The first tactic that I had employed early in my college publishing career, was to un-genderize every suspect pronoun with a set of non-sexist pronouns of my own devising: the “humanist” pronouns. Over time I have seen a few outraged buyers, most accepting, but none with what I would call enthusiasm for “hu, hus, hum, humself.” A few authors use “he” when they mean male and “she” when they mean female, but many of the classics, in speaking of unknown or hypothetical persons, invariably use “he” with the assumption that that means everybody. One might excuse that on historical grounds, that the only readers were going to be males, as females were not taught to read in those days. But my books were intended for American college students, and these days that means half or more of them are women. Should I, as editor, simply insult them by passing on language that had obvious sex bias? I still struggle with that question. The “humanist” pronouns I have now abandoned, and the texts that used them have been revised. I include a small marker on the cover to indicate that “he” is the universal third person singular in use in that edition. To ease my own conscience, I have experimented with developing eight versions for each volume, with choices of “he/she,” “s/he,” “one,” “they,” and other possibilities, including a universal “she,” just to see how that might feel. But I’m reluctant to waste eight ISBNs on every volume on the possibility that somewhere someone will want that specific edition. On my website, I’m playing with code to see if it’s feasible with PHP to give the reader choices. I won’t give you the link, as this is unfinished business. This is, as I said, still an unsettled question in my mind, and I wonder how others have handled this situation. Since I deal primarily with long-dead authors, I don’t have the option of persuading them to change.

The other strategy that marred the early production of this volume, formerly called “The Little Gospel,” by Leo Tolstoy, was to make his work into a thoroughly humanistic document even more than he had himself. I did this by avoiding words that to me have no specific meaning but are used as part of a feel-good formula: bless, holy, sacred, heaven, and such words. I also substituted Parent where Jesus says Father (the nonsexist error); I have come to understand that for Jesus, making God into a Father was personally important to him, even though—it seems obvious to me—that the creator of biological life is universally the Female. I still have an editorial problem with the baggage of some of the language used, but on re-reading the text, I appreciate yet again the task that Tolstoy undertood, which I had failed to find in my own reading of the Bible all the way through (I found my old copy, it’s full of underlinings from beginning to end). I had given up on Christianity in my teen years because, though the Bible is full of stories, exhortations, and parables, no coherent system or principle stood out for me.

Tolstoy, I found, made tough but intelligent decisions. The Old Testament has no rationale for Christians except to provide some basis for claiming that Jesus was more than just a preacher who went too far. And lately, I did my own thinking about Mark, the earliest of the four recognized Gospel writers. I may eventually publish those thoughts in a book myself. As an editor, however, I asked myself, Why did Mark write this, who was he writing it for, what was the point? He (or whoever actually wrote the Mark Gospel) lived two or three generations later. He seemed to be asking himself the same question — why am I writing about this dead guy, who wasn’t a very good Jew?— so he wouldn’t fit as another prophet of the Jewish tradition. He seemed to spend a lot of time throwing out ritual, worship, having priests or rules—and he healed people. But that’s not a principle or an ethic. He asked people to be like him, homeless, wandering, accepting whatever was offered, breaking rules and taboos.

But Tolstoy was much more thorough, given the materials available. Not only did he weed out the Old Testament, but also the miracles (no lessons to learn there), the descent, the star and manger (nothing to learn there), and most definitely the “Resurrection” — he came back briefly and said very little, so what was the point? What was the teaching?

The material that was left, Tolstoy modeled on the lines of what is known as the “Lord’s Prayer.” My understanding is that the “eternal life” he was talking about was really spiritual life that is outside time; in other words, not that one lasts forever (who would really want that?) but that right now one can abide in peace and love, by not living in memory nor in expectation. Which is why not promising or taking any oath was so important. Well, you can read the book yourself and see what sense you make of it. I found it much more palatable than other Gospels, so I have re-titled it, The Gospel According to Tolstoy.

The translation may undergo further revision; if you have specific points to respond to, please add those in your comments.

I was so inspired by this revisiting Tolstoy that I decided to start what may become a series, the short novels of Tolstoy—on the theory that students or readers might be more tempted to indulge in a “two-hour read,” than, say, War and Peace. This volume is Hadji Murad, a story Tolstoy wrote toward the end of his life, about a Chechen leader who, for reasons of survival, went over to the Russians. It’s a fascinating and little-known peek into the imperialist ambitions of Russia, and a glimpse of the complicated politics of the Caucasus area. Chechnya is still in the news, and, on reading this, I can see why.

