I missed the blizzard of '78, having been in sunny CA that year, but when I started college (a few years late -- sometime someone should ask me about my years living in CA and doing the acting gig, oy vey), it was still talked about wistfully. No storm has stacked up to it yet. It is, apparently, the one and only time Rt. 128 (inner ring-road around Boston, and the only way to get to the North Shore on a highway, in those days) was closed down entirely for a week by order of the governor.
Way upstream Melissa Singer wrote: Ganesha is the patron god of publishing...
He IS? And here I thought I was bizarre, with a Ganesha on my desk all these years. My sandalwood Ganesha came via Donya Hazard White, from one of her ubiquitous trips to India.
In production, the taking away of obstacles keeps Ganesha very busy indeed.
I am told in India you find him riding on the dashboard of taxis, rather like a plastic Jesus, but probably far more effective at preventing road accidents.
[waves back at Ganesha, next to my silver cat/paperweight and my Levenger eraser]
Now I remember why I have put up with this house for 16 years (this July): the fear that I'd have to endure moving again.
We moved almost every year (sometimes as little as 6 months) when I was a kid and Dad was still in the Navy. I seem to have lost all the good habits learned from that, or perhaps it's willful spirit to live against the Code of the Often Moved. I spread out; I don't throw things away (enough); I don't throw out things I haven't used in a year. Egads.
I joke that they'll have to remove me in a hearse from this house; even the thought of moving makes me want to have a good lie down and some scotch.
Where's my Macallen?
(Speaking of which, Sara: How do you think Tallisker would stand up to the truffle recipe? What sort of chocolate would you recommend?)
I entered the typesetting world in 1980, when I took a job at a small typesetting shop on Rt. 1A in South Hamilton, Mass., just across from what is still undeniably the best roast beef joint in the Northeast: Nick's Roast Beef. I gained 10 lbs. working there, but Nick knew me by name and sight.
We had to punch out to go to the bathroom. We had a second bathroom we'd set up as a darkroom for that paper-developing strips from the Vari-typer (or a relative to it, my memory fails here). I remember being a favorite of the owner, a hard man who literally docked your pay by the minute, if you failed to not come back from the bathroom or lunch "on time" (3 breaks a day, 5 minutes each: if you couldn't pee in that time, you lost money). He often winked me in and out if I was a bit late: I was his "perfect" keyboarder/typist; alas, a trait that has slipped over time, with the introduction of the Mac in 1984 -- which we gobbled up and adored when it premiered in the office.
Computers changed my life, quite literally. But then, most people here know how closely connected my entire life has been with computers. (Someone ask me sometime about that -- my life has consisted of standing among giants.)
PCs, Macs -- Ventura (originally Xerox Ventura for Windows 3.1), Quark, Pagemaker, and now Indesign. Conquered, loved, cursed at, and worked with them all. I'm setting a book in Indesign today, and there are still some quirks to it that make me wonder if the people who develop typesetting programs actually do typesetting. [she shakes her head and pinches the bridge of her nose...]
My love for type hasn't waned: Elric refers to me -- sitting in bed with a type catalog, matching type for a book -- as Nancy reading "type porn."
Out of curiosity, how many people here play "match that type" at movies, during the credits?
Elric woke me by saying, "Do you know what day it is?"
"What's the date?" (Because I'm in production, I live in the future and never know the date.)
"June 16th. Do you know what day it is?"
"Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes."
We laughed together. I'm glad I'm married to someone who laughed in response, knowing why I said it and where the reference comes from.
Mike K.: I can only speak from experience with handling books from packagers at Baen. For that, I tend to see anthologies (way easier to have someone else put together an anthology, wrangle all the authors, etc.), shared-world anthologies (ditto), and, yes, tie-in books (let someone else - the packager - handle the rights, etc., and then wrangle with the rights-holder for the details on which hand the hero's brother's sidekick holds his sword in the original computer game on which this book is based).
What packagers actually do -- how much work they put into a deal, once it's inked and they have the authors writing the book -- differs from packager to packager. I have worked with packagers that do damn near everything, including produce the book so all I have to do is make sure the pages aren't upside down and then send it off to the printer. Others simply ink the deal and work rather like agents; they don't even bother to proofread the galleys we produce. Some here can recognize both beasts.
worlddude wrote: Many American publishing houses and self-publishing authors print in Canada and Asia.
