sergeant is out with his men, marching cross-country. Everything is going famously until they came to a fence with no gate. The sergeant knew no command for “crawl over the fence.”
He stood on the near side, yelled, “Company, faaaaall OUT!” Then he climbed over the fence, stood there and yelled, “Company, faaaall IN!!” In other words, there is likely to be a free-form individual scramble for a while. But it will work.
Anyway, I already have a print-on-demand machine: my trusty computer. I’d better give it a name. How about Rumpelstilskin? I can download early anthropology about the Blackfeet that has long been out of print. Or government reports that I had no idea existed until I used a search engine.
Most of the people who are objecting to print-on-demand are thinking in terms of the quality of the book itself or the problem of people finding out that it exists in the first place. They are thinking about the unfamiliarity of digitization and not about what digitization implies in some other ways. For instance, what does it do to international barriers when books, like music and movies, can be invisibly shipped across traditional national boundaries?
Speaking from experience, one could only buy Canadian books by going up to Canada or by already knowing a Canadian bookseller to contact via mail or the phone. Even in the latter case, the book had to be shipped with all the paraphenalia of stickers and declarations -- to say nothing of the cost. When I’ve tried to take my little homemade books across the line, I was stopped and harassed by the border agents from Canada claiming that I was damaging their markets by smuggling in illicit US products. Now when I go to Canada, it is the US people who accuse me of somehow bringing back terrorist-related materials. So I just don’t go to Canada anymore. Instead, I buy on the Internet.
At one time I couldn’t sell used Canadian books on the US side, both because no one knew what they were about anyway and because the dealers couldn’t figure out how to value them. Now I can sell them on the Internet. When I looked for Kutkos, the book written by my fourth grade teacher in Portland, Oregon, who was a Chinook Indian, I found it in an Irish bookstore, and when I wanted a copy of Sacred Paint about Ned Jacob, an artist who was here in the Sixties, I found it in Australia. They tell me the best market for Bob Scriver’s book, The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains, is in Germany and France. (Up to $800!) It’s written in English but is basically a photo book and educated people in those countries are likely to speak English anyway.
Anyway, I’m interested in environmental issues, which belong to the ecosystem which is continuous from Yellowstone up to Edmonton, and in the Blackfeet whose nation was unnaturally cut through by the 49th parallel. I want to note that the Canadian resistance to Yankee invaders is strong -- maybe justified. But I still use books and other materials from both sides of the border.
There has in the past been a “gentleman’s agreement” among Canada, England, the U.S., and probably other English-speaking countries, that they would not “poach” on each other’s territory, to use a metaphor from the elite classes of Britain who enforced the boundaries of “their” territory with armed game wardens. But now the gloves are off. My book to be published this fall by the University of Calgary Press (Bronze Inside and Out) must be distributed in the US through the University of Michigan because a published book is a physical entity that can be controlled in shipment. But what about the digitized version? (In fact, what did we say in the contract about digitized versions?) Of course, my Print on Demand books through Lulu.com are already digitized. They do not have to stop at the border if they are downloaded and the printed versions, if Lulu.com finally acquires a printing center in the US, won’t have to either. (At present they are printed in Britain. Maybe the US industry doesn't want them here.) What about advertising? Won’t that be international commerce?
And what about the U of Oklahoma Press and the U of Nebraska Press who have dominated the market when it comes to books about prairie artists? Of course, these two presses had first refusal. The U of Calgary Press may be opening a broad new market for itself, but they are small -- will they be overwhelmed?
I had not realized how much of a barrier existed between countries until I was doing grad work at the University of Chicago and discovered that the Powell’s Bookstore there had a trove of “object relations” psych books. (Winnicott and co, “teddy-bear” attachment theory) In this country there wasn’t enough interest to justify a publisher picking up these books or maybe the shrinks in this country didn’t like the competition, so they just weren’t available. In fact, one wouldn’t know they existed. (They do now. Lady Di said she was raising her children via Winnicott methods.)
No doubt uneducated non-readers (I suppose one might be educated without reading and one might read without becoming educated) think that a book is an object and only that. But there’s a bait-and-switch in this story. When Bob Scriver started out as a taxidermist, he had a wrangle with the IRS. (He continued with wrangles all his working life, since they are an excellent example of the category above.) When a customer failed to pay for a mounted head, leaving Bob stuck with it and not much market since the persons who want such things usually want them only because of the associations with an exciting hunt and a personal coup, he tried to take the $60 fee off his taxes as a loss. But the IRS said no. He was only allowed to take the cost of the materials: a bit of tanning acid, glass eyes, some clay and paper mache, and glue. A few dollars. Not even the labor. But when the heads were just sitting around the shop as inventory, waiting to be sold, they were valued at $60 or what the customer would have paid to have the head mounted. Heads I win, tails you lose.
This is the way books have developed: the physical object is worth something when sitting on the shelf. Digitized, it is as though it no longer exists. We probably have not even started to digest the implications of this. To some people it implies that the author has also stopped existing.
One possibility is that the governments, China-style, may try to impose virtual borders in the book trade between countries. These borders could have serious impacts on Internet use. They will have the excuse of security, of course. The effect will probably be to considerably heighten the value and simple charisma of the books.