Think of it as a time machine. As you go back before World War II, before the Civil War, before Shakespeare — in the days before public education, or even in Milton‘s day, only boys went to school. Only men and boys played characters on the stage. Writers consciously or unconsciously wrote for those who could read — men.

As an editor and a publisher, I am preparing material for women and men living now. So, what to do about the classics? — just let them fade into oblivion? That’s not my choice. I work with “classics” which I identify as material that is durable, that continues to speak truths to people now and people yet to come.

One is likely to regard philosophy as talking about underlying universal principles. Plato’s Athens among Greek city-states, however, was especially uninviting for women to participate in public discourse. When he talks about justice or right, is he really talking about principles that apply to both sexes? That’s how we read him today, but perhaps we’re simply looking through modern glasses at texts that are not that explicit. Generally, we give his Socrates character the benefit of the doubt. Socrates himself, if we can trust the testimony of the Apology, credits one woman with authorizing his vocation.

On to the “gender question.” As editor, what am I to do with material that, if presented to me today by any modern writer, would be obviously biased and unsuitable for publication to any educational institution? Academic authors now go out of their way to make sure that they are inclusive in their writing. No standard has been set for this. Some will alternate using “he” in one example, and “she” in the next hypothetical case. “S/he” crops up, and “he/she”; in Spanish one often sees expressions such as “Latino/a.”

Sidenote: This brings up a curiosity in language development. Germanic, Latinate, and some other languages assign a “gender” to every noun and adjective, not necessarily corresponding to sexual gender at all. Yet the English language dropped this gender pattern almost entirely — except in the case of the third person pronouns. I don’t know the linguistics behind this shift, but it does make some sense that one might drop gender for “le gateau” or “el perro,” since they might refer to either sex —and yet keep “he” for males and “she” for females simply because it’s meaningful.

We find it very handy to be able to refer to a woman as “her,” to a man as “him” — but even this is not totally satisfactory to transgenders, such as myself (and this may be the reason why I ponder the question so much).

Yet the reason this issue has come up is rooted, I believe, in the Women’s Liberation movement, demanding at least equal recognition when a writer or speaker is referring to, say, a hypothetical voter or driver or soldier. “He” is not sufficient; “He or she” will serve the purpose, yet introduces ambiguity into the image. We are lacking a universal pronoun.

That was my thought twenty-some years ago. After a good deal of searching and pondering, I decided to plunge ahead with a new idea. Now English is quite flexible as a language, we grab foreign words and use them as we please; we create neologisms easily — I heard one today: “Rovian,” referring to the political tactics of Karl Rove; that’s easily understood.

So, my pattern of thinking was to create as little as possible but use the materials already at hand. The object: to find words that we could use to replace “he,” “his,” “him,” “himself” — that would be easily understood without much thinking about it. And I stumbled onto non-gender-specific third person pronouns that already existed! The indefinite pronouns: “who,” “whose,” “whom,” (but not “whomself”). That was step one. The next logical step was to keep the pronunciation the same, but to write them as “hu,” “hus,” “hum,” and “humself.” (I tried hoo, hoos, etc. — not as elegant).

The first book that I published on my own as Bandanna Books was a translation of the I Ching. Almost every entry talked about the perfect man, the upright man, etc. In ancient China, that might actually have been the intention, to specify the man and disregard the woman. But I live in an egalitarian society; it’s part of who we are (“who” — non-specific. We are all “whos”). So, would it be pointless to translate the I Ching for modern readers? In my mind, this was perhaps the earliest effort to define the moral person, the citizen. I could not ignore that, and my first publication with the new “humanist” pronouns, as I called them, was the I Ching.

Perhaps because the cultural difference was so great that making the transition seemed to me to be the most practical way of handling the text. Sappho came next, and there was no problem. She dealt with women and with men, and specified what she meant every time. Next came a Tolstoy text, and, on looking back at it, I think I went overboard with the translation; that’s on my to-do-over list.

My next book was a text by Gandhi for which I had to pay for the rights, so I didn’t really have the option of changing the language. Gandhi wrote voluminously and well in English, so it was not at all a translation.

