Sekf-Publishing: the Print-on-Demand Route
Although the project has not yet been finalized, WITCHLORD is definitely a go, and, as the time draws near for the launch of this second edition, the self-published second edition, I thought it time to say a few words about self-publishing.
Often, self-publishing is a disappointment, and sometimes a financial disaster, particularly if you take the traditional truckload-of-books-in-the-garage route, but some people have been able to make even that work, my sister being one of them, as outlined below. (Rather deep down below, but keep scrolling and you'll get there eventually.)
And now, with online publishing opportunities, I think do-it-yourself publishing has become everyone's opportunity, even though you have to be realistic at the outset and realize that the global market for this work of genius that you have just spent twenty years completing is probably somewhere between two and a half and six copies (yeah, and there's also a niche market for this in Ethiopia, but you haven't translated it into one of their languages, and, anyway, most of them aren't on the Internet).
While I still don't have a launch date for the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, the project is definitely a go. It will be my fifth time out into the world of print-on-demand with lulu.com, the first four books being the fantasy novel BAMBOO HORSES, the medical memoir CANCER PATIENT, the alternative reality suicide bomber novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER and, launched just this month, my first book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT.
Working with lulu.com means working with America. My blogs, my main website, my favorite search engine, my print-on-demand outfit: all American. And, as I see it, that's the way to go.
I have my reservations about American culture (the culture that got so fascinated by Janet Jackson's little wardrobe malfunction, is that culture really possessed of the gravitas which should go with the possession of all those thermonuclear weapons?) but, when it comes to the Internet, the American way of doing things seems to be supreme.
Google is one of the institutional heroes of my life, and I'm a big fan of the Red Hat Linux crowd, too, and one of the guys who used to work with that out fit is part of the machinery of the print-on-demand outfit I've chosen to work with, lulu.com.
I certainly don't think my planet would be improved if the government of the People's Republic of China started adding its muscle to the organization of the Internet, with compulsory assistance from Greece, Turkey, Bolivia, Botswana and Brazil.
Yes, when it comes to the Internet, the Americans definitely know how to do it. There is an undeniable streak of genius in American culture, certain things that Americans do really well (Playboy, Penthouse, hamburgers and the Edsel, all that good stuff) and the Internet, in my opinion, is right at the top of a list of things in which America is supreme.
Whatever the Chinese government may think about America's domination of the setup, I don't imagine for a moment that anyone here in New Zealand has any quibbles about it. It works, and anyone can use it. In the build-up to the latest Iraq war, one of Saddam Hussein's sons was enjoying free web-based e-mail through an American company, wasn't he? So who can complain?
The other day, my brother Charles and I were having a little chat about a plan hatched by French and German government bureaucrats to set up their own Internet outfit to rival America's Yahoo. And we both thought that a big joke. These ponderous bureaucracies with their varnished desks and their fifty million filing cabinets, they're going to compete against a bunch of caffeine-fueled young Americans bent on conquering planet Earth from their table in some Los Angeles Starbucks somewhere? Somehow, I don't think so.
One billion bureaucrats against three guys in a coffee shop? The coffee shop guys will win this one, hands down, no question about it. Okay, France and Germany are really great nations with great cultures, and the French even have their own thermonukes, as their President has proudly been reminding us lately. But even so ...
In France they have these great street riots, and in Germany they're really good at the symphony orchestra thing. But neither of those areas of competency is really the required skill set.
We don't have the required skill set here in New Zealand, either. I'm totally disgusted by the way we've fumbled this one. Coming here after seven years of living in the everything-works-and-it-works-all-the-time culture of Japan, I still can't believe that we are unable (a) to get trains to run on time (we only have a very few of them) and (b) to keep the Internet up and running.
Color me disgusted.
Here in New Zealand we've made a totally crappy mess of running our little inlet of the great Internet ocean. The government has permitted artificial caps to be placed on broadband speed and has failed to kick ass and get a decent service delivered.
Basically, despite a few token nods in the direction of competition, we're still suffering from a telecommunications monopoly here. We're up against the monopoly capitalists. The monopoly should, kin the American tradition, be deliberately fractured by the state, and the government here in New Zealand signs off on that notion, on a theoretical level, but, although they theoretically have a guy to regulate this stuff, and have written legislation which, theoretically, empowers him to do his job, it's all talk and no action.
And, on top of that, given that I've always thought of New Zealand as being right at the cutting edge of technology, I don't understand why we put up with constant outages in the Internet service. This is accepted as being normal, but it's not. I've enjoyed the use of a rock-solid Internet connection in Japan, and I know what the real thing looks like.
You sit down, you connect, everything works perfectly, and then you suddenly realize, oh, shit, it's been twenty-four hours, I've been going nonstop, and I haven't thought to water those plants even once, and my wife's going to be back from her mother's in a few days, and if she finds out they've all died then she's going to kill me.
Here in New Zealand, I don't have that same mesmerized go-with-the-flow online experience because the internet keeps crapping out on me. Periodically, while I'm online, the system just craps out and stops working, so that site you accessed nicely just five minutes ago, it's no longer there.
What was that site called again? Google.com. Well, maybe they're offline. How about ibm.com? Yeah, can't get through to them, either. What's the probable explanation for this? Saddam's buddies finally came through with those weapons of mass destruction and took out America, big time? Or did our shitty Third World crapsystem just crap out on me again?
This was the nation which helped the British achieve glorious things in the Boer War, which pioneered heavier-than-air flight, which teamed up with Nepal to climb Mount Everest, which invented the jet boat, which turned the kiwifruit into a global conqueror. What the hell happened to us? Why are we losing it now?
First piece of advice for anyone thinking of going the online publishing route, particularly for anyone with the misfortune of living in New Zealand: set it up with an American company.
Around the world there seems to be a certain amount of bitching, not amidst the general population but in the higher echelons of the nation state, about the fact that America runs and organizes the Internet, but I don't think there's a case for complaint. Everyone can go online, so what's your problem?
And I get worried by this "we're the governments of the world" stuff which is leading a lot of governments around the world to think they'd like to take control away from the Americans and run it with their own committee.
How many people does it take to change a lightbulb? If the governments of the world do end up muscling Internet control away from the Americans and we end up with the lightbulb-changing committee from hell, a hundred suits sitting around a conference table arguing about which direction in which to change the lightbulb. Poor lightbulb!
Anyway, the lightbulb committee has not succeeded in making its grab for world domination yet, so the Internet is still working, and, while the Internet we have here in New Zealand is seriously flawed to the point of being broken, it still works well enough for me to get online to America, make my blogs and upload my books for print-on-demand publication.
So let's get back to the topic, which is self-publishing, uploading books online and taking the print-on-demand route.
The new technology, which is cheap and affordable and here right now, and works. And can be done for zero cost. Or almost.
As part of the work for the WITCHLORD project, I've had the local copy shop scan the maps from the first edition, just cost six dollars to put the four maps onto a CD, an that's my only significant expense for this publishing project. Since I'm not going to buy the second edition an ISBN of its own, it's going to be (but for the six bucks) a zero-outlay publishing venture.