The ways books are advertised will change. Already the traditional ads in the newspapers and magazines have been diminishing and reviews have fallen to blogs where any book review can be found through search engines but no review can be easily judged for fairness, insight or consistency. The biggest restrictions will be among English-speaking countries since foreign languages serve as a natural barrier. Traditionally, sharing a language has meant MORE freedom and friendship, not less. More print will go to voice, pod-cast style, so people can “read” while fixing supper or driving or running. Of course, this will affect the style of the writing and maybe encourage such things as adding sound effects. I don’t think it will become fashionable to have a talking author head on your iPhone.
Later I want to come back to the distribution and advertising side of publishing, which is what publishers used to do. I think of one of my favorite stories: a new drill sergeant is out with his men, marching cross-country. Everything is going famously until they came to a fence with no gate. The sergeant knew no command for “crawl over the fence.”
He stood on the near side, yelled, “Company, faaaaall OUT!” Then he climbed over the fence, stood there and yelled, “Company, faaaall IN!!” In other words, there is likely to be a free-form individual scramble for a while. But it will work.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
PERSONAL HANDMADE BOOKS: GWEN FROSTIC
I wonder how many people remember Gwen Frostic. She was a poet who learned how to make her own books -- not just to print her books, but to illuminate them (not just illustrate) with elegant portraits of plants and birds, and even to make her own paper so that one gorgeous page actually had a real butterfly pressed and bonded into it.
The little yellow butterfly (a sulphur butterfly?) is actually embedded in translucent paper so that when one turns the page, it seems to lift from or descend on the grasses on the next page.
Many of the images are gently humorous. This is one of my favorites.
Here's a double-page spread of a winter scene with red willows.
The covers generally look similar to this. Greyed-out green or brown, delicate lines of small familiar growing things.
Gwen was solidly grounded in natural history, a poetic precursor of Mary Oliver, but with no narrative except ongoing life itself. She was the very opposite of the city-trapped trendy aesthete looking for fame and fortune. Simply she produced these objects in a near-medieval way -- expressions of the heart. I bought several of them, gave a couple away as special gifts and couldn’t bear to part with the last ones. She has been an ideal I meant to follow and maybe it’s not too late.
When I looked her up on Abebooks.com, I was surprised to see the enormous disparity in the value of her books. At the low end, one dollar will buy you one of these beautiful books! At the high end, the book dealer wants four HUNDRED dollars. Same book! I suspect the difference is between someone who appreciates a custom collectible unique book-as-object and someone who only sees value in either best-sellers or high academic works. If I had a hundred bucks to spare right now, I’d invest them in Gwen Frostic books, because I think the market will converge on handmade, limited edition, unique, personal books.
With that in mind, I’ve acquired books about making paper and about making book covers. With all the excitement about Print On Demand, there has been little attention to the covers which are often simply a glossy photograph with a title -- at least that’s the way mine are. Maybe perfect bound and maybe spiral bound (much better for reference books because one wants them to lie down flat). It’s perfectly adequate for thin ones to be stapled.
But it seems to me that if only a few copies of a special book are to be produced, that a really good hand-binding job and some special attention to the materials and design is a good thing, if only because it opposes the rising tide of plastic ephemera around us. For years now I’ve been making a pitch for Blackfeet books written by Blackfeet, illustrated by hand, bound in buckskin, maybe beaded or quilled, with a feather for a bookmark. When Bob Scriver got to his “artifact book,” the one that sells for $800 in some places (“Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains”) he made a certain number of presentation copies, specially bound and with a slipcase that had a compartment on the side into which was put a branch of sage, the kind the Blackfeet used for smudging.
One of my delayed projects for the summer has been some “nanobooks” containing the nano stories I wrote earlier. I printed them onto sticky mailing labels, sewed some small booklets and meant to put a label on each page, but then ran aground when I discovered I was sticking them on crooked and would need to somehow make reference dots as guides. Then again, I have rubber stamps and had meant to stamp some decorations or use felt pens to at least scribble on some colored patterns. And again I lost confidence. But there are also people who are the other way around -- they could make little booklets if only they had an idea what to say.
Noma Coleman, a family friend and a one-room school teacher, made each of us cousins a story book when we were little, cutting out ads and composing doggerel couplets about them as though they were about us. When I got an advertising flyer that featured a small Chinese girl as a model for clothes, I tried my hand at this art form with the innovation of laminating the pages and fastening them together with a medley of bright ribbons. As it happened, my cousin had just adopted a Chinese girl so I had the perfect person to send it to. She returned the favor with a slender rainbow on blue and silver paper.
My Chinese grandma friend and former classmate, Pearl Lee, especially enjoys making folded and precision-cut greeting cards, often with a Chinese theme. They are far beyond anything I could do. If the problem with Print On Demand is that it reduces books to something pedestrian that anyone could do, then perhaps custom bindings and covers can restore some of the value and uniqueness. You know, they say that in Asian countries everyone can do lovely art and poetry, because they don't know they not supposed to do it unless they're geniuses!
This material about Frostic is from www.tomfolio.com/AuthorInfo/authors/GwenFrostic.asp
Gwen Frostic (1906-2001)
Sara Gwendolen Frostic was a Michigan author, book manufacturer, linoleum-block nature artist and papermaker.
Born in the "thumb" of Michigan, Gwen Frostic spent her entire life in the state. She wrote, illustrated, printed and published 20 books and contributed to four others. Though some described her as handicapped -- she walked with a limp, spoke with a slight slur and had a withered left arm -- she never thought of herself that way.