Then came Milton. This was a test, because his theoretical argument about the freedom of printing had a lot to do with hypotheticals. In other words, the universal “he” cropped up a lot. Should I just ignore that and treat it as precious Miltonian prose, that he meant every word as he wrote it? Was it just a historical document for the archives? Or was it, as I judged, a vital piece of literature that modern readers ought to be able to read without flinching at what would be regarded as his “male chauvinism”? Now I was in the deep end of the pool. Did I really believe what I was asserting? Well, I’d never know unless I tried it, so I made the decision to modify those pronouns. My guiding principle was, and continues — if the author were alive today and looking over my shoulder, what would he/she do. What did s/he intend? Was it meant to be all humankind, or just half?

After this and other books ordered by and sent out to about 300 universities, I found that a few returned the books in disgust. I did a survey, sent it out, and got back mixed results — more positive than negative, yet no groundswell of acceptance by others of my “elegant” solution.

In the past couple of years, as ebooks are coming in (yes, I’m finally on board with that), I’ve been experimenting with web coding that would allow a reader to choose which brand of pronouns s/he might like (I was going to say “hu might like,” but I’m not pushing that so hard these days), including totally replacing “he” with a universal “she.” That might stretch some minds. I’m still stewing over the details of that, but it would be interesting to know what people actually would feel comfortable with. Is there a retreat from “s/he” and such, or an affirmation? Is there a standard developing?

So, for the moment, you will find a small “he” or “s/he” or “he/she” on the cover of editions of Bandanna Books to identify which version you might be reading. I am concerned that I’ll start running out of ISBN numbers rather quickly — back in the day, they were free. Now they’re expensive.

So, I can’t say that I’ve resolved this issue to my own satisfaction, and I would appreciate input on this. I’d like to know what you think, how you feel about it.

My field has been publishing for the college market in literature and the humanities, which to me had always meant books, in particular the classic texts assigned in reading lists by professors. In Second Life and elsewhere, I have seen the Fall of the House of Usher, the nine circles of Hell (with some contemporary figures thrown in), and I have launched a recreation of the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury (to discover what happened and why it made such a difference: inconclusive). But these are not books, and the “answers” are the experience of the pieces, which are much harder to measure in educational terms than a true-false test or even an essay.

I did find one book, or rather an abridged book summary of some of Ferdousi’s work, artistically done, and if it had been in RL (real life), it would have been eight feet tall, with pages that turn like a Kindle. But I would stand in front of it to see the pictures and read the text, not very active on my part. Second Life can have text, and actually the text chat with other avatars can be quite illuminating, but I always have the feeling that I should be participating. Or flying — yes, you can fly in SL or other VWs, which is handy because there’s so much to see.

When I had an island (yes, a whole 16 acres), I learned to build four-story buildings, convert readymades into something else, design and landscape, create a harbor, shops,  a cave, meeting places. I was learning all the time. And some of it made more sense of RL when I returned — I understood better why houses are built the way they are, what is good design in terms of space.

But it didn’t have a lot to do with books. Not that books are superseded. The basis of our lives is text. All of Second Life is code, written code. Movies are based on scripts, written scripts.

It’s only a few hundred years that we’ve had novels and fiction, which opened up our minds to things and scenes that are not physically present, and yet we can participate in them with our minds. The fictive imagination brings history alive, and trashy novels, science fiction, so that our RL seems rather dull in comparison (which is probably a good thing). But we now have so much bombardment of news and gossip and fiction all mixed together that we need to remember to keep it straight as to what is real, what is possible from what is not real, and what is not possible.

I find virtual worlds refreshing, to remind me of that. I can be in “fantasyland,” as some might call it, and yet talk seriously with someone who is an avatar, or dance with a half-dozen while chatting — and these are real people even though they are actually in Australia or Germany or Canada while I’m soaking up the sun in Southern California. What is real is our connection.

The owners of Second Life have abandoned the educational discount on renting “land” there, and some colleges have withdrawn, usually in favor of other virtual worlds that are cheaper, or even opening their own private worlds (there are over a hundred now). The technology isn’t that daunting. So, I love it, and I learn there — but until we as a culture redefine what education means or what it is intended to do, I’m not sure that virtual worlds are, at this point, an answer.