Antithetically, six dollars isn't exactly zero cost, but, compared to what you pay out if you go pick up three of those ultra-glossy high-quality chocolate bars in the supermarket, it isn't much.
Publishing your own book no longer means mortgaging your house and accepting delivery of two truckloads of books from the local printer, books you later have to cremate, at your own expense, because nobody on planet Earth wants to buy them. (Not that the bank is going to give you any sympathy on that.)
Now, if you don't need any hand-holding, if you can make your own computer files, choose your fonts, design your book layout, make your own images, to the cover art, edit the thing, proofread the thing and remember to put THE END at the end (not compulsory, but it's a convention you have the option of following) then you can publish for zero cost.
Your returns on your investment are quite possibly going to be zero, but at least the bank isn't going to be dropping round to repossess your house.
Although the traditional books-in-the-garage self-publishing route usually works out as a financial catastrophe, some people have managed to make it work.
My sister, Catherine Cook, was inspired to writer her own tarot book, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME, and did so, in conjunction with her artist friend, Dwariko, who painted a complete set of tarot cards.
That was definitely the publishing project from hell, and I was very glad to be out of the country when it was happening. The full-color printing turned out to be a technical nightmare, and the whole family, minus me, got roped into sandpapering smooth the edges of thousands and thousands of tarot cards.
These cards were -- get this -- round. Nice concept, but your average local printer isn't in the habit of printing circular things, and these cards arrived from the printer with rough edges which had to be sandpapered off by hand, and sorted into sets.
The book launch ... I won't talk about that. Wasn't my disappointment.
My sister and her friend did, however, sell the entire first edition. Eventually. My sister would do tarot readings at women's get-togethers, New Age festivals, that kind of thing, do tarot readings and sell the book and cards to people at the same time. She had, then, a marketing strategy.
Eventually, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME had a second printing, something which the average traditional self-published book never does.
My sister is out of the business now, but Dwariko is still in action, and I believe a new cut-down miniaturized edition has been produced, something that is easily portable for Dwariko as she travels around festivals and the like selling stuff (stuff she paints, stuff she designs, stuff she manufactures) in a life divided between New Zealand and England.
A different world.
Why my sister's book succeeded was, in my analysis, because she persisted. Dug in and kept digging in. It took years, literally, years and years, to sell all those books, one copy here, two copies there.
Because she had a product for which there was a market demand. New Age, tarot -- it's a niche.
Because she had a marketing strategy. Be at the festival, the woman's talk-fest, the big female get-together, and have your stall, your books. They might not find you on the Internet, but they'll find you there, face to face, and doing the tarot readings gives you the cash flow, gives you a workable economic base by which the minuscule book sales can be sustained.
The books themselves won't pay for that air trip from New Zealand to the woman's conference in Australia. The books probably won't even pay for the taxi ride to the airport. The tarot readings will pay for that.
So my sister and her friend Dwariko succeeded where many, many others have failed. They had a non-fiction book, a book on a subject which will not go out of date -- tarot will still be tarot twenty years from now -- and organized venues to go to at which they could reasonably hope to find their target audience in the flesh. They had a product for which there was a market and a workable strategy to market the product.
That magnum opus you've been working on for the last ten years -- COMING OUT: A MASTURBATOR TELLS ALL -- might not enjoy the same success.
Her success, it took a lot of guts, and an enormous amount of hard work, and I admire her for it.
And I have to stress that, for my sister, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME was a dream. At a critical time in her life, she had this vision of what she wanted to accomplish. That was her dream, so she went out and she did it.
And, when it comes to self-publishing, I'd say this: if it's not your dream, why are you doing it? If all you want is money, dress down, put a hat on the sidewalk, put up an appropriate cardboard sign and work on looking hungry. You'll make more money that way. A lot more money.
If my sister were ever to do a second book, I imagine that she would take the print-on-demand route.
It's definitely the way to go, and now one of my sister's Luddite friends, who has done some of the books-in-the-garage route (without losing her house) is thinking of getting into it.
The Luddite friend, who I have not yet met, does not even have a computer, but has access to one.
She had self-published, apparently, a number of New Agey things. As indicated above, there's a market for that kind of thing. Has more sales potential than, say, a collection of praise poems in honor of Saddam Hussein.
But the future is here, and even the Luddite knows it, and the other day I asked my sister what had happened to that coffee shop meeting we were going to have, so I could gen her up? What happened? The Luddite cancelled? No, she's still on holiday, that's all. The meeting is still desired, though no date for it yet.
When we meet, I'll give her what I can, maybe preparing some stuff on CD in advance.
The basic concept of print-on-demand is pretty simple.
1. You, the author, prepare a computer file, typically a Microsoft Word document, done to the exact specifications of the online publishing outfit you are going to work with. Preparing this document is your responsibility, one hundred percent, and if you're not prepared to learn how to do it and to learn how to do it properly, then abandon hope at this stage.
2. You set things up with your online publishing outfit. In the case of lulu.com, go to the site, make your free account, give them the details they need, and you're done.
They give you your own storefront, which comes with a horribly complicated Internet address which you can then customize to something closer to your heart's desire, in my case lulu.com/hughcook. They also give you a free blog, but I confess I only made one entry in mine, and I've forgotten how to access it, though I guess I could find out in less than five minutes. So many things to do, so little time.
It's all free at this stage, and it stays free unless you want to go buy the global distribution thing, of which more below.
3. Having set things up with the online publishing outlet, which costs zero dollars upfront with lulu.com, but which may possibly costs you some up-front money with other outfits, upload your book as a Word document. If you work with lulu.com, you have the option of uploading your own covers or of choosing from a selection of free covers, back and front, which they provide. They're fussy about the covers, and if you upload something which doesn't meet the technical specs, then the computer will spit it back at you. This is what happened to me the first time i tried to upload a cover, and I had to remake it, which, fortunately, didn't take too long. First time out, it all seems a bit complicated. Don't worry. If you hang in there, you'll get there.
4. With lulu.com, one of the last steps is setting prices. The deal is that lulu.com charges the customer for (a) the production cost of the book, (b) your royalty, (c) lulu.com's royalty (if your royalty is US $4 then theirs is US $1) and shipping costs (by FedEx, which may not be cheap, but it works).
With lulu.com, you have the opportunity of offering the world your book as a PDF download for free (a PDF file being a portable document file, one of those files which can be opened by Adobe Reader, an older version of which you may have on your computer with the title Acrobat Reader).
Lulu.com gives you the opportunity of giving away your book for free as a PDF file or of charging for the file.
In my case, I charge, and one reason I'm doing this is to try to find out if there is really any market for PDF books. All the information I have suggests that there is not. Apart from a few nerds and geeks, almost nobody on planet Earth wants to read books on some kind of screen. The reading process was perfected the day the first dead tree book went into print, and the arrival of the electronic age has not changed that.
People will happily read a poem or a short story online, but a full-length book, no, forget it. An ardent fan e-mailed me to say he'd read the full text of one of my novels that I'd posted online for people to read for free on my zenvirus.com site, but he made no secret of the fact that he found it a struggle.