Her 18-press print shop in Benzonia with its inviting gallery/showroom is still a popular tourist attraction for folks visiting the northwestern part of Michigan's lower peninsula.
In the early 1940s, Frostic set up her first printing shop in her home in Wyandotte, just south of Detroit. Though she moved twice, she continued to work out of her home for the rest of her life. During the 1950s she operated in both Wyandotte and Frankfurt, but in 1964, after she had fallen in love with "the north," she transferred her now booming business to Benzonia.
A Frostic book is instantly recognizable: hardcover, no jacket, every page a different kind of paper, and simple but beautiful illustrations on every spread. Frostic created everything you see in her books, from the myriad papers to the exquisitely printed illustrations to the wisps of free verse that flow across the pages.
If you examine a Frostic book more closely, you’ll find the front board covered in smooth, colored paper and illustrated with a simple but elegant block print depicting some natural object. The spine and rear will likely be bound in a differently colored, differently textured paper. No text will be found on the covers except a subdued title on the front. Almost all Frostic books measure about 6 x 9 inches, although she made some that were closer to 8 x 10.
Inside the book, you’ll be amazed by the many and various fancy papers, some smooth, some textured, some embossed, some mottled, some like tissue paper, some translucent. Many pages will have deckle (ragged) edges while others will be neatly trimmed. Earth-toned papers and earth-toned inks will be heavily favored. The text will be gracefully designed and will not appear on every page. Each spread will be individual and unique, a beautiful work of art in itself.
. . . Since her death in 2001, her business, Presscraft Papers, has been carried on by her longtime friends Pam and Kirk Lorenz, and by her nephew, Bill Frostic.
The little yellow butterfly (a sulphur butterfly?) is actually embedded in translucent paper so that when one turns the page, it seems to lift from or descend on the grasses on the next page.
Many of the images are gently humorous. This is one of my favorites.
Here's a double-page spread of a winter scene with red willows.
The covers generally look similar to this. Greyed-out green or brown, delicate lines of small familiar growing things.
Gwen was solidly grounded in natural history, a poetic precursor of Mary Oliver, but with no narrative except ongoing life itself. She was the very opposite of the city-trapped trendy aesthete looking for fame and fortune. Simply she produced these objects in a near-medieval way -- expressions of the heart. I bought several of them, gave a couple away as special gifts and couldn’t bear to part with the last ones. She has been an ideal I meant to follow and maybe it’s not too late.
When I looked her up on Abebooks.com, I was surprised to see the enormous disparity in the value of her books. At the low end, one dollar will buy you one of these beautiful books! At the high end, the book dealer wants four HUNDRED dollars. Same book! I suspect the difference is between someone who appreciates a custom collectible unique book-as-object and someone who only sees value in either best-sellers or high academic works. If I had a hundred bucks to spare right now, I’d invest them in Gwen Frostic books, because I think the market will converge on handmade, limited edition, unique, personal books.
With that in mind, I’ve acquired books about making paper and about making book covers. With all the excitement about Print On Demand, there has been little attention to the covers which are often simply a glossy photograph with a title -- at least that’s the way mine are. Maybe perfect bound and maybe spiral bound (much better for reference books because one wants them to lie down flat). It’s perfectly adequate for thin ones to be stapled.
But it seems to me that if only a few copies of a special book are to be produced, that a really good hand-binding job and some special attention to the materials and design is a good thing, if only because it opposes the rising tide of plastic ephemera around us. For years now I’ve been making a pitch for Blackfeet books written by Blackfeet, illustrated by hand, bound in buckskin, maybe beaded or quilled, with a feather for a bookmark. When Bob Scriver got to his “artifact book,” the one that sells for $800 in some places (“Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains”) he made a certain number of presentation copies, specially bound and with a slipcase that had a compartment on the side into which was put a branch of sage, the kind the Blackfeet used for smudging.
One of my delayed projects for the summer has been some “nanobooks” containing the nano stories I wrote earlier. I printed them onto sticky mailing labels, sewed some small booklets and meant to put a label on each page, but then ran aground when I discovered I was sticking them on crooked and would need to somehow make reference dots as guides. Then again, I have rubber stamps and had meant to stamp some decorations or use felt pens to at least scribble on some colored patterns. And again I lost confidence. But there are also people who are the other way around -- they could make little booklets if only they had an idea what to say.
Noma Coleman, a family friend and a one-room school teacher, made each of us cousins a story book when we were little, cutting out ads and composing doggerel couplets about them as though they were about us. When I got an advertising flyer that featured a small Chinese girl as a model for clothes, I tried my hand at this art form with the innovation of laminating the pages and fastening them together with a medley of bright ribbons. As it happened, my cousin had just adopted a Chinese girl so I had the perfect person to send it to. She returned the favor with a slender rainbow on blue and silver paper.
My Chinese grandma friend and former classmate, Pearl Lee, especially enjoys making folded and precision-cut greeting cards, often with a Chinese theme. They are far beyond anything I could do. If the problem with Print On Demand is that it reduces books to something pedestrian that anyone could do, then perhaps custom bindings and covers can restore some of the value and uniqueness. You know, they say that in Asian countries everyone can do lovely art and poetry, because they don't know they not supposed to do it unless they're geniuses!
This material about Frostic is from www.tomfolio.com/AuthorInfo/authors/GwenFrostic.asp
Gwen Frostic (1906-2001)
Sara Gwendolen Frostic was a Michigan author, book manufacturer, linoleum-block nature artist and papermaker.