Actually that's not true of most American publishing houses that do hardcovers. Why? To qualify for the CIP program through the Library of Congress (Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication), you have to print your book in the United States. It's the LOC's form of "keep money for publishing flowing in America," like Ireland's "Buy Irish" program you see all over the place (or at least I did when I lived there in the mid-80s). Note all those hardcovers from American publishers that say on the copyright page "Printed in the United States" (a requirement for the CIP program).
This is why Quebecor World (the largest printer in the world) has bought most of America's midsize printing facilities, such as what used to be Bookpress Vermont, in Burlington.
All of Simon & Schuster is printed in the U.S. Same for St. Martin's, which owns Tor. Same for Random House. Same for Putnam Penguin. Same for Harper Morrow. Same for ... You get the idea.
TNH -- Packager snarls. Yes. It seems universal. Yet we (publishers) all continue to work with them. It boggles the mind. I know why certain contracts with certain packagers get made (I have no Tor stories, of course, only stories for other publishers who shall -- with their stories -- remain nameless), yet it still continues to confound reason.
Packagers arose to prominence during the Great Outsourcing Flow of the late 80s, yes? At least, that's when I started to really notice them.
mythago -- Just to make some (longish) notes about self-publishing nonfiction.
As "Windhaven," the few people I've agreed to produce for their self-publishing schemes have been nonfiction writers with premade, preselected niches. For instance, a venture capitalist who wrote the book, When Venture Capitalists Say No, sells it not only to his own mailing lists, but to his attendees at the lectures he gives. For the record: I talk fiction and non-niche nonfiction writers out of the idea of self-publishing -- and I hope they take my advice.
Do I recommend self-publishing for every identified-niche nonfiction out there? No. I still think everyone should do their damnedest to publish with a standard publishing house. Why? No one can do a better job with print production (at least costwise for this), marketing, PR, and distribution. No one. Not even Lisa and TWC. (Note: sarcasm dripping off that last sentence.) This is why in 20+ yrs. in the field, I've only taken on a handful of people who came to me for help self-publishing. I've successfully shooed away, and/or shooed towards standard publishing, everyone else, because they were going to fare far better either not publishing at all or going via "regular" publishing route.
We also need to make the distinction between identified-niche nonfiction and just plain, old regular nonfiction. If you know who, where, and when you can sell your book, with little or no effort (do you give lectures? do you have classes? do you have a following for some specialty?), then you have an identified niche in nonfiction. Then you have to think: Can I market my book? Can I tell people about it without blushing and wishing I wasn't marketing my own book? Can I/will I send out mailings to my classlist/mailing list/lecture list? If the answer is that you can indeed market your book and you know how and when, and you think the sales from the book will exceed your marketing, production, and print costs, then you have an identified niche. The venture capitalist I mentioned above fit just that bill, which I why I agreed to produce his book for him. To take on a customer who couldn't answer the above questions in the positive would be to take money from the innocent and naive. That's exactly what scammers do.
There's still a vast difference between vanity publishing -- where someone else is still taking money off the top (visibly or not so visibly) from you, the author -- and self-publishing, where the author is taking all of the profit, not just some of it. Most book production companies who work with self-publishers will take the authors' hands, walk them through the process of producing their book from manuscript to bound copy, as part of the fee they're being paid for editing, typesetting, proofreading, and prepress-producing the book. The fee isn't inflated for the advice: it's part of the service. At least, it certainly should be, and is for all the legit book production companies I know who work with self-publishers. There are a number of short-run printers who do the same, advice-wise: Thomson-Shore comes to mind.
(Remember, always, I'm talking here about nonfiction niches, like venture capitalism, not fiction -- fiction is a completely different ball of wax, and I would never encourage someone to self-publish fiction if what they care about is sales or that anyone, anywhere, ever saw their book beyond their immediate family and friends).
All this is to say, we must keep bearing in mind that we, here in this thread, need to keep vanity publishing and self-publishing as separate entities -- which they are. People like Lisa try to blur that distinction: what TWC is, and continues to be, is a vanity press posing as a self-publishing "group."
worlddude, actually all printers do charge you every time you make a change. And all real printers (the only kind I've ever worked with are real, large [or semi-large, in comparison] printers for real, large [ibid.] publishers) ask for PDF files nowadays.