And the full text of my CANCER PATIENT memoir is, similarly, online to read for free, but the last guy who e-mailed me about that told me that, although he knew that, he still went to the expense of buying the printed book.
When the age of electronic publishing came along, many people expected that it would kill traditional publishing dead, but it hasn't, and ergonomics has a lot to do with that.
Can't take your computer into the bath, not, at least, without voiding your life-insurance policy. Can't read the screen in the sun. Our eyes don't see the true brightness of light. We, like all other sighted organisms on the planet, only see a kind of dumbed-down version of that brightness, the log of light rather than the real blaze of illumination which is truly out there, so we don't properly understand what the computer is struggling with. Bottom line, though, is true: that LCD screen is not going to work at the beach.
So the printed book is going to be here, in my judgment, forever. If it was going to go away then it would have gone. Already. Online reading is here, now, cheap and convenient, the ultimate crap experience, if you really want to go inflict it upon yourself. And, apart from some weirdos ("Yeah, reading WAR AND PEACE on my digital watch, that would be a real blast!")
So print-on-demand is the way to go.
You, the author, make the file and upload it to your online publishing outfit. They make it available for sale. If someone pays for a copy, someone presses a button somewhere and a big machine prints out a copy on the spot.
Traditional publishing involves having a big printing run and printing thousands of books at a time, a big financial investment, a big financial disaster if none of those copies get sold. With print-on-demand, nothing is printed until it has already been paid for. Customers wants a book, customer pays for the book, someone presses a button, a big machine prints one copy of that book (the one copy required to meet the current level of global demand) and that copy is shipped out.
That's how it works ideally, any rate, but read the small print. I saw one outfit which confessed that they waited until they had a batch of orders for your book before they printed out anything, and if your book is only likely to attract one copy every three years, that's not the way to go.
With lulu.com, my mother has been acting as my sales manager, getting on to people around the world -- England, Australia, Canada and the States -- to lay down their money and go buy my CANCER PATIENT medical memoir. And those who have done that reported that they ordered and the book came quickly, delivered by Federal Express, nicely packaged and protected.
No worries here, judging by the feedback I've had, regarding the actual delivery of the product.
Lulu.com does not actually print the books they sell. They outsource the actual printing, just as they outsource the delivery to Federal Express. Which, obviously, in practice, works.
With lulu.com, once you've successfully uploaded book and cover, going through a bunch of minor steps in the process -- filling in a form to say what category your book belongs to, for example, a category such as science fiction or such -- you reach the stage where a happy screen congratulates you on having published your book.
Your book is now on sale through your storefront, for example lulu.com/hughcook. Anyone in the world can buy it from lulu.com. If that's all you want, fine. It's free.
That's all I wanted for my book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT, so my total publishing cost for that was zero.
For my CANCER PATIENT project, however, I wanted an ISBN, one of the barcode numbers which bookshops and libraries use to keep track of books. You need this to sell via amazon.com, and libraries won't touch your book unless it has an ISBN.
(How will your libraries know about your book? Well, you need my mother's help on this. She's been bugging these people she knows, in England, Australia, Canada and the States, to go tell their public libraries to order it. And here in Devonport she's been pressuring multiple people into requesting that the library buy it: the library system here, apparently, won't buy a book on the basis of a request from a single would-be reader, so a properly organized conspiracy is the way to go.)
So for CANCER PATIENT, and also for the novels BAMBOO HORSES and TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I bought the international distribution service offered by lulu.com.
This gives us extra steps, and you'll need a credit card.
Here are the steps:-
5. Read up about the global distribution services so you're sure you know what you're doing, then buy it. As part of the deal, you have to order and pay for one copy of your printed book. You have to check this before you approve your book for sale.
If you think this requirement is unreasonable, if you're not that serious about your project, well, fine. Nobody's pressuring you. You already have your storefront sales opportunity, for free, and nobody's pressuring you to take this extra step.
6. Wait for your book to be delivered by FedEx. Check it. If it's not right, do it again. If it is right, go online and approve it. Note that one of your final steps is to set a retail price which will be used by outfits such as amazon.com. Make sure you understand what you're doing, as you can't easily go back and change this. Read on-screen warnings carefully. Don't mindlessly click on anything. It's not a computer game, it's a publishing process.
I actually have my screen capture program running while I'm uploading a book, and periodically capture screenshots and save them to a dedicated folder, so I have my own track record of what I do. (My screen capture program is PrintKey, which I've used under Windows 98, and which I have got up and running on Windows XP Professional, though to get it running on XP I ended up having to find the executable, copying it and pasting it onto the desktop so I could click it into action when needed.)
After your book has been approved for sale by you, it will, all going well, be available on amazon.com some time later, but don't hold your breath. I think we're talking four to six weeks.
If you've bought the global distribution service, lulu.com lets you click to have your book sent to books.google.com to be indexed and displayed to the reading public, who get to see part of it (or perhaps all of it) for free.
I wondered if books.google.com would be able to digest my suicide bomber novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, which is tending toward the hard core (torture, a sadistic bare-handed killing and a guy whose lover is a large pig) so I went there and, experimentally, clicked the rudest words in the English language into the search box.
Plenty of hits, and what you were looking for jumping up on the screen. No good taste limits here, as far as I can see.
I ended up approving BAMBOO HORSES, CANCER PATIENT and TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER for indexing by books.google.com, making them searchable and displayable.
How do you tie your product into the Internet? Well, obviously, by making it part of a vast database that people are actually going to search. If some cancer patient is doing a search for a chemotherapy term like "methotrexate", then my chances of bringing my CANCER PATIENT memoir are better if it's indexed by books.google.com.
I saw my cancer memoir and my two novels as products which have at least a chance out there in the bi wide world of amazon.com.
My book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT, no. My thesis is that someone who has sampled my poems on my main website, zenvirus.com, might possibly want a copy. Global sales demand, of course, might only be six copies, but that's not a problem for me. It's my book of poems, my dream, just as SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME was my sister's home. And I do want my book of poems in my hand. Before I die, please.
As for THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, well, obviously, there are at least a few people out there searching for it, otherwise second hand prices would not have escalated to the US $300 per copy mark. That's a price, obviously, being paid by readers, not bibliophiles, since an old paperback book, considered as an old paperback book, quite simply doesn't have that commercial value.
It's people who actively want to read the book who are driving the prices up to that level, and someone who is strongly motivated to read the book will find it themselves online, providing I make a suitable number of web pages with appropriate titles, meta tags and content.
And, of course, this blog.
Witchlord-weaponmaster.blogspot.com -- shouldn't be too hard to find that.
My hint for advertizing yourself online: try to zero in on your product. Not "poems", that's too competitive. What is your niche market? "Constipation poems"?
"Death poems"? "Praise poems for Saddam Hussein"? Zero in on that, and make the appropriate domain name, subdomain name, web page, blog, whatever.
Don't try to be all things to all people. Don't go try to win first place for the search term "cars" if your book is really about the history of steering wheel covers for model-T Fords.