Born in the "thumb" of Michigan, Gwen Frostic spent her entire life in the state. She wrote, illustrated, printed and published 20 books and contributed to four others. Though some described her as handicapped -- she walked with a limp, spoke with a slight slur and had a withered left arm -- she never thought of herself that way.
Her 18-press print shop in Benzonia with its inviting gallery/showroom is still a popular tourist attraction for folks visiting the northwestern part of Michigan's lower peninsula.
In the early 1940s, Frostic set up her first printing shop in her home in Wyandotte, just south of Detroit. Though she moved twice, she continued to work out of her home for the rest of her life. During the 1950s she operated in both Wyandotte and Frankfurt, but in 1964, after she had fallen in love with "the north," she transferred her now booming business to Benzonia.
A Frostic book is instantly recognizable: hardcover, no jacket, every page a different kind of paper, and simple but beautiful illustrations on every spread. Frostic created everything you see in her books, from the myriad papers to the exquisitely printed illustrations to the wisps of free verse that flow across the pages.
If you examine a Frostic book more closely, you’ll find the front board covered in smooth, colored paper and illustrated with a simple but elegant block print depicting some natural object. The spine and rear will likely be bound in a differently colored, differently textured paper. No text will be found on the covers except a subdued title on the front. Almost all Frostic books measure about 6 x 9 inches, although she made some that were closer to 8 x 10.
Inside the book, you’ll be amazed by the many and various fancy papers, some smooth, some textured, some embossed, some mottled, some like tissue paper, some translucent. Many pages will have deckle (ragged) edges while others will be neatly trimmed. Earth-toned papers and earth-toned inks will be heavily favored. The text will be gracefully designed and will not appear on every page. Each spread will be individual and unique, a beautiful work of art in itself.
. . . Since her death in 2001, her business, Presscraft Papers, has been carried on by her longtime friends Pam and Kirk Lorenz, and by her nephew, Bill Frostic.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
PRINT ON DEMAND AND SNOOPY
I think it has been underreported how much the traditional publishing industry, through failure and simple change, has invited self-publishing, which is often based on Print on Demand.
First, publishing houses were bought up by international corporation who expected the same kind of investor profits as Campbell soups: that is, 10% or more. This pushed the business from a educated and possibly bankrolled gentleperson's enterprise to the ordinary commodification that in other contexts might be called "prostitution."
Second, advances for works not yet written had to be justified but works not yet written are of necessity unquantifiable. This threw the ball to the market research and fame-is-fortune people. The amounts of advances became a feature of publicity and were compromised by Hollywood-style book-keeping anyway: creative deductions for all associated costs.
Third, the whole problem of print runs, much exacerbated by the brilliant decision of the tax people to consider books inventory to be taxed and also the simple physical necessity of keeping books warm, dry, and pristine (another cost) meant a motive for short print runs and quick liquification which are deadly for books that need time to develop an audience, like Native American books. (Frankly, I think this problem alone snuffed the NA literature renaissance since back east publishers had no idea how to market NA books, therefore ordered small runs and ended them quickly to avoid risk, therefore eliminated eventual wide sales.) Again, the Hollywood model: profit in the first hours of existence.
Fourth: The corporation model required "lean and mean" staffing which meant editors who formerly developed the "house focus" by putting in many days of reading in offices were pushed out to being "agents" who had no house, no focus, no stable of faithful writers, no handholds but the necessity of earning a living. I discovered that some agents are not making a living by selling books but by kindly offering "for a fee" to rewrite over-the-transom works to make them more saleable. This was formerly called "editing" and paid for by the publisher.
Fifth: Proofing and fact-checking are time-consuming and time is money, so -- beyond maybe Spell-checking -- those quality-control elements went out the window. Anyway, fewer and fewer new hires were capable of proofing OR researching a fact, a national education failure.
Sixth: The author has to be promotable, so one strategy is to represent that books are written by popular people, though ghosted by someone else, or to represent the author as a larger-than-life person. This is the slippery slope that took us to the "packaged book" which is invented by sales people right down to hiring someone to tour around pretending to be the author. Or resourceful writers pretending to have shocking pasts.
Seventh: Publishers had somehow made a devil's pact with bookstores to allow the stores to return all unsold books. Not just the ones that are still clean, undamaged and saleable, but also the ones that have big dayglo sale stickers or are shelf-worn or that are simply in the way when it comes time to inventory for a tax-audit at the first of the year. The underside of this pact is that bookstores charge publishers to place the books favorably, as on the end of an aisle.
Eighth: A person who has spent his entire life in media work was recently shocked, SHOCKED to discover that publishers don't bother to spend money on promotion or ads anymore. Which has caused newspapers, whose income came from the ads, to discontinue their book review sections.
Ninth: Another little money-saving step: no money from the publisher for research or the acquisition of necessary photos or graphics. The author must foot the bill.
Tenth: When it comes to the step of selling to the public, the money-making publisher likes big chunks of sales and so sells through chains, either “book” chains like Barnes & Noble or Amazon or “Big Box” chains with special discounts like Walmart or Target. This has caused many small quality bookstores to go out of business. But the regional sales force that makes the sales to such venues are not innovative about replacing them with special interest stores (sports) or local interest stores (grocery stores on reservations).