Some schools and teachers are allowing text chat, or common work, as long as it pertains to the class discussion. Group or team projects are easier to set up now, whether simply with iPhones or iPads or virtual worlds. And if we’re training people for their working lives fifty years into the future — who are we to say what they’ll need to have a fruitful life?

I’m not giving up on books, and yet…there must be better ways for culture to pass on in a smooth flow. Maybe that’s already happening and I’m just not hearing it. I used to think that, as a publisher, I was taking the long view. That turns out to be a shorter view than I had imagined. The long view, that’s now off in a fogbank that isn’t that far away. If I were driving a car, I’d slow down — but in this case, I’m not sure slowing down is the appropriate response.

However, as a book collector (I love old books), I observed that, over time, the incredible ingenuity of the Nineteenth Century that had gone into making books precious and attractive objects, as well as reading machines — such niceties as beveled edges, marbled endpapers, frontispiece with an extra sheet of tissue to protect it, decorative chapter headings and tailpieces, hardcovers with blindstamping, gilt and colorstamping, perhaps leather for the cover, cornerpieces — all these designer elements had been abandoned, so that the only decoration left was color on the dust jacket or paper cover of mass market paperbacks. Book illustration as well has almost entirely disappeared in adult reading books. All these disappeared in part because they became expensive, and in part because serious readers apparently did not want to be distracted by visual or tactile sensations when they were engrossed in the words.

So, am I swimming against the tide to re-introduce visual elements into books, or will the colored type be subliminal enough to deliver the message unobtrusively? In another project, not yet published, I am using an even more subtle clue to distinguish spoken words from the narrative: a small indent, in addition to the traditional quote marks. In a more complex book that may or may not become an ebook, The Idea of a President, which uses the text of the Constitutional Convention to tell its story, I’m dealing with a number of speakers with different points of view, and whose speeches may or may not relate directly to the preceding speaker’s point, plus the need for a connecting narrative. For this, I decided to do an extra-wide book, while keeping each speech’s width to the usual 60-70 characters for ease of reading, but shifting from right to left (not politically) and adding a little space between so that each speech stands by itself — as if the reader’s attention is drawn from one side of the room to the other when another speaker interrupts. Could this be an ebook? Well, if I simply gave up on the design in favor of flowing text that would fit any screen, all my machinations would be lost. But iPads and e-readers with 7-inch screens could handle it directly.

I have to confess, for full disclosure, that I, book person pre-eminent, rarely read a book any more. I skim a lot, and catalog and research and handle books all the time. Perhaps I misjudge the ebook reader. What I see is that words are flying off paper pages into momentary flashes on screens. Reading, which we expect every child to do rather quickly, is a very specialized, narrow focus that shuts out almost all sense input of the world around us. It requires the almost instant translation of squiggles on a page into meaningful sounds, and then bypasses our ears altogether to race to the brain! What kind of skill is that? More curious—how did we ever evolve to be able to do it at all? And, I have to ask, are we about to evolve yet again, now that words are released from paper?

The best that I can do, from a book designer point of view, is to figure out how best to package materials (not just texts) for readers/absorbers. The means of delivery seems to change by the month. An article by Jack Schofield has me looking back at Word’s docx format, which I had disregarded before as merely troublesome (as most of Word’s stuff has been for us Mac users). It turns out to be XML-based, or at least a Word version of that, which for some books might actually be useful. I’m already double-publishing in paper and ebook (pdf) format, and I can foresee the possibility that a MS or text might come along that would merit (not sure of the right word here) chunking? hierarching? coding? for various formats. I can see that it’s designed around academic uses, and some of my work is for university centers. So, another thing to learn (yawn), another tool in the toolkit.

For some years now, I thought the Web was it. But it’s just a tool. And it might go away, or be superseded. Well, so might I, for that matter. While it’s here, and I’m here—that’s all that matters in the end.

If you leave a comment, I’d appreciate hearing how you’re doing, what you’re working on, or just what you’re curious about.

Today I was staring at the keyboard of my upright piano, amazed at what a technical achievement it was to create such an amazing instrument for weaving pleasing sounds. And yet what I heard, and what I played, was channeled by discrete tones from the keys, eliminating all the tones in between. So, while over the past few centuries it has allowed a tremendous outpouring of music, the 12-tone scale also shapes our expectations of what to hear.

