This note had appeared in about November 2011 on my website, and I thought it had enough personal info to include it here. It shows how far (or how not so far) my publishing strategy has progressed.
I WAS FINALLY CONVINCED to take a chance with POD publishing, almost forced into it with my brother’s book, Pi to 500,000 places. And I was able to turn that brief introduction into helping a poet friend do his books cheaper, and finally doing it for my own projects, now 20 of them online in POD, so that’s about 3 titles a month! The pricing is different, and the royalties, well, I’m used to the publisher’s share, but call it royalties they do. POD changes the business model; no longer is there a huge investment in inventory, which is sold off piece by piece to recoup the cost of printing—maybe. The gamble is taken out of the equation, since, after the initial preparation (which is the part I know best), you basically sit back and collect income. Marketing helps, but even that field is totally shifting. The following top picks of the wish list didn’t get done at all, but one further down did: Twelfth Night, as part of a Shakespeare series of plays with transgender activity. But a lot of energy went into two 19th century items: The Beechers, which was originally a radio play for which I still had the tape recording of all the speakers. Which led me to issue a Supplement Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the added material based largely on the Beecher research. And the Supplement Editions, which had been previously done simply as pamphlets, were now incorporated with their texts. And currently (Dec. 2011) I’m preoccupied with recreating the Constitutional Convention, as it related directly to the role of the President, in a similar way to the way that I produced The Beechers; I may even try recording the various speakers and posting that online, as I have done with The Beechers. I have not seen such a production, but with my radio background and the script, I can do it.
One thing I notice is that I enjoy the designing part of book production. When I was doing the Black Sparrow Press books, at the very first, I would ask what typeface to use, what point size, etc. My boss at the time, Graham Mackintosh, would tell me, but it wasn’t long before I realized that he was making it up depending on the book’s author and the content — and that I could do the same. The Black Sparrow books were all done in the same 6×9 format, whether prose or scatter poetry, with very few exceptions. The publisher, John Martin, found a format that worked, and he went with it. When I concurrently started doing publications myself, I chose a similar but smaller format. Now, with POD, I’m realizing that, in this age where paper edition books are now sold in part because of the look and feel that people enjoy, formatting doesn’t have to simply be designed to sit upright on a shelf with a middling-to-fat spine as its advertisement. The Shakespeare books, for instance, are full of iambic pentameter, which is too short for 6×9 or even 5.5×8.5, and you probably have seen it in double columns in tiny type. I chose instead a “landscape” format, yes, with two columns but a lot of space and good-sized type. It may look odd, but it reads well.
Now that I’ve adjusted to 2011, it’s becoming 2012 and I will have to sort out the appropriate forms of books to be read on a smart phone (rather than “grandpa box” as a friend’s children call his desktop computer). Ebook, ePub, Kindle — and how to market ebooks to college classes? I’m sure someone has figured out how, and I will too.
Addendum as of January 18.
I’m experimenting with a Director’s Playbook for Hamlet, with what I consider to be the elements behind the scenes that go into a production: auditioning, budget, planning the promotion, the playbill, publicity, lighting, set design, costuming, hiring a theater–w0w, and all this for a few nights and then it’s gone? What makes theater people do it? Well, I could say the same about publishing: if you want to make money, look elsewhere.
Also my first try at an ebook. Different possibilities, different limitations.
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