I have beside my reading chair a book called “A Glorious Accident: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle” by Wim Kayzer. It’s a “tie-in” to a PBS series which was a “concept” developed by Kayzer. He invited some cutting edge thinkers to talk among themselves, something like “The Edge,” which is a website for thinkers who are a little bit “out there.” (I was clued to this book by Michael “Blowhard” of 2blowhards.com.) So this is a “tie-in” product that is “generated” rather than written because it consists of the transcriptions of Kayzer’s preliminary interviews with these quite fascinating men. The publisher is W.H. Freeman and Company, which publishes science books and engages in “custom publishing” by which they mean classroom books that are composites of other books and lab manuals tailored for specific classes. In other words, Print on Demand.
Is this a good thing? Well, here’s an early sentence: “As I drive to his house on Sunday morning through New York, ever fascinating, pompous, and threatening, I feel apprehensive.” Is this a lost appositive, a confused referent, or a peculiar personification of a city? The book has narrow margins, though the subject cries out for many reader notes. It has clearly not even been run through a Spell-check: “srot” for “sort” as well as the kind of thing that evades Spell-check: “his” for “has.” A previous reader had kindly gone through my used copy and made corrections with a ballpoint but even he or she missed a few. In a book explaining complex logic and new paradigms, such problems hurt.
At least on Lulu the author has control of these matters, which are the difference between Print on Demand and Self-Publishing.
But I submit, if the professionally “published” books are bad and the self-published books are good (which they often are), then what is the distinction of a book produced by a publisher?
Further, I submit that it is not in the production of the book at all, but in the promotion. It is the soulful portrait, the national interviews on prestigious media outlets, the beautiful advertising, and the currying of the promotable author that makes the difference. All of which moves the focus from the quality of the book to the appeal of the writer.
And I return to Snoopy receiving a letter from his publisher. “We have decided to publish your book. If the first copy sells, we’ll print another one.” But Snoopy is resourceful and has grown a longer tail. This is the essence of Print On Demand: that once it’s digitized and can be found by a search engine, no book will go out of print. But that means anyone can write a book. The mystique of the demonic, ecstatic, exceptional genius author who is brought to us by a perceptive, capable, nurturing editor is gone. Oowoooo! Howls of displeasure.
First, publishing houses were bought up by international corporation who expected the same kind of investor profits as Campbell soups: that is, 10% or more. This pushed the business from a educated and possibly bankrolled gentleperson's enterprise to the ordinary commodification that in other contexts might be called "prostitution."
Second, advances for works not yet written had to be justified but works not yet written are of necessity unquantifiable. This threw the ball to the market research and fame-is-fortune people. The amounts of advances became a feature of publicity and were compromised by Hollywood-style book-keeping anyway: creative deductions for all associated costs.
Third, the whole problem of print runs, much exacerbated by the brilliant decision of the tax people to consider books inventory to be taxed and also the simple physical necessity of keeping books warm, dry, and pristine (another cost) meant a motive for short print runs and quick liquification which are deadly for books that need time to develop an audience, like Native American books. (Frankly, I think this problem alone snuffed the NA literature renaissance since back east publishers had no idea how to market NA books, therefore ordered small runs and ended them quickly to avoid risk, therefore eliminated eventual wide sales.) Again, the Hollywood model: profit in the first hours of existence.
Fourth: The corporation model required "lean and mean" staffing which meant editors who formerly developed the "house focus" by putting in many days of reading in offices were pushed out to being "agents" who had no house, no focus, no stable of faithful writers, no handholds but the necessity of earning a living. I discovered that some agents are not making a living by selling books but by kindly offering "for a fee" to rewrite over-the-transom works to make them more saleable. This was formerly called "editing" and paid for by the publisher.
Fifth: Proofing and fact-checking are time-consuming and time is money, so -- beyond maybe Spell-checking -- those quality-control elements went out the window. Anyway, fewer and fewer new hires were capable of proofing OR researching a fact, a national education failure.
Sixth: The author has to be promotable, so one strategy is to represent that books are written by popular people, though ghosted by someone else, or to represent the author as a larger-than-life person. This is the slippery slope that took us to the "packaged book" which is invented by sales people right down to hiring someone to tour around pretending to be the author. Or resourceful writers pretending to have shocking pasts.
Seventh: Publishers had somehow made a devil's pact with bookstores to allow the stores to return all unsold books. Not just the ones that are still clean, undamaged and saleable, but also the ones that have big dayglo sale stickers or are shelf-worn or that are simply in the way when it comes time to inventory for a tax-audit at the first of the year. The underside of this pact is that bookstores charge publishers to place the books favorably, as on the end of an aisle.
Eighth: A person who has spent his entire life in media work was recently shocked, SHOCKED to discover that publishers don't bother to spend money on promotion or ads anymore. Which has caused newspapers, whose income came from the ads, to discontinue their book review sections.
Ninth: Another little money-saving step: no money from the publisher for research or the acquisition of necessary photos or graphics. The author must foot the bill.
Tenth: When it comes to the step of selling to the public, the money-making publisher likes big chunks of sales and so sells through chains, either “book” chains like Barnes & Noble or Amazon or “Big Box” chains with special discounts like Walmart or Target. This has caused many small quality bookstores to go out of business. But the regional sales force that makes the sales to such venues are not innovative about replacing them with special interest stores (sports) or local interest stores (grocery stores on reservations).