I’m reminded of the Richard Serra comment on budding artists, who stretch their canvases, buy the paints and brushes, to, as he put it, duplicate what previous artists had already done. In other words, art is not about canvas and bought paints, it’s about giving expression to something that can’t be said in words. And maybe the perception as of yet lacks the tools or media to represent it.

I apply this idea to books. I’m a book person. My definition of a book is a well-formed idea. At least that’s the kind of book I’m interested in. It may take three hundred thousand words to fully form an idea—realistic novels are like that. The idea of how it is, or how it was. When I think back on my young years, I know that the world has changed dramatically since then—at the time it seemed to me that there was nothing to write about, and yet, from where I sit today, I know that very few people had the eyes to see what was all around, and the wit to record it.

We’re now in an age where paper is no longer essential for a book. That’s OK, it used to be that a scroll was a necessity; no longer. So, the essentials of a book, in my view, is enshrining thoughts or descriptions or data into a coherent whole that has not been said or expressed before. And delivering this well-formed idea to others.

This has several ramifications, in my mind. One is the value I hold for a book that has a source in an individual voice, with very little of the echoes of other people’s thoughts or ideas or experiences bouncing around one more time in our noosphere. I used to call it originality, but I’m no longer satisfied that within our culture we even have true originality. If we did, it would be outside our culture, for culture is basically our commonly accepted framework or limits. Voice, on the other hand, can be found, although coming to a place of recognizing one’s own voice, and then being able to use it effectively, is, in my opinion, rare.

Second, as a self-proclaimed publisher, the form in which a well-formed idea may be cast may need to be recalculated, by going back to basics. The author (rarely more than one person) brings the idea forth, the reader or recipient is able to read-hear-absorb it, and the conduit between the two, in my terminology, is the publisher (one who makes public, or publicly available).

As conduit, then, what is my role? My experience with editing a literary magazine was to recognize that writers write and readers read for entirely different reasons. So, my role is to shape the idea into forms that readers/audience are trained/prepared to accept. Paper is not out of the question, depending on the project. Web, ebook, POD, audio, video, virtual, bot, movie, and there may be other avenues to come—which is most appropriate depends on the idea, the audience, the times? And it depends on me, as well.

The invention of the piano was an evolution, shaped as much by what people wanted to hear as on what people wanted to share. Publishing as an industry may be undergoing a similar evolution—and evolution, we all know, essentially means the survival of the most fit for the environment. In a changing environment, being open to change is essential.

I believe the book will survive, though it may not look or feel the same as before. The mass market paperback “pocket book” format lasted about 70 years. And now we have tablets and smartphones, with new inventions on the way. Unanswered questions.

The difficulties may have been at our end, not keeping up to date on stuff. But we’re not an office staff, just collectors and sellers. Double-selling seemed to come up a number of times.

The new DIY adventure may be more time-consuming, but we can work at our pace.

Another change in our structure is that I personally am backing out of the day to day operations — though I still take the stuff to the P.O. (while it’s still around). That should reduce miscommunications with my partner. Instead, I’m paying attention to my own publishing, setting up POD for titles out of print, revising, and completing some projects that I had abandoned for lack of funds to pay printers. POD is a lifesaver from that point of view. And if I happen to start selling thousands, I can always go back to printing the traditional way (ha, as if that can happen).

And not only print. I used to do a radio show, so I’m comfortable with the idea of podcasts. Would I ever do a regularly schedule radio show again? Doubt it. But I know that some people learn better through the ear (not me), and it’s possible to combine both, though slower.

Video I’ve avoided because I’m not visually skilled. And I don’t see the point of yet another talking head telling people how great their product is. I aim to provide works that people need to know about, that have some relevance to public life today — such as the role of the Presidency. Or Shakespeare’s transgender characters. This adds to the discussion. Transgenderism has a history. The Presidency was a matter of great debate, and still is.

Back to the used book business — Amazon has encouraged a lot of different angles on works. At least a half dozen publishers are grabbing out-of-print texts, and republishing them willy-nilly as far as I can tell. Which may be a public service. My question is always: what is the value added?

My personal criterion for working with older texts is to make an effort to modernize the language so that it sounds like a person talking, and at least add a glossary for ideas or events that have faded from public memory. And each work should say something that needs to be said now, in our day.

