Paperbacks: Publishing Is Dead, Long Live Publishing (Or) You Can’t Read A Kindle In The Tub

The following boils down to a prediction: In a world gone digital, indie print-on-demand paperbacks will become the vinyl records of reading. In both cases, credibility and efficient pricing are king. Plus, people need paper.

That's right. Paperbacks. Sort of like in the movie The Graduate, when the older guy is giving advice to a young(ish) Dustin Hoffman and says, “One word: Plastics.”

Meanwhile, it's a long walk to holding your own book in your hands. I’m happy to share that my debut paperback is now in full distribution through Ingram Publishing. This whole experience was eye-opening and I took notes. So, I’m happy to have the occasion to share what I’ve learned so far.

It all begins with glue. In 1935, around the same time adhesive labels were born, the three Lane Brothers of London were able to efficiently attach paper covers to glue bindings at a reduced cost.

As Penguin Books, they borrowed some branding ideas from a recently-failed rival company, purchased some high-end publishing rights, distributed well-priced copies through Woolworths and sold a million in the first year.

Regular people need good stories. Everybody loves a bargain. But, nothing really changes until technology says so. Always keep in mind, someday soon, today will be quaint.

Today we have the Espresso Book Machine. An early version debuted in 2007 at a New York library, where it printed and bound free copies of public domain books from a huge, open database.

A 100-page book takes approximately eight minutes to print, glue together, and then trim to the proper size. Meanwhile an 800-page book (which is the largest the EBM can produce) takes about 12 minutes to produce. - McNally Robinson Booksellers (Canada)

It is a print-on-demand system, which means today's minimum order on any unit is now one. Not one box or pallet or truckload that somebody needs to sell or they'll all rot someplace. One book, printed and shipped, with costs included in the purchase price, robbing larger companies of the advantages of scale. Someday, the only printed books will be the ones somebody asked for, so everybody won't collectively be paying off that wasted paper and ink. Hopefully, this efficiency means an advantage for creators, for once, instead of only the gatekeepers and their friends. It just seems, doesn't it, that better things happen when people get the tools into their own hands? Or at least, it's supposed to work that way.

So far so good: Since it launched in 2013, indie-focused IngramSpark registered more than seven million POD books.

Ideally, self-publishing follows a cycle. POD books selected to be on shelves at libraries and independent book stores means credibility. That credibility and some strategic marketing combine for ebook sales. Popular ebooks make great POD books, especially as gifts and beach reads. Ask for yours at your local library or independent books store - they'll order more.

The best part, this is one aspect of the game Amazon does not completely control. The clear industry leader at the moment is Ingram, already one of the best book distributors in the world. Amazon quietly uses them for their own "extended distribution" and builds in the extra cost. The IngramSpark program allows any independent writer with something to say and an ISBN number to offer their books at industry standard wholesale to the retailers and libraries who already use Ingram, which is all of them. Within their system, your listing is indistinguishable from the listings of any other publisher. Friends, the playing field is now level. And their support people are genuinely nice.

This all also helps independent book stores fill their shelves more efficiently, while gathering and guiding smart buyers through this world of new authors. People will need community and dialogue and curators more than ever. They'll package their own themed collections, have speaker nights and sell lots & lots of coffee.

One terrific example of booksellers capitalizing on things coming over the horizon is the IMAGINARY FRIENDS READING CLUB at Skylight Books on Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles. They send you a hand-picked, recently released novel or story collection every month. And they've been in that influential neighborhood for more than twenty years. These folks know what's good. Booksellers simply do.

Great, but, hold on, you say, what kind of REAL author self-publishes their work, anyway? 

Hey, that's a good-looking question. Do you workout? Here’s an article from John Kremer, who answers this with Elliot, Atwood, Whitman, Pound, Shaw, Sinclair, Blake, Kipling . . .

So, go publish yourself. The future is bright.

And here is my own story. Because that's all I got.

Part One: Introduction

I must have been eight or nine, at the People’s Drug store near our house, when I really listened to the words to Paperback Writer for the first time. I have a mental image of the narrow aisles as it played from the overhead speakers.

I took away a couple things that day. First, the Beatles were sort of mocking this guy, who wrote this thing and seemed to be begging a little. (Fab, Paul, must be easy when you’re a Beatle.) Second, I wanted to be that guy. (I’m still not sure why. Something nice about used book stores, I guess.) Even if Paul McCartney made fun of me.

The following is the What, How and Why Now of my first book, called Lights Along The Interstate. Or, Forty Thousand Words That Took Me Twenty Years To Write. The book answers to either one. It’s just happy to be out of drawer.

Why so long? Good question. Hopefully, in here somewhere is that answer.

In book blurbs I sometimes call it: The Canterbury Tales meets Paradise Lost at a roadside diner, except the apple falls from a needle this time . . .

The dot-dot-dot is key.