I have beside my reading chair a book called “A Glorious Accident: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle” by Wim Kayzer. It’s a “tie-in” to a PBS series which was a “concept” developed by Kayzer. He invited some cutting edge thinkers to talk among themselves, something like “The Edge,” which is a website for thinkers who are a little bit “out there.” (I was clued to this book by Michael “Blowhard” of 2blowhards.com.) So this is a “tie-in” product that is “generated” rather than written because it consists of the transcriptions of Kayzer’s preliminary interviews with these quite fascinating men. The publisher is W.H. Freeman and Company, which publishes science books and engages in “custom publishing” by which they mean classroom books that are composites of other books and lab manuals tailored for specific classes. In other words, Print on Demand.
Is this a good thing? Well, here’s an early sentence: “As I drive to his house on Sunday morning through New York, ever fascinating, pompous, and threatening, I feel apprehensive.” Is this a lost appositive, a confused referent, or a peculiar personification of a city? The book has narrow margins, though the subject cries out for many reader notes. It has clearly not even been run through a Spell-check: “srot” for “sort” as well as the kind of thing that evades Spell-check: “his” for “has.” A previous reader had kindly gone through my used copy and made corrections with a ballpoint but even he or she missed a few. In a book explaining complex logic and new paradigms, such problems hurt.
At least on Lulu the author has control of these matters, which are the difference between Print on Demand and Self-Publishing.
But I submit, if the professionally “published” books are bad and the self-published books are good (which they often are), then what is the distinction of a book produced by a publisher?
Further, I submit that it is not in the production of the book at all, but in the promotion. It is the soulful portrait, the national interviews on prestigious media outlets, the beautiful advertising, and the currying of the promotable author that makes the difference. All of which moves the focus from the quality of the book to the appeal of the writer.
And I return to Snoopy receiving a letter from his publisher. “We have decided to publish your book. If the first copy sells, we’ll print another one.” But Snoopy is resourceful and has grown a longer tail. This is the essence of Print On Demand: that once it’s digitized and can be found by a search engine, no book will go out of print. But that means anyone can write a book. The mystique of the demonic, ecstatic, exceptional genius author who is brought to us by a perceptive, capable, nurturing editor is gone. Oowoooo! Howls of displeasure.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
SELF-EVERYTHING for POD
My sort of loose rule about this blog is that it’s supposed to be regional, but instead it’s acquiring a lot of subjects that ought to be on my “other” blog, merryscribbler.blogspot.com. But also part of doing this is to cut trail for other writers around here, especially Blackfeet, so I suppose I can justify writing about Lulu.com that way. I’ll just follow this cowpath or game trail or whatever it is. Certainly no superhighway.
The main confusion I see about using Lulu.com is that people constantly mistake PRINT on demand for PUBLISH on demand. Since their awareness of publishing was mostly a matter of pulling a book off the shelf in a bookstore, that’s the lens through which they see everything else. Writers, of course, cling to the moment in movies when the author gets a life-changing letter of acceptance for their manuscript. I thought “Peanuts” had a nice comment on that: Snoopy gets a letter of acceptance all right. It says, “We like your book and intend to print it. If anyone buys it, we’ll print another copy.” Snoopy is caught between triumph and despair. Aren’t we all?
Today’s publishing industry is a particularly complex and global phenomenon that needs a good deal of deconstruction for both writers and readers.
These are possible classical steps we read about in the biographies of writers, plus some comments which I make only as an observer so far.
GETTING IN THE DOOR
1. The publishing house actively seeks out writers. When I was teaching in Browning in the Sixties, the textbook rep actually came to me and suggested I write a book about Blackfeet for his publisher. Of course, in those days I didn’t BEGIN to know what I needed to about Blackfeet and would only have been able to produce the same kind of over-researched, under-analyzed and hackneyed work that already floods the market. But at least I had a sense of it being possible.
2. The slush-pile reader recognizes something in a manuscript and begins to play Maxwell Perkins inventing and shaping Thomas Wolf. This is one of the hardest fantasies to give up. “I’ll write a lot of off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, then someone more literate will give it shape, structure, decent spelling and grammar, and etc.” But these days that fantasy has been passed to the agents, often previously employed as editors and slush-pile readers. Some end up practically ghosting the book -- in fact, it’s a fine line. But one can always hire someone to edit one’s baggy old manuscript. (Few will do it for free.) THEN submit. Or self-print.
3. A famous writer will pick up one’s manuscript and make it all happen. After all, didn’t Carl Hiassen recognize “Aragon” and get it published? Hmmm. We may not be getting the whole story.
4. In the academic context, one’s submitted manuscript is run past a committee of three “impartial” scholars, sort of like a doctoral thesis. If you’ve ever tried to get a doctoral thesis off the ground, you’ll recognize the hazards. There’s no such thing as an impartial scholar -- the model is science, but even in scientific fields people are far less objective than they purport to be. If the field of the subject is small, one may be suppressed by a frank rival or by a person criticized in the text. “Given wisdom” trumps most everything. Even ordinary commercial publishers seem to operate as committees rather than insightful and dedicated individuals.
THE MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE AND ACCEPTED
5. I’m just learning about this. a) Copy editing -- spelling, grammar, fact-checking, redundancies and obscurities eliminated. b) Layout -- creating a decent-looking and readable page by combining pictures and words, setting margins, pagination, etc.