The used book industry (not just a business anymore) has a value of making available books that are worthwhile, even if someone has already owned them, and at a price usually well below the original price. In some cases, used books in high demand and scarce supply will fetch a good price. The rule of thumb for New York publishers used to be that if the demand fell below 10,000 or 5,000 books a year, that title would be discontinued. The residual under-5,000 population would either do without or scramble to find used copies. Economically, from the publisher’s point of view, that made sense. Now with POD, that dynamic may be changing. But in any case, AFAIK, major publishers are still looking for the new, the next, the topper.

I’m just as happy in my niche, which is the college crowd, both the students and grad assistants who teach them, providing them with thoughtful classics, sometimes books that were once called middlebrow — both popular and informative. Which is what Sir Philip Sidney settled on as the excuse for all that scribbling that writers insist on doing: education and entertainment.

Selling used books that fit that description satisfies me; so does reclaiming neglected works of the previous few centuries.

For me, pdf is the way I’m going, simply because I have fun designing books, and if it all goes to flowing text, then, why bother designing? (Attitude? What attitude?). Actually, if you’re a writer, there’s no reason for you to think about style, fonts, leading, white space, margins, headers, page numbers.

But if you do have some idea of what you want it to look like, pdf allows you to set it up, and the only thing readers can change is the zoom. Actually, some of my classic revivals benefit from being in iambic pentameter, not because I love poetry, but because it’s a relatively short line and will fit more or less comfortably on a smart phone screen. In other words, pdf of short lines works pretty well.

So, I’ll skip the process of making pdfs. I’m using InDesign, so basically, I push a button and it makes a pdf of whatever I’m working on. Createspace, which is the producer I’m using, wants to see texts in pdf format — one for the text and one for the cover (in color). So the books I’m converting are already available in paper editions, and I’m producing the ebooks as a cheaper edition and in a sense a kind of advertising for the paper edition.

OK, let’s say you have your pdf for the text. If your goal is simply to create an ebook to be made available, then you’re almost there. I would recommend a “cover” (which is a misnomer when applied to an ebook). Basically, it’s your first page. Pdf allows color, so you could do your whole book in color. I will presume that you will make a color first page — you need to make the color in the RGB format, which is designed for viewing on the web. The technology for it came from color television, which originally had a cathode ray tube shooting three color guns at a phosphorescent surface inside the tube, to activate red, green, or blue and not to activate areas that were intended to be black. So when you’re sitting on outside of that tube, this particular combination of colors provided an adequate representation of whatever you are supposed to be seeing. White comes when all three guns are firing, black when none of them are. And the shades and tones in between are all combinations of those three colors. So, as long as your material is on the web, even though screens may be using a different technology, they are still geared toward that interesting solution to color.

If, however, you were making a paper book with inks, you’re not seeing images created by a lighted surface. Many colors are still available; they have recipes for just about any color, such as in the Pantone ink book. The black, however, rather than being the absence of something, is intended to be so opaque that you don’t see through it. White or cream paper is already at the other end of color without having anything in addition. Likewise, the colored inks used are based on a reflective model. One could mix colors to get an exact shade — and in the print shop where I worked, Graham Mackintosh, the printer, often had jobs from Black Sparrow Press requiring color mixing and matching, for Barbara Martin’s provocative designs.

Most color work these days, however, is not done by hand. Based on the newspaper/magazine model of halftones, a picture is made up of tiny dots, like a Seurat painting. The standard system in the U.S. is to use four-color printing with the dots. The four colors are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Black is designated by K (I don’t know why), and the system is identified by the initials CMYK, which is what printers want to see if you send them a job to print. It’s possible to convert RGB to CMYK or back, but the tones will not be quite the same. Fancy printers may use six-color printing or other systems when quality is of importance.

So for ebooks, to be seen on electronic screens, by all means use color, use RGB. For myself, I am simply putting a image of my paper edition cover on the first page of the ebooks, and leave it at that. Since my designs are simple, with mostly flat areas and no pretense of realism, getting an exact tone is not an issue with me. This last project has a map, so I indulged myself with color there. Readers mostly don’t care about color, unless it’s a textbook or art book. But it’s still true that people judge a book by the cover. New Directions went for years with simple black and white covers, but these days, printers expect to deal with color for covers. And so do readers.