So my feeling about THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER is that the book has its natural market base, undoubtedly small but undoubtedly real, and that will be where the sales will come from, and they'll find it without me advertizing it in their daily newspaper because they'll be actively looking for it.
As one of the last steps in pulling the WITCHLORD second edition together, today, Saturday 28 January 2006, I phoned England from my parents' home here in Devonport, New Zealand.
Two o'clock in the morning here so about two in the afternoon in England, and Colin Smythe picked up the phone after just a few seconds. Haven't spoken to him on the phone for more years than I can remember, but he was expecting the call because I'd already sent a letter outlining what I had in mind and indicating that I would call.
Colin Smythe of Colin Smythe Ltd is the original publisher of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, the man who published the original hardback edition of THE WIZARDS AND THE WARRIORS, the first book in the series, and who got Transworld Publishers to buy the series and bring it out as a set of Corgi paperbacks.
When Transworld remaindered the series, Colin bought the remaindered books, stashed them in one of his warehouses, and continues to sell a trickle of copies. I got my last royalty check, about 300 British pounds, a couple of years back, and anticipate anther check of similar size sometime in the next lustrum.
(No, publishing is not, as a rule, a big money business. If you're interested in making really big money, go make cement. There's a career there.)
When Colin acquired the Corgi books, he went and got new ISBN numbers of them, and seven of the ten books of the CHRONICLES series are still available on amazon.com and the like, his warehouse still able to supply the copies.
The three missing books are all up on my zenvirus.com website to read for free: THE WORDSMITHS AND THE WARGUILD, THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY and THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER.
But who wants to read a book of 250,000 words as a set of HTML files?
One fan was enthusiastic about the prospect of reading it as a PDF file, so he took the HTML files, made his own PDF file (asked me first if that would be okay by me, and I said, sure, go for it) and loaded it onto a little book-reading gadget to take on a cycling tour.
Then, in the end, decided not to take the gadget after all. He had the gizmo, but, when it came to the crunch -- little itty bitty screen, battery issues -- did he really want to plow through all 250,000 words of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER? No, he didn't.
So, for the series to be complete, having the missing titles online is really not an answer. They have to be available as printed books.
Hence this new project, the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER. And, after this, logically, I'll go on to do the other two missing titles, which will be easier, as they're smaller books, and I should be able to do them as standard 6 inch x 9 inch paperbacks, instead of going for the rather clunky 8.5 inch x 11 inch format that I'm going to use for the WITCHLORD second edition.
(Rather that than go for a small font or a division into three volumes.)
My reason for phoning Colin Smythe was to check that he had no qualms, that he saw this as the way to go, and, yes, I'm happy to say that he was Mr. Enthusiasm about this.
He handles some big-time stuff. He is, for example, the agent for Terry Pratchet, a major British fantasy writer, the author of the Discworld fantasy novels. And, if I ever get my bigtime Hollywood bite, then Colin will be my agent for that. (But working with a guy he knows and trusts in Hollywood, one of the sharks who knows how to swim with the sharks).
Colin Smythe, then, is my most persistent link to the publishing world, a guy with whom I've had a business relationship with since about 1985, which, now that I count, is over twenty years.
That's a long time, going way back when, back to the days before the end of the Cold War, back before George W. heated things up and chose to kick off World War Three.
Ancient history. My history.
He is someone who has made a success of publishing in the margins, so to speak, not meaning anything unkind by that. Colin Smythe Ltd. does some fantasy, but a lot of the emphasis is on Ireland and Irish literature, not the kind of thing you want to put into the arena up against hip-hop music or the attractions of Janet Jackson's latest wardrobe malfunction.
Consequently, although he will be my line into Hollywood if that moment ever arrives, he's not going to knock my product because it's not Hollywood material. The stuff he largely deals with, stuff about Irish poets.
Colin Smythe is a real publisher with real authors and real books, a guy who was put on the right track at a seance where, needing career assistance, he sought help from the Other Side. The medium did her thing and, fortunately, the Other Side came through.
"Has Colin ever considered publishing?"
Well, whether he had or had not, that was the road he ended up heading down, thanks to the encouragement he got from the Other Side, and it worked for him.
His perspective is the one I wanted today. The perspective of someone who is a business person who has managed to make small-scale publishing a commercial reality, who is not going to knock my second edition project just because it is microsmall, but who would tell me if I was (somehow, unbeknownst to me) heading in the direction of a major mistake.
As I've indicated, he was all enthusiasm about this, very much "way to go" (though I doubt that his spoken English includes sloppy Americanisms like "way to go").
Your book may not be going out to take the world by storm, but, if there's a niche for it, there's no reason why it shouldn't exist, even if, realistically, your global sales potential is only half a dozen books. (Which, seriously, is quite possibly the reality.)
Sales sidebar:-
(I went to one of the big online publishing companies, looked at the number of titles they boasted at having published, looked at the number of copies they boasted about having sold, hauled out my pocket calculator, got the calculator to divide total copies sold by total titles in print, and arrived at the conclusion that the average title sold about fifty copies, most of them, quite possibly, bought by the authors.
Sales sidebar ends.
I'd sent Colin a complimentary copy of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, a book, I imagine, possibly a little raw for his tastes, and he'd got at least as far as the front matter, from which he had discovered that I had published an autobiographical medical memoir, CANCER PATIENT.
He asked me about that and i told him, will, where I'm at now is more trips to hospital, more tests, and, after that, who knows what?
He was sympathetic.
Me, well, I'm adjusted to the situation. I've had well over a year now to process the fact that my life may be near its close.
Right now, my latest problems are not necessarily a signal that cancer has returned. They could simply be the survivable effects of the hit I took from radiation therapy, the ongoing outcome of my own slow-rolling Chernobyl, the post-radiation chaos which, if I live, will continue to change my brain, continuously, for the next ten to fifteen years.
If it is the cancer back again, then the probability is that I die, quite possibly this year.
In the face of that, my intention is to achieve the achievable. And what is achievable?
Well, if you look around the supermarket, there are quite a few chocolate bars I've never sampled before in my life, and yesterday I went and bought three of them.
Even if you're down to your last six months, which I conceivably may be, that's still time enough to eat quite a significant amount of chocolate.
And time enough, I think, for some more print-on-demand publishing projects.
I have the texts of THE WORDSMITHS AND THE WARGUILD and THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY as a set of HTML files, and I can easily reformat those and make an uploadable Word document out of them.
Some time this year, the three out-of-print books in the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series could all be back in print again, and that would make the series complete.
And, beyond that, i want to publish another book of poems, the title to be THE DEATH OF BIRDS. Cover, black. Back cover, black unadorned. Front cover, title in white print on black. Spine, "Poems by Hugh Cook" in white on black. In amongst the front matter, the rubric "Poems on the topic of my death".
Not everyone's idea of a dream project, I suppose, a book of death to wrap up with. But, if I am truly going down, then I want to go down in style, thank you very much. Icarus descending. Going down, but not regretting the trip.