6. Then the actual printing, which in the past has been done in batches. Part of the art of publishing was estimating how big the batch should be. U of Calgary Press says they rarely print more than a thousand copies. The problem that crops up is that a mis-estimate means either having to tool up to print another batch or having to warehouse a lot of copies. Warehouses cost money and the government taxes the books. This has been addressed by persuading bookstores to load their shelves with books (another estimation problem), creating the practice of allowing bookstores to return all unsold copies. These become remainders or are pulped. Print-On-Demand has become a major breakthrough for regular publishing houses who want to avoid both over and under production of copies, especially when dealing with the “long-tail phenomenon” of having sporadic demand for backlist books that would ordinarily go out of print, be remaindered and/or pulped. BUT this puts those “long tail” books into competition with books that would otherwise replace them over time: why read an imitation Zane Grey if you can read the REAL Zane Grey?
DISTRIBUTION
7. On the model of commercial distribution, books have been sent to warehouses which supply the bookstores with microfiche for ordering. Google and Amazon, et al, have now created direct relationships between publisher and reader.
8. Shipping will become ever more important as gas becomes more expensive. However, print on demand means that there can be “Espresso” printing machines distributed through the country so that one goes into a kiosk at Starbucks or Kinko’s, requests the book, walks out with it in an hour or less. Ebooks mean that the books travel through wires and satellites over the Internet, lacking only a pretty binding. One can take the downloaded manuscript to Kinko’s and get it bound or put it in a 3-ring binder, or just file it. I predict that custom on-demand binding will become more important and that this can flower into an art form. But some kinds of reading are so ephemeral that they will never even be downloaded -- just read on a portable screen device and then discarded.
Other possibilities are that the book may be audio or that the print manuscript might be interrupted by video. How does one “lay out” a video? The nastier possibility is the IMpossibility of corraling the manuscript -- once digitized online it can be copied.
This tech explosion, which affects both formal publishing and self-publishing, is not confined to manuscripts. Writers and publishers should carefully watch the fields of music and film, both of which can be “self-published” now with very similar issues. The sharpest issue may turn out to be tech progress: the 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, MP3 and... I know there are already other challengers out there. An actual book or painting or score never goes inaccessible, but these other media can be blocked by lack of the right equipment. I’ve already got material in early versions of Writenow software that I can’t open on a contemporary platform.
Distribution is dominated by the bar code and ISBN, at least in venues where lots of books are handled. If you’re selling a self-printed book at a fishing tackle store, they won’t mind so much. But then a self-distributor must establish a route and regularly check back by phone or in person. People who run fishing tackle stores expect that. It means you’ll have to keep careful records.
PROMOTION
Tech advances open ways of promoting writing, but they also shut out readers who only relate to paper books. (I don’t know what the percentage of the population is, but it’s probably higher than techies think.) Readings might reach them. Unless a person has built a reputation or relates to a specific group of people, it’s unlikely that a writer will be solicited to read, so you have to give them the idea. With liberal congregations like Unitarians, writers might be allowed to piggyback on services, maybe even "preach."
Posters, mailings, brochures, and so on might work. Websites for the tech-competent. Amazon is experimenting with several things: access to the first chapter or at least early pages, selling “shorts” for 49 cents to introduce authors. In a bookstore one does something similar by taking a book off the shelf.
Get on TV or the radio. Offer yourself to schools. Montana has a humanities “speaker’s bureau” that will book writers. Book festivals are good for promotion and also provide community with other authors.
You can pay someone to do promotion -- there are companies. Lulu.com lists some that they know will do a good job, which is in itself as important as the actual printing part that they do themselves.
So what I’m saying is that self-printing is only one step. One must do self-distribution, self-promotion, and -- what is much harder -- self-evaluation and self-editing. One must choose oneself and be one’s own agent, self-reassuring, self-networking, self-researching. It’s no longer possible to be a passionate inky wretch in a garret and expect much of anything, except to perhaps become a skilled, distinctive, very fine writer. How many of them are out there, undiscovered?
But if one does all this self-this-and-that, where is the time to develop as a writer?
The main confusion I see about using Lulu.com is that people constantly mistake PRINT on demand for PUBLISH on demand. Since their awareness of publishing was mostly a matter of pulling a book off the shelf in a bookstore, that’s the lens through which they see everything else. Writers, of course, cling to the moment in movies when the author gets a life-changing letter of acceptance for their manuscript. I thought “Peanuts” had a nice comment on that: Snoopy gets a letter of acceptance all right. It says, “We like your book and intend to print it. If anyone buys it, we’ll print another copy.” Snoopy is caught between triumph and despair. Aren’t we all?
Today’s publishing industry is a particularly complex and global phenomenon that needs a good deal of deconstruction for both writers and readers.
These are possible classical steps we read about in the biographies of writers, plus some comments which I make only as an observer so far.
GETTING IN THE DOOR
1. The publishing house actively seeks out writers. When I was teaching in Browning in the Sixties, the textbook rep actually came to me and suggested I write a book about Blackfeet for his publisher. Of course, in those days I didn’t BEGIN to know what I needed to about Blackfeet and would only have been able to produce the same kind of over-researched, under-analyzed and hackneyed work that already floods the market. But at least I had a sense of it being possible.