The next factor in creating an ebook, for me, would be the format, the actual height and width of the ebook. This is a concern simply because if your lines are too long, your readers tire more easily.

I discovered the hard way that just putting a pdf up in my website wasn’t enough. Although the files aren’t really that big, compared with most applications, the technique seems to be to zip the files, which compresses them somewhat. And then, when one comes to your “page” with the pdf zipped, it will download. I didn’t know this three days ago, and there may be more to it, but I found that zipping makes it work.

Now, that’s all you need, if you just want to give away your ebook. I don’t mind giving away a sample chapter (which requires making a separate pdf), but I’d really prefer that people pay for it — not as much as the paper edition, though pricing is up to you.

I didn’t go the Kindle route, though I’ll be looking at that, since most of my print books are available on Amazon. The problem is that if you go with Kindle, only certain readers can read it. I do have a “Kindle for Mac” on my machine, and the books I’ve seen on there are not pdf, so at the moment I’m not convinced that that’s the way to go, for me. Outlets do matter, though, and I understand that many authors find Amazon to be the answer. Look into it. The industry is still shaking out and may not reach a standard any time soon.

If you sell on Amazon, you can just leave it up to them to handle the money transaction. If you don’t, then the choice is to find other venues (Amazon won’t sell non-Kindle ebooks). Or do it yourself, which is where I’m at, at the moment. My solution has been to use PayPal “Buy Now” buttons on my website. Don’t have a website? Then I’m not of any help. If you do web stuff, the PayPal button is set up so that when one clicks it, PayPal handles the money transaction based on your price, and then exits to the page that you specify (but is normally hidden)  which contains the desired ebook to download. I had to buy my own book to see that it worked, and it did.

One of the advantages of ebooks is that they can be interactive. My first ones are what I call supplement editions: they provide the classic text and additional material, usually some critical quotes, and a glossary of words that aren’t in common use these days. With a print book, that’s all there is, just add on the material to the end of the book. InDesign, and, I believe, other programs offer the possibility of designating a destination and a starting point. For example, I use it in two ways: for my copyright page, I mention other books which are either on my website or on CreateSpace, or even on eBid — these require the url to get to, and for CreateSpace and eBid, they handle the money transaction. Orders that come in for some of my books, which are still in my own inventory, I will need to pack and ship myself; most of these orders are from college bookstores, so I offer credit to them.

The other interactive links are to spots within the text, in my case, from the front file to the text file and also to the supplementary materials, and the glossary. All these don’t work with print books, though some publishers, especially children’s publishers, are working audio and other devices into books for reading. I think that’s a good idea. Actually, for some of my texts I’ve already created readings — hmm, I wonder how that might work with an ebook.

Another avenue I haven’t gone down is XML, which some major publishers are pursuing, to organize their workflow for the different publishing formats now available or soon will be. That will be another learning curve for me. And another blog.

Hope that this discussion helped some of you get started or get thinking.

The Idea of a President — I modeled it on a radio series I did, The Beechers, in which I had created a reading script from historical documents to bring that part of history alive. I had had this idea years ago, probably the drastic transition from Clinton to Bush, about what was this “presidency” anyway? It takes such a personal stamp, or so it seems.

I had begun it in the years before digital files were available, and I ran across this folder with all my notes and the beginnings of working with James Madison’s notes at the Constitutional Convention, the place where they decided, or thought they did, what the Presidency ought to look like. Not a King, to start with. First idea was to have three people in the Executive function; that didn’t last long, but there were long debates on seven year terms, or eleven years, or ineligible to serve twice, all sorts of stuff. An advisory council of the Supreme Court, that didn’t fly.

Anyhow, it proved to be my lesson in civics, going through this entire document, weeding out all the parts that didn’t pertain to the Presidency. And then, it may have been an unconscious decision on my part, I began putting the statements in the present tense: “I move that…” and so forth. It made it come alive for me, and Madison was scrupulous about taking notes. I learned that he had initiated a meeting some months before, at Annapolis, where only five states showed up. But then the Shays’ Rebellion continued with unrest in Massachusetts, and no one seemed to have the authority to put it down (a private party actually financed enough of a militia to do the job). And that clinched it. The Articles of Confederation really was not an adequate governing document, and people were afraid the loose union might fall apart, and then what? Madison made the call for a real Convention, with the idea that just patching up the Articles might not be enough. And then afterward, he was one of the writers of the Federalist Papers (urging ratification). And, of course, our fourth President.