Often, self-publishing is a disappointment, and sometimes a financial disaster, particularly if you take the traditional truckload-of-books-in-the-garage route, but some people have been able to make even that work, my sister being one of them, as outlined below. (Rather deep down below, but keep scrolling and you'll get there eventually.)
And now, with online publishing opportunities, I think do-it-yourself publishing has become everyone's opportunity, even though you have to be realistic at the outset and realize that the global market for this work of genius that you have just spent twenty years completing is probably somewhere between two and a half and six copies (yeah, and there's also a niche market for this in Ethiopia, but you haven't translated it into one of their languages, and, anyway, most of them aren't on the Internet).
While I still don't have a launch date for the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, the project is definitely a go. It will be my fifth time out into the world of print-on-demand with lulu.com, the first four books being the fantasy novel BAMBOO HORSES, the medical memoir CANCER PATIENT, the alternative reality suicide bomber novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER and, launched just this month, my first book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT.
Working with lulu.com means working with America. My blogs, my main website, my favorite search engine, my print-on-demand outfit: all American. And, as I see it, that's the way to go.
I have my reservations about American culture (the culture that got so fascinated by Janet Jackson's little wardrobe malfunction, is that culture really possessed of the gravitas which should go with the possession of all those thermonuclear weapons?) but, when it comes to the Internet, the American way of doing things seems to be supreme.
Google is one of the institutional heroes of my life, and I'm a big fan of the Red Hat Linux crowd, too, and one of the guys who used to work with that out fit is part of the machinery of the print-on-demand outfit I've chosen to work with, lulu.com.
I certainly don't think my planet would be improved if the government of the People's Republic of China started adding its muscle to the organization of the Internet, with compulsory assistance from Greece, Turkey, Bolivia, Botswana and Brazil.
Yes, when it comes to the Internet, the Americans definitely know how to do it. There is an undeniable streak of genius in American culture, certain things that Americans do really well (Playboy, Penthouse, hamburgers and the Edsel, all that good stuff) and the Internet, in my opinion, is right at the top of a list of things in which America is supreme.
Whatever the Chinese government may think about America's domination of the setup, I don't imagine for a moment that anyone here in New Zealand has any quibbles about it. It works, and anyone can use it. In the build-up to the latest Iraq war, one of Saddam Hussein's sons was enjoying free web-based e-mail through an American company, wasn't he? So who can complain?
The other day, my brother Charles and I were having a little chat about a plan hatched by French and German government bureaucrats to set up their own Internet outfit to rival America's Yahoo. And we both thought that a big joke. These ponderous bureaucracies with their varnished desks and their fifty million filing cabinets, they're going to compete against a bunch of caffeine-fueled young Americans bent on conquering planet Earth from their table in some Los Angeles Starbucks somewhere? Somehow, I don't think so.
One billion bureaucrats against three guys in a coffee shop? The coffee shop guys will win this one, hands down, no question about it. Okay, France and Germany are really great nations with great cultures, and the French even have their own thermonukes, as their President has proudly been reminding us lately. But even so ...
In France they have these great street riots, and in Germany they're really good at the symphony orchestra thing. But neither of those areas of competency is really the required skill set.
We don't have the required skill set here in New Zealand, either. I'm totally disgusted by the way we've fumbled this one. Coming here after seven years of living in the everything-works-and-it-works-all-the-time culture of Japan, I still can't believe that we are unable (a) to get trains to run on time (we only have a very few of them) and (b) to keep the Internet up and running.
Color me disgusted.
Here in New Zealand we've made a totally crappy mess of running our little inlet of the great Internet ocean. The government has permitted artificial caps to be placed on broadband speed and has failed to kick ass and get a decent service delivered.
Basically, despite a few token nods in the direction of competition, we're still suffering from a telecommunications monopoly here. We're up against the monopoly capitalists. The monopoly should, kin the American tradition, be deliberately fractured by the state, and the government here in New Zealand signs off on that notion, on a theoretical level, but, although they theoretically have a guy to regulate this stuff, and have written legislation which, theoretically, empowers him to do his job, it's all talk and no action.
And, on top of that, given that I've always thought of New Zealand as being right at the cutting edge of technology, I don't understand why we put up with constant outages in the Internet service. This is accepted as being normal, but it's not. I've enjoyed the use of a rock-solid Internet connection in Japan, and I know what the real thing looks like.
You sit down, you connect, everything works perfectly, and then you suddenly realize, oh, shit, it's been twenty-four hours, I've been going nonstop, and I haven't thought to water those plants even once, and my wife's going to be back from her mother's in a few days, and if she finds out they've all died then she's going to kill me.
Here in New Zealand, I don't have that same mesmerized go-with-the-flow online experience because the internet keeps crapping out on me. Periodically, while I'm online, the system just craps out and stops working, so that site you accessed nicely just five minutes ago, it's no longer there.
What was that site called again? Google.com. Well, maybe they're offline. How about ibm.com? Yeah, can't get through to them, either. What's the probable explanation for this? Saddam's buddies finally came through with those weapons of mass destruction and took out America, big time? Or did our shitty Third World crapsystem just crap out on me again?
This was the nation which helped the British achieve glorious things in the Boer War, which pioneered heavier-than-air flight, which teamed up with Nepal to climb Mount Everest, which invented the jet boat, which turned the kiwifruit into a global conqueror. What the hell happened to us? Why are we losing it now?
First piece of advice for anyone thinking of going the online publishing route, particularly for anyone with the misfortune of living in New Zealand: set it up with an American company.
Around the world there seems to be a certain amount of bitching, not amidst the general population but in the higher echelons of the nation state, about the fact that America runs and organizes the Internet, but I don't think there's a case for complaint. Everyone can go online, so what's your problem?
And I get worried by this "we're the governments of the world" stuff which is leading a lot of governments around the world to think they'd like to take control away from the Americans and run it with their own committee.
How many people does it take to change a lightbulb? If the governments of the world do end up muscling Internet control away from the Americans and we end up with the lightbulb-changing committee from hell, a hundred suits sitting around a conference table arguing about which direction in which to change the lightbulb. Poor lightbulb!
Anyway, the lightbulb committee has not succeeded in making its grab for world domination yet, so the Internet is still working, and, while the Internet we have here in New Zealand is seriously flawed to the point of being broken, it still works well enough for me to get online to America, make my blogs and upload my books for print-on-demand publication.
So let's get back to the topic, which is self-publishing, uploading books online and taking the print-on-demand route.
The new technology, which is cheap and affordable and here right now, and works. And can be done for zero cost. Or almost.
As part of the work for the WITCHLORD project, I've had the local copy shop scan the maps from the first edition, just cost six dollars to put the four maps onto a CD, an that's my only significant expense for this publishing project. Since I'm not going to buy the second edition an ISBN of its own, it's going to be (but for the six bucks) a zero-outlay publishing venture.
Antithetically, six dollars isn't exactly zero cost, but, compared to what you pay out if you go pick up three of those ultra-glossy high-quality chocolate bars in the supermarket, it isn't much.