Asking for and/or demanding the native files is not the sign of a "good" printer versus a bad or only-prints-for-vanity printer. It simply means you have a printer who would like the option of making the changes for you, instead of letting you make your own changes that you saw in bluelines/silverprints. And this is why they really want the native files: if you let the printer make the change, you're going to pay a minimum one-hour fee based on (usually) about $75/hr. Making your own changes, sending them new PDF(s), will save you a heck of a lot of money in the end. This is how even very legitimate printers boost their bottom line. The same can be said for letting the printer do many things for you, including color corrections, separations, stripping in art by hand, etc. But making few changes in bluelines is even better: you shouldn't ever be making changes other than "Oh-My-God-We-Spelled-the-Author's-Name-Wrong" sorts of changes at that stage. There is a reason most changes to bluelines cost you about $50/page: it's a pain in the butt to reimpose the new page, even in this direct-to-plate age.
I apologize if that's nitpicky of me, but I nitpick production for a living, and have done so for more than 20 years now for various publishers. And I had a migraine that lasted the last 1.5 days, so I may sound more nitpicky than usual. My nits feel picked over.
P.S. The Phoenix Color I know is a big, publicly-traded company that is actually the largest jacket cover printer in the U.S. Perhaps you are referring to another "Phoenix Color" in your comment?
Michaelle -- I believe the other publisher you're thinking of that now has four-digit prefixes is Pocket. We (Baen Books) get our ISBNs from Pocket (who is our distributor): our current prefix is 0-7434. Used to be 0-671. Before that ... gods, I'd have to go look. They seem to change about every year, now. I've been warned we're getting a new prefix from Pocket any day now. Someday they'll change so fast for us that I won't be able to remember them in my sleep. Gah.
(~~Baen's production manager, freelance wrangler)
While my 2003 book title was unerringly on target (book about lupus titled LUPUS has little questions attached to it), it would have been soooo much better with a hot dude or chick on the cover. Dammit. Targeted sales be damed, I want a hot dude!
Wrapping back to publicity: sitting in the author's chair for once (and what a weird trip that was), I witnessed a midlist nonfiction publisher (Marlowe) get this series (of which I was a part) not only end-cap placement in B&N for a month, but a review in the NY Times for my title. Am I unhappy about their publicity? No. Did I work with my own publicist? Yes, for local talks and signings. (More on why, below.)
Would I pay for a publicist to do that again? Probably not, but I would "hire" a friend with a good speaking voice (hi, Jim -- you're it, if I do this again) to do the calls to hospitals (medical, in my case), bookstores, etc. to book gigs. Why? Because at least in medical nonfiction I ran into a glass wall when trying to book gigs as the author myself. A third party booking, based on my own research, though, does the job perfectly. Weird, but true in my case. Again, this is only one person's experience, but I'm curious as to whether this is pandemic in the industry from an author's POV.
I know fiction writers don't necessarily get the brush-off when trying to book their own gigs -- or do they? Is this a fiction/nonfiction phenomenon? Or perhaps genre/nongenre?
I know we have booksellers (hi, Tom) as well as authors here. Anyone?
I feel like a rabbit in headlights, reading through this today. So much happened while I was off with lupus-related stuff (again), and setting up a new Mac (hurray!).
I await Lisa's responses with anticipation of more wonders to come (or at least illumination as to what is really going on), but fear we may never hear from her again. Too bad. I was enjoying her posts so very much.
I was amazed to see her try to pick apart TNH's knowledge of publishing, publicity, and distribution. I admire our hostess's restraint. It's a good thing Lisa Grant didn't second-guess me -- and I'm a few years' shy of TNH's experience in the field (though I have some marketing and distrubtion experience she never had, having run major bookstores, too, in my youth, before going back to the bosom of a publishing house) -- but I'd have not been so restrained in any of my responses. In fact, Teresa may have had to disemvowel me.
TNH and Jim, you are my heroes this week.
Lisa -- why no response? The questions really were standard ones, and not at all flame-laden, if answered honestly and openly.
Henry, but how can people get your book or hear about your book other than through you? Can they walk into a chain bookstore (say, B&N) and find it on the shelf as a "Oh, that book looks interesting" discovery? That's one downside of self-publishing.