And: A retirement home escapee heads for parts unknown. The Devil quits, he’s in love with a waitress. Unexpected gunshots create late-night companions. A traveling salesman picks his own place in the Universe. A wandering ex-priest looks for answers between the lines of a legal pad. Somebody’s flinging pennies at a naked businessman and she’s not at all sorry it hurts. Stranded, a student finds himself, and dinner, in the middle of nowhere. A drunk widow skips the service. An overdue family reunion solves nothing and resolves everything. Two lost kids the age of grownups decide something big for the rest of us. And all the Bus Driver’s praying for is a good night’s sleep.

And, sometimes: An often joyful, sometimes heartbreaking journey. Full of dry humor among late-night strangers traveling that long road to elsewhere.

It’s dedicated to my Mom, my Wife and the nuns who were first to get their pointy fingers into my pretty little mind.

I just wanted to get that marketing stuff all out of the way. See, I’m a big believer that it doesn’t matter what the author was thinking. That what you take away from the object they created is the only important thing.

So, anyway, here’s what I was thinking:

The idea is to get out of the way of the story. So the writing is spare and present tense. Many characters are named for their function. There are no quotation marks because it’s always the narrator talking. These stories are meant to be fun. Irony always wins. And I write like this. With lots of starts and stops. For that, I have some very good reasons. But maybe that’s another essay.

To provide moral support for an overall style that may, at times, seem too simple, I would like to reference this recipe by Dean Martin:

MARTIN BURGERS - One lb. ground beef, two oz. bourbon, chilled. Preheat a heavy frying pan and sprinkle bottom lightly with table salt. Mix meat, handling lightly, just enough to form into four patties. Grill over medium-high heat about four minutes on each side. Pour chilled bourbon in chilled shot glass and serve meat and bourbon on a TV tray.

If it helps, my shortest explanation is, this first book happened while I was daydreaming in English class. The next book leans more toward Action & Adventure, so stay tuned for that.

Meanwhile, I’ll let you be the judge. Because, like I say, what choice do I have?

Part Two: The What

When you’re still a couple years short of driving, sometimes you get stuck places with your family. One long and rainy Saturday, when I was in high school, at an antique furniture auction in rural Virginia, I bought a couple old paperbacks out of a wooden bucket and met Woody Guthrie.

Bound For Glory is the first book I ever felt was talking directly to me. I mean that in terms of writing style as much as, obviously, the person and story. It was as if somebody was sitting across the room, speaking in their own voice. Not their typewriter voice. Not their junior book editor’s voice. Their voice. Woody’s voice, as clear as any recording. Completely unfiltered. Almost shouting, this is how I tell it, want to hear my story or not? That Woody Guthrie sure was punk rock.

In the introduction to Richard Bach’s Illusions, he notes that it’s a book he never wanted to write. He simply had other things to do. But the book insisted. It’s not healthy or wise to compare your own stuff in any way to perfect works such as that one. So I certainly don’t. I just know my book insisted on being. And that Donald Shimoda also changed how my brain functions.

For a long time I got caught up with the idea of how things are supposed to be. I looked at other books and wondered why I didn’t just do it all the same way. I changed the tense back and forth. I fluffed out entire sections with pointless dialogue. I worried over word counts. Supposed-to’s are a real killer. The book didn’t care. It knew where to grow and where not to. I had to get over myself in order to figure that out. Took a while.

The stories started in college as a collection. I was essentially a history major, but took a 500-level Milton class my second senior year, in which we passed Paradise Lost around, each reading a part until the sun came up. Powerful stuff. Read my book. It’s all in there. At least, my version.

Then, while I was working on suburban newspapers, along came real life, real fast, which gave the fictional characters walking around in my head something to think about. These papers covered people where they lived. That close to home, small things leave big dents. Like, right in your driveway.

In long-form improv comedy, a building block is that people often operate from the function: When you do this, I feel like that. It works because that's also true in life. That's how folks do their thing.

I saw wins, lots of them. And losses, lots of them. What I took away is that look in someone's eye when it's all still happening. How their shoulders and voices rise or fall. How they frame their next thought. With any luck, I learned something.

We moved to Los Angeles. Another five years went by. Then all of a sudden I’d spend a couple weeks on it and the whole thing would get shorter. Then back in the drawer. Then, later, out again for a trim. Always adding what I’d learned and removing words in the process.

Then one day it was done. Simple as that. So I spent another five years polishing.

The constant polishing part comes from writing up countless unsold scripts, treatments and pitches, hoping to lure actors to lure money to make movies. Constantly trying to look at it from the other person’s point of view. Nothing is ever really done until it’s finished on the screen. Even then, it’s not really done so much as too late to make any further changes. There is no sharpening stone quite like: Well, did it work or didn’t it?

If newspapers taught me how to march, movie scripts taught me to fight. In a good way.

“I set down with my back against the wall, looking all through the troubled, tangled, messed-up men. Traveling the hard way. Dressed the hard way. Hitting the long old lonesome go.” Woody Guthrie, from his book Bound For Glory (1943)

Part Three: The How & Why Now

At the end of the last century, my Wife-To-Be and I were in the process of moving West.

I had a very shabby draft of the book together. So, I bought one of those publishing guides with all the New York and London addresses. The newest one that year. Thick. Pricey. Very specific about which places are looking for submissions and which are not. With very specific instructions about whether