OK, OK, I’m still full of the details. I’m happy with the production, and thinking beyond the book toward perhaps recreating the kind of “radio” show I had before, by enlisting my congregation friends to speak the lines into a mike, and I could spend my time patching it together as an audio production. That’s a maybe; my estimate is that it would amount to ten hours of audio — and if you knew audio production, multiply that by 10 or 20 or more for production. It might be quicker. When I did the Beechers series, not only did I write the script and beg for people to read it, I actually cut and spliced a master tape, well, 28 half hour episodes. Plus music intros and such. Digital tech might speed up that end of things.

The idea of a President didn’t come easily. They didn’t start with political parties, though you can see the moderates, the conservatives, the liberals. And the three who finally didn’t sign actually had contributed as much or more than anybody to the discussions. In the end, nobody was totally satisfied. Ratification took a few years — but what choice did they really have?

Deliberations went on from May through September, by some of the most dedicated and perspicacious individuals alive at the time. Thank goodness Ben Franklin was still around. At the very end, he commented on the painting on the wall in the room where it all happened. He said he hadn’t been sure whether it was of a setting sun or a rising one. But now he was sure that it was a rising sun.

Wait a few days, and then check in at www.createspace.com/3766602 to read the description of the book.

So, what have you been up to lately?

Once you have a first draft in hand, what are the steps forward? I personally recommend letting a MS (manuscript) sit overnight, perhaps longer.

When you pick it up again, you are no longer the writer, you are the editor. Assume that someone else wrote this — in other words, free yourself to slash paragraphs, revise, rearrange, rewrite, toss out whole chapters (well, put them aside to see if it flows better without that subplot diversion).

To an editor, the words are not golden. The editor takes a loftier view — what is the arc of the story or narrative? Does the piece flow from beginning to end? Does it pull you along, anxious to find out what happens next, or how an argument rounds out?

Do you hear a voice in the writing, a consistent surefooted presence? If there are characters, can you tell one from another by the tone? Do you see the setting, or understand the premise? And the Perlongo test: if you pick it up at any random passage, do you immediately know what is happening?

Another take: Who are you writing this for? Visualize that person as well as you can. Male? Female? Young? Working? Cheap? Student? Filled with anxieties? Desperate for love? Ambitious? Depressed? A minority person? Looking for a fast buck? a cheap thrill? Relief from her/his dreary life? Nostalgic? Picky? Dense? Easily distracted? In a quandary? Now look at your piece to see how that person would read it. Did the writer connect to that reader?

As an editor, I’ve seen a lot of pieces in which writers have poured their hearts out — which is a good thing, as that’s where the value lies. But look from the reader’s eyes; she/he is not looking for your problems unless it sheds light on or mirrors her or his own. The editor and the publisher are there to build a bridge, if possible, between writer and readers.

I have a specific mission these days, on the question of writing, editing, and publishing. It’s based on my personal experience of writing, writing, writing without a lot of direction, and I had succeeded, in my own mind, in crafting believable stories out of thin air, building contrast and conflict, character change and resolution, with creative story lines. But when I stepped behind the editor’s desk and saw what others were doing — quite similar to what I had been doing — and I was also responsible to publish and find readers for same, my mind changed on what was valuable in writing. That and a writing class with Bill Richardson, who had one message: write yourself.

It’s easy to make stuff up, and fun too. Some popular authors do just that. But as an editor, I can tell you that that dreck gets wearisome. The MSS that made a difference to me were honest, they may have changed the names but it was obvious on reading this kind of material that it was carved out of life, sometimes painful life, not cardboard. It changed my attitude, and I understood why Hemingway might spend all day to write one true sentence.

That change may have migrated to my own writing, though I now understood that it wasn’t pounding out words that counted, that honest writing was hard. It didn’t come naturally like conversation, it was more like confession. And who wants to confess, day after day — not me.

So that’s where I see value in writing. The more crafted a piece, usually the less true it becomes. But don’t forget punctuation, spelling, grammar — well, that’s what editors are for.

OK, that’s off my chest. More later.