Publishing your own book no longer means mortgaging your house and accepting delivery of two truckloads of books from the local printer, books you later have to cremate, at your own expense, because nobody on planet Earth wants to buy them. (Not that the bank is going to give you any sympathy on that.)
Now, if you don't need any hand-holding, if you can make your own computer files, choose your fonts, design your book layout, make your own images, to the cover art, edit the thing, proofread the thing and remember to put THE END at the end (not compulsory, but it's a convention you have the option of following) then you can publish for zero cost.
Your returns on your investment are quite possibly going to be zero, but at least the bank isn't going to be dropping round to repossess your house.
Although the traditional books-in-the-garage self-publishing route usually works out as a financial catastrophe, some people have managed to make it work.
My sister, Catherine Cook, was inspired to writer her own tarot book, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME, and did so, in conjunction with her artist friend, Dwariko, who painted a complete set of tarot cards.
That was definitely the publishing project from hell, and I was very glad to be out of the country when it was happening. The full-color printing turned out to be a technical nightmare, and the whole family, minus me, got roped into sandpapering smooth the edges of thousands and thousands of tarot cards.
These cards were -- get this -- round. Nice concept, but your average local printer isn't in the habit of printing circular things, and these cards arrived from the printer with rough edges which had to be sandpapered off by hand, and sorted into sets.
The book launch ... I won't talk about that. Wasn't my disappointment.
My sister and her friend did, however, sell the entire first edition. Eventually. My sister would do tarot readings at women's get-togethers, New Age festivals, that kind of thing, do tarot readings and sell the book and cards to people at the same time. She had, then, a marketing strategy.
Eventually, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME had a second printing, something which the average traditional self-published book never does.
My sister is out of the business now, but Dwariko is still in action, and I believe a new cut-down miniaturized edition has been produced, something that is easily portable for Dwariko as she travels around festivals and the like selling stuff (stuff she paints, stuff she designs, stuff she manufactures) in a life divided between New Zealand and England.
A different world.
Why my sister's book succeeded was, in my analysis, because she persisted. Dug in and kept digging in. It took years, literally, years and years, to sell all those books, one copy here, two copies there.
Because she had a product for which there was a market demand. New Age, tarot -- it's a niche.
Because she had a marketing strategy. Be at the festival, the woman's talk-fest, the big female get-together, and have your stall, your books. They might not find you on the Internet, but they'll find you there, face to face, and doing the tarot readings gives you the cash flow, gives you a workable economic base by which the minuscule book sales can be sustained.
The books themselves won't pay for that air trip from New Zealand to the woman's conference in Australia. The books probably won't even pay for the taxi ride to the airport. The tarot readings will pay for that.
So my sister and her friend Dwariko succeeded where many, many others have failed. They had a non-fiction book, a book on a subject which will not go out of date -- tarot will still be tarot twenty years from now -- and organized venues to go to at which they could reasonably hope to find their target audience in the flesh. They had a product for which there was a market and a workable strategy to market the product.
That magnum opus you've been working on for the last ten years -- COMING OUT: A MASTURBATOR TELLS ALL -- might not enjoy the same success.
Her success, it took a lot of guts, and an enormous amount of hard work, and I admire her for it.
And I have to stress that, for my sister, SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME was a dream. At a critical time in her life, she had this vision of what she wanted to accomplish. That was her dream, so she went out and she did it.
And, when it comes to self-publishing, I'd say this: if it's not your dream, why are you doing it? If all you want is money, dress down, put a hat on the sidewalk, put up an appropriate cardboard sign and work on looking hungry. You'll make more money that way. A lot more money.
If my sister were ever to do a second book, I imagine that she would take the print-on-demand route.
It's definitely the way to go, and now one of my sister's Luddite friends, who has done some of the books-in-the-garage route (without losing her house) is thinking of getting into it.
The Luddite friend, who I have not yet met, does not even have a computer, but has access to one.
She had self-published, apparently, a number of New Agey things. As indicated above, there's a market for that kind of thing. Has more sales potential than, say, a collection of praise poems in honor of Saddam Hussein.
But the future is here, and even the Luddite knows it, and the other day I asked my sister what had happened to that coffee shop meeting we were going to have, so I could gen her up? What happened? The Luddite cancelled? No, she's still on holiday, that's all. The meeting is still desired, though no date for it yet.
When we meet, I'll give her what I can, maybe preparing some stuff on CD in advance.
The basic concept of print-on-demand is pretty simple.
1. You, the author, prepare a computer file, typically a Microsoft Word document, done to the exact specifications of the online publishing outfit you are going to work with. Preparing this document is your responsibility, one hundred percent, and if you're not prepared to learn how to do it and to learn how to do it properly, then abandon hope at this stage.
2. You set things up with your online publishing outfit. In the case of lulu.com, go to the site, make your free account, give them the details they need, and you're done.
They give you your own storefront, which comes with a horribly complicated Internet address which you can then customize to something closer to your heart's desire, in my case lulu.com/hughcook. They also give you a free blog, but I confess I only made one entry in mine, and I've forgotten how to access it, though I guess I could find out in less than five minutes. So many things to do, so little time.
It's all free at this stage, and it stays free unless you want to go buy the global distribution thing, of which more below.
3. Having set things up with the online publishing outlet, which costs zero dollars upfront with lulu.com, but which may possibly costs you some up-front money with other outfits, upload your book as a Word document. If you work with lulu.com, you have the option of uploading your own covers or of choosing from a selection of free covers, back and front, which they provide. They're fussy about the covers, and if you upload something which doesn't meet the technical specs, then the computer will spit it back at you. This is what happened to me the first time i tried to upload a cover, and I had to remake it, which, fortunately, didn't take too long. First time out, it all seems a bit complicated. Don't worry. If you hang in there, you'll get there.
4. With lulu.com, one of the last steps is setting prices. The deal is that lulu.com charges the customer for (a) the production cost of the book, (b) your royalty, (c) lulu.com's royalty (if your royalty is US $4 then theirs is US $1) and shipping costs (by FedEx, which may not be cheap, but it works).
With lulu.com, you have the opportunity of offering the world your book as a PDF download for free (a PDF file being a portable document file, one of those files which can be opened by Adobe Reader, an older version of which you may have on your computer with the title Acrobat Reader).
Lulu.com gives you the opportunity of giving away your book for free as a PDF file or of charging for the file.
In my case, I charge, and one reason I'm doing this is to try to find out if there is really any market for PDF books. All the information I have suggests that there is not. Apart from a few nerds and geeks, almost nobody on planet Earth wants to read books on some kind of screen. The reading process was perfected the day the first dead tree book went into print, and the arrival of the electronic age has not changed that.
People will happily read a poem or a short story online, but a full-length book, no, forget it. An ardent fan e-mailed me to say he'd read the full text of one of my novels that I'd posted online for people to read for free on my zenvirus.com site, but he made no secret of the fact that he found it a struggle.
And the full text of my CANCER PATIENT memoir is, similarly, online to read for free, but the last guy who e-mailed me about that told me that, although he knew that, he still went to the expense of buying the printed book.