I've produced (designed, typeset, prepress) some niche books that self-published quite nicely: for instance, the author who had a small niche he sold to directly (his national tour speaker gig: "And my book is for sale in the back of the auditorium!"), and he, like you, knew what he wanted and was able to maintain authorial control. I also found he, as with many authors, actually did need some line- and copy-editing, but he refused it. Not my problem; the bad grammar, misspellings, and errors of content is blamed on him by the reader. The name on the book is his, not mine.
Again, upsides and downsides of complete authorial control.
I know, as a professional author of nonfiction, that I absolutely cannot copyedit and proofread my own work. I can't check my own spelling, and often I miss easy, clear content errors. No author can see his/her own mistakes. Not all of them. That's why we let others, professional editors and copyeditors, work on our creations. Inhouse editors are there to help you, not to hinder you.
Just needed to rant about that. TNH has heard this rant many times from me, I know. :)
As TNH and Jim will attest, I've been helping "fight" against scams for a long time, and it almost seems as if keeping my mouth shut about Publish America, when a friend was taken in by their scam, is akin to condoning their behavior (P.A.'s, not my friend's).
I have a sticky situation to hand.
A dear friend from college (lo, these 20 years past) has just reconnected with me, and wanted to share her joy at being published (not once, but five times) with what she describes as a "small publisher."
Turns out she was sucked into the void that is known as Publish America.
Donna is dear to me. But how, how can I break it to her that she was suckered? That she is not going to be able to take these books and get a great agent (her next big goal)? That these books are not going to be reprinted by a "big" publisher? (She clearly never read the small print at Publish America.)
She thinks she has sold hundreds (thousands!) of copies, based on the "ranking" P.A. has told her she has. (Where is this ranking? I have no idea.) She thinks she is a best-selling author.
She has convinced other friends of ours that she is a best-selling romance author. They all now think that P.A. is a real small press. God. I don't want to be the bearer of bad tidings; besides, they would probably tell me that I was wrong and that I'm just jealous of Donna's accomplishments. (I wish she was accomplished as a published writer! I would dance with joy!)
I don't know if I should say anything at all. Perhaps I should just congratulate her and say nothing else. But I'm having a hard time keeping quiet.
What to do?
I wonder if he'll update it, given that the prices he has appears to have based his estimates on are now two years old. Also no way to choose different paper or weights, which is a big cost factor.
Xopher, having dabbled in linguists as regards to cognitive development, in particular with regard to the hearing impaired (oh, how my life took a 90-degree turn since those days), I would love to be there for the Worldcon Linguistis Lecture & Discussion Group. Set a time, eh?
Damn, now I'm definitely going to have to go to Worldcon.
TNH -- Will we still combine all this with a trip to kill small paper targets? Yes? Oh, and we have to have Sex.
I'll play. Double bachelor's in English Lit. and Psychology from Gordon College before it became a fundamentalist stronghold (don't get me started). Most of an M.A. in Children's Lit. from Simmon's in Boston, before they kicked out Betty Levin and a bunch of the others who founded that program and repopulated it with a bunch of academicians who had never written or edited children's books (again, don't get me started).
So currently I'm a freelance editor and production editor (copyediting, line-editing, etc.) and book production person (design, typesetting, etc. from ms. through finished book) for various companies. Do I get to edit children's books? Once in a very blue moon, if I'm lucky. But that degree in psych does help out once in a while when I'm stuck talking to freelancer of mine (usually a proofreader) down off a ledge, and in convincing a printer that they really want to give us extra time in the schedule.
But how and why did I get my first job in publishing? (Not counting my internship, long ago.) Because I could make computers my b*tch.
He does appear to be from Santa Barbara -- witness this page at Webdelsol, which is linked throughout his older pages at geocities.com. Webdelsol also appears to be the original place that housed the FSU creative writing pages Todd wrote (advice sections and all), and strangely Webdelsol.com also appears to be the server housing at least two of the online literary journals Todd mentions in his credentials.
"Todd Pierce grew up in Santa Barbara, California, a place he still considers home and which serves as a backdrop for much of his fiction."
He says elsewhere, on pages dating from the same period, that he hopes he can stay in So. California to complete his education -- this before his move to FSU for his Ph.D. program. Guess his alma matter at Irvine didn't see fit to have him take his Ph.D. there.
I note that on his old geocities.com webpage, Todd says in his bio that he has lived in Sydney, Australia. A mention that may be surprising to those who have noticed his not-terribly-accurate descriptions of that fair city.
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| 2004 | 38 |
| 2003 | 18 |
| 2002 | 11 |
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