2. The slush-pile reader recognizes something in a manuscript and begins to play Maxwell Perkins inventing and shaping Thomas Wolf. This is one of the hardest fantasies to give up. “I’ll write a lot of off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, then someone more literate will give it shape, structure, decent spelling and grammar, and etc.” But these days that fantasy has been passed to the agents, often previously employed as editors and slush-pile readers. Some end up practically ghosting the book -- in fact, it’s a fine line. But one can always hire someone to edit one’s baggy old manuscript. (Few will do it for free.) THEN submit. Or self-print.
3. A famous writer will pick up one’s manuscript and make it all happen. After all, didn’t Carl Hiassen recognize “Aragon” and get it published? Hmmm. We may not be getting the whole story.
4. In the academic context, one’s submitted manuscript is run past a committee of three “impartial” scholars, sort of like a doctoral thesis. If you’ve ever tried to get a doctoral thesis off the ground, you’ll recognize the hazards. There’s no such thing as an impartial scholar -- the model is science, but even in scientific fields people are far less objective than they purport to be. If the field of the subject is small, one may be suppressed by a frank rival or by a person criticized in the text. “Given wisdom” trumps most everything. Even ordinary commercial publishers seem to operate as committees rather than insightful and dedicated individuals.
THE MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE AND ACCEPTED
5. I’m just learning about this. a) Copy editing -- spelling, grammar, fact-checking, redundancies and obscurities eliminated. b) Layout -- creating a decent-looking and readable page by combining pictures and words, setting margins, pagination, etc.
6. Then the actual printing, which in the past has been done in batches. Part of the art of publishing was estimating how big the batch should be. U of Calgary Press says they rarely print more than a thousand copies. The problem that crops up is that a mis-estimate means either having to tool up to print another batch or having to warehouse a lot of copies. Warehouses cost money and the government taxes the books. This has been addressed by persuading bookstores to load their shelves with books (another estimation problem), creating the practice of allowing bookstores to return all unsold copies. These become remainders or are pulped. Print-On-Demand has become a major breakthrough for regular publishing houses who want to avoid both over and under production of copies, especially when dealing with the “long-tail phenomenon” of having sporadic demand for backlist books that would ordinarily go out of print, be remaindered and/or pulped. BUT this puts those “long tail” books into competition with books that would otherwise replace them over time: why read an imitation Zane Grey if you can read the REAL Zane Grey?
DISTRIBUTION
7. On the model of commercial distribution, books have been sent to warehouses which supply the bookstores with microfiche for ordering. Google and Amazon, et al, have now created direct relationships between publisher and reader.
8. Shipping will become ever more important as gas becomes more expensive. However, print on demand means that there can be “Espresso” printing machines distributed through the country so that one goes into a kiosk at Starbucks or Kinko’s, requests the book, walks out with it in an hour or less. Ebooks mean that the books travel through wires and satellites over the Internet, lacking only a pretty binding. One can take the downloaded manuscript to Kinko’s and get it bound or put it in a 3-ring binder, or just file it. I predict that custom on-demand binding will become more important and that this can flower into an art form. But some kinds of reading are so ephemeral that they will never even be downloaded -- just read on a portable screen device and then discarded.
Other possibilities are that the book may be audio or that the print manuscript might be interrupted by video. How does one “lay out” a video? The nastier possibility is the IMpossibility of corraling the manuscript -- once digitized online it can be copied.
This tech explosion, which affects both formal publishing and self-publishing, is not confined to manuscripts. Writers and publishers should carefully watch the fields of music and film, both of which can be “self-published” now with very similar issues. The sharpest issue may turn out to be tech progress: the 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, MP3 and... I know there are already other challengers out there. An actual book or painting or score never goes inaccessible, but these other media can be blocked by lack of the right equipment. I’ve already got material in early versions of Writenow software that I can’t open on a contemporary platform.
Distribution is dominated by the bar code and ISBN, at least in venues where lots of books are handled. If you’re selling a self-printed book at a fishing tackle store, they won’t mind so much. But then a self-distributor must establish a route and regularly check back by phone or in person. People who run fishing tackle stores expect that. It means you’ll have to keep careful records.
PROMOTION
Tech advances open ways of promoting writing, but they also shut out readers who only relate to paper books. (I don’t know what the percentage of the population is, but it’s probably higher than techies think.) Readings might reach them. Unless a person has built a reputation or relates to a specific group of people, it’s unlikely that a writer will be solicited to read, so you have to give them the idea. With liberal congregations like Unitarians, writers might be allowed to piggyback on services, maybe even "preach."
Posters, mailings, brochures, and so on might work. Websites for the tech-competent. Amazon is experimenting with several things: access to the first chapter or at least early pages, selling “shorts” for 49 cents to introduce authors. In a bookstore one does something similar by taking a book off the shelf.
Get on TV or the radio. Offer yourself to schools. Montana has a humanities “speaker’s bureau” that will book writers. Book festivals are good for promotion and also provide community with other authors.
You can pay someone to do promotion -- there are companies. Lulu.com lists some that they know will do a good job, which is in itself as important as the actual printing part that they do themselves.
So what I’m saying is that self-printing is only one step. One must do self-distribution, self-promotion, and -- what is much harder -- self-evaluation and self-editing. One must choose oneself and be one’s own agent, self-reassuring, self-networking, self-researching. It’s no longer possible to be a passionate inky wretch in a garret and expect much of anything, except to perhaps become a skilled, distinctive, very fine writer. How many of them are out there, undiscovered?
But if one does all this self-this-and-that, where is the time to develop as a writer?
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