When the age of electronic publishing came along, many people expected that it would kill traditional publishing dead, but it hasn't, and ergonomics has a lot to do with that.
Can't take your computer into the bath, not, at least, without voiding your life-insurance policy. Can't read the screen in the sun. Our eyes don't see the true brightness of light. We, like all other sighted organisms on the planet, only see a kind of dumbed-down version of that brightness, the log of light rather than the real blaze of illumination which is truly out there, so we don't properly understand what the computer is struggling with. Bottom line, though, is true: that LCD screen is not going to work at the beach.
So the printed book is going to be here, in my judgment, forever. If it was going to go away then it would have gone. Already. Online reading is here, now, cheap and convenient, the ultimate crap experience, if you really want to go inflict it upon yourself. And, apart from some weirdos ("Yeah, reading WAR AND PEACE on my digital watch, that would be a real blast!")
So print-on-demand is the way to go.
You, the author, make the file and upload it to your online publishing outfit. They make it available for sale. If someone pays for a copy, someone presses a button somewhere and a big machine prints out a copy on the spot.
Traditional publishing involves having a big printing run and printing thousands of books at a time, a big financial investment, a big financial disaster if none of those copies get sold. With print-on-demand, nothing is printed until it has already been paid for. Customers wants a book, customer pays for the book, someone presses a button, a big machine prints one copy of that book (the one copy required to meet the current level of global demand) and that copy is shipped out.
That's how it works ideally, any rate, but read the small print. I saw one outfit which confessed that they waited until they had a batch of orders for your book before they printed out anything, and if your book is only likely to attract one copy every three years, that's not the way to go.
With lulu.com, my mother has been acting as my sales manager, getting on to people around the world -- England, Australia, Canada and the States -- to lay down their money and go buy my CANCER PATIENT medical memoir. And those who have done that reported that they ordered and the book came quickly, delivered by Federal Express, nicely packaged and protected.
No worries here, judging by the feedback I've had, regarding the actual delivery of the product.
Lulu.com does not actually print the books they sell. They outsource the actual printing, just as they outsource the delivery to Federal Express. Which, obviously, in practice, works.
With lulu.com, once you've successfully uploaded book and cover, going through a bunch of minor steps in the process -- filling in a form to say what category your book belongs to, for example, a category such as science fiction or such -- you reach the stage where a happy screen congratulates you on having published your book.
Your book is now on sale through your storefront, for example lulu.com/hughcook. Anyone in the world can buy it from lulu.com. If that's all you want, fine. It's free.
That's all I wanted for my book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT, so my total publishing cost for that was zero.
For my CANCER PATIENT project, however, I wanted an ISBN, one of the barcode numbers which bookshops and libraries use to keep track of books. You need this to sell via amazon.com, and libraries won't touch your book unless it has an ISBN.
(How will your libraries know about your book? Well, you need my mother's help on this. She's been bugging these people she knows, in England, Australia, Canada and the States, to go tell their public libraries to order it. And here in Devonport she's been pressuring multiple people into requesting that the library buy it: the library system here, apparently, won't buy a book on the basis of a request from a single would-be reader, so a properly organized conspiracy is the way to go.)
So for CANCER PATIENT, and also for the novels BAMBOO HORSES and TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, I bought the international distribution service offered by lulu.com.
This gives us extra steps, and you'll need a credit card.
Here are the steps:-
5. Read up about the global distribution services so you're sure you know what you're doing, then buy it. As part of the deal, you have to order and pay for one copy of your printed book. You have to check this before you approve your book for sale.
If you think this requirement is unreasonable, if you're not that serious about your project, well, fine. Nobody's pressuring you. You already have your storefront sales opportunity, for free, and nobody's pressuring you to take this extra step.
6. Wait for your book to be delivered by FedEx. Check it. If it's not right, do it again. If it is right, go online and approve it. Note that one of your final steps is to set a retail price which will be used by outfits such as amazon.com. Make sure you understand what you're doing, as you can't easily go back and change this. Read on-screen warnings carefully. Don't mindlessly click on anything. It's not a computer game, it's a publishing process.
I actually have my screen capture program running while I'm uploading a book, and periodically capture screenshots and save them to a dedicated folder, so I have my own track record of what I do. (My screen capture program is PrintKey, which I've used under Windows 98, and which I have got up and running on Windows XP Professional, though to get it running on XP I ended up having to find the executable, copying it and pasting it onto the desktop so I could click it into action when needed.)
After your book has been approved for sale by you, it will, all going well, be available on amazon.com some time later, but don't hold your breath. I think we're talking four to six weeks.
If you've bought the global distribution service, lulu.com lets you click to have your book sent to books.google.com to be indexed and displayed to the reading public, who get to see part of it (or perhaps all of it) for free.
I wondered if books.google.com would be able to digest my suicide bomber novel TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, which is tending toward the hard core (torture, a sadistic bare-handed killing and a guy whose lover is a large pig) so I went there and, experimentally, clicked the rudest words in the English language into the search box.
Plenty of hits, and what you were looking for jumping up on the screen. No good taste limits here, as far as I can see.
I ended up approving BAMBOO HORSES, CANCER PATIENT and TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER for indexing by books.google.com, making them searchable and displayable.
How do you tie your product into the Internet? Well, obviously, by making it part of a vast database that people are actually going to search. If some cancer patient is doing a search for a chemotherapy term like "methotrexate", then my chances of bringing my CANCER PATIENT memoir are better if it's indexed by books.google.com.
I saw my cancer memoir and my two novels as products which have at least a chance out there in the bi wide world of amazon.com.
My book of poems, ARC OF LIGHT, no. My thesis is that someone who has sampled my poems on my main website, zenvirus.com, might possibly want a copy. Global sales demand, of course, might only be six copies, but that's not a problem for me. It's my book of poems, my dream, just as SONGS FOR THE JOURNEY HOME was my sister's home. And I do want my book of poems in my hand. Before I die, please.
As for THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER, well, obviously, there are at least a few people out there searching for it, otherwise second hand prices would not have escalated to the US $300 per copy mark. That's a price, obviously, being paid by readers, not bibliophiles, since an old paperback book, considered as an old paperback book, quite simply doesn't have that commercial value.
It's people who actively want to read the book who are driving the prices up to that level, and someone who is strongly motivated to read the book will find it themselves online, providing I make a suitable number of web pages with appropriate titles, meta tags and content.
And, of course, this blog.
Witchlord-weaponmaster.blogspot.com -- shouldn't be too hard to find that.
My hint for advertizing yourself online: try to zero in on your product. Not "poems", that's too competitive. What is your niche market? "Constipation poems"?
"Death poems"? "Praise poems for Saddam Hussein"? Zero in on that, and make the appropriate domain name, subdomain name, web page, blog, whatever.
Don't try to be all things to all people. Don't go try to win first place for the search term "cars" if your book is really about the history of steering wheel covers for model-T Fords.
So my feeling about THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER is that the book has its natural market base, undoubtedly small but undoubtedly real, and that will be where the sales will come from, and they'll find it without me advertizing it in their daily newspaper because they'll be actively looking for it.
As one of the last steps in pulling the WITCHLORD second edition together, today, Saturday 28 January 2006, I phoned England from my parents' home here in Devonport, New Zealand.
Two o'clock in the morning here so about two in the afternoon in England, and Colin Smythe picked up the phone after just a few seconds. Haven't spoken to him on the phone for more years than I can remember, but he was expecting the call because I'd already sent a letter outlining what I had in mind and indicating that I would call.
Colin Smythe of Colin Smythe Ltd is the original publisher of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, the man who published the original hardback edition of THE WIZARDS AND THE WARRIORS, the first book in the series, and who got Transworld Publishers to buy the series and bring it out as a set of Corgi paperbacks.
When Transworld remaindered the series, Colin bought the remaindered books, stashed them in one of his warehouses, and continues to sell a trickle of copies. I got my last royalty check, about 300 British pounds, a couple of years back, and anticipate anther check of similar size sometime in the next lustrum.
(No, publishing is not, as a rule, a big money business. If you're interested in making really big money, go make cement. There's a career there.)
When Colin acquired the Corgi books, he went and got new ISBN numbers of them, and seven of the ten books of the CHRONICLES series are still available on amazon.com and the like, his warehouse still able to supply the copies.
The three missing books are all up on my zenvirus.com website to read for free: THE WORDSMITHS AND THE WARGUILD, THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY and THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER.
But who wants to read a book of 250,000 words as a set of HTML files?
One fan was enthusiastic about the prospect of reading it as a PDF file, so he took the HTML files, made his own PDF file (asked me first if that would be okay by me, and I said, sure, go for it) and loaded it onto a little book-reading gadget to take on a cycling tour.
Then, in the end, decided not to take the gadget after all. He had the gizmo, but, when it came to the crunch -- little itty bitty screen, battery issues -- did he really want to plow through all 250,000 words of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER? No, he didn't.
So, for the series to be complete, having the missing titles online is really not an answer. They have to be available as printed books.
Hence this new project, the second edition of THE WITCHLORD AND THE WEAPONMASTER. And, after this, logically, I'll go on to do the other two missing titles, which will be easier, as they're smaller books, and I should be able to do them as standard 6 inch x 9 inch paperbacks, instead of going for the rather clunky 8.5 inch x 11 inch format that I'm going to use for the WITCHLORD second edition.
(Rather that than go for a small font or a division into three volumes.)
My reason for phoning Colin Smythe was to check that he had no qualms, that he saw this as the way to go, and, yes, I'm happy to say that he was Mr. Enthusiasm about this.
He handles some big-time stuff. He is, for example, the agent for Terry Pratchet, a major British fantasy writer, the author of the Discworld fantasy novels. And, if I ever get my bigtime Hollywood bite, then Colin will be my agent for that. (But working with a guy he knows and trusts in Hollywood, one of the sharks who knows how to swim with the sharks).
Colin Smythe, then, is my most persistent link to the publishing world, a guy with whom I've had a business relationship with since about 1985, which, now that I count, is over twenty years.
That's a long time, going way back when, back to the days before the end of the Cold War, back before George W. heated things up and chose to kick off World War Three.
Ancient history. My history.
He is someone who has made a success of publishing in the margins, so to speak, not meaning anything unkind by that. Colin Smythe Ltd. does some fantasy, but a lot of the emphasis is on Ireland and Irish literature, not the kind of thing you want to put into the arena up against hip-hop music or the attractions of Janet Jackson's latest wardrobe malfunction.
Consequently, although he will be my line into Hollywood if that moment ever arrives, he's not going to knock my product because it's not Hollywood material. The stuff he largely deals with, stuff about Irish poets.
Colin Smythe is a real publisher with real authors and real books, a guy who was put on the right track at a seance where, needing career assistance, he sought help from the Other Side. The medium did her thing and, fortunately, the Other Side came through.
"Has Colin ever considered publishing?"
Well, whether he had or had not, that was the road he ended up heading down, thanks to the encouragement he got from the Other Side, and it worked for him.
His perspective is the one I wanted today. The perspective of someone who is a business person who has managed to make small-scale publishing a commercial reality, who is not going to knock my second edition project just because it is microsmall, but who would tell me if I was (somehow, unbeknownst to me) heading in the direction of a major mistake.
As I've indicated, he was all enthusiasm about this, very much "way to go" (though I doubt that his spoken English includes sloppy Americanisms like "way to go").
Your book may not be going out to take the world by storm, but, if there's a niche for it, there's no reason why it shouldn't exist, even if, realistically, your global sales potential is only half a dozen books. (Which, seriously, is quite possibly the reality.)
Sales sidebar:-
(I went to one of the big online publishing companies, looked at the number of titles they boasted at having published, looked at the number of copies they boasted about having sold, hauled out my pocket calculator, got the calculator to divide total copies sold by total titles in print, and arrived at the conclusion that the average title sold about fifty copies, most of them, quite possibly, bought by the authors.
Sales sidebar ends.
I'd sent Colin a complimentary copy of TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, a book, I imagine, possibly a little raw for his tastes, and he'd got at least as far as the front matter, from which he had discovered that I had published an autobiographical medical memoir, CANCER PATIENT.
He asked me about that and i told him, will, where I'm at now is more trips to hospital, more tests, and, after that, who knows what?
He was sympathetic.
Me, well, I'm adjusted to the situation. I've had well over a year now to process the fact that my life may be near its close.
Right now, my latest problems are not necessarily a signal that cancer has returned. They could simply be the survivable effects of the hit I took from radiation therapy, the ongoing outcome of my own slow-rolling Chernobyl, the post-radiation chaos which, if I live, will continue to change my brain, continuously, for the next ten to fifteen years.
If it is the cancer back again, then the probability is that I die, quite possibly this year.
In the face of that, my intention is to achieve the achievable. And what is achievable?
Well, if you look around the supermarket, there are quite a few chocolate bars I've never sampled before in my life, and yesterday I went and bought three of them.
Even if you're down to your last six months, which I conceivably may be, that's still time enough to eat quite a significant amount of chocolate.
And time enough, I think, for some more print-on-demand publishing projects.
I have the texts of THE WORDSMITHS AND THE WARGUILD and THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY as a set of HTML files, and I can easily reformat those and make an uploadable Word document out of them.
Some time this year, the three out-of-print books in the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series could all be back in print again, and that would make the series complete.
And, beyond that, i want to publish another book of poems, the title to be THE DEATH OF BIRDS. Cover, black. Back cover, black unadorned. Front cover, title in white print on black. Spine, "Poems by Hugh Cook" in white on black. In amongst the front matter, the rubric "Poems on the topic of my death".
Not everyone's idea of a dream project, I suppose, a book of death to wrap up with. But, if I am truly going down, then I want to go down in style, thank you very much. Icarus descending. Going down, but not regretting the trip.
posted by Hugh Cook at 4:34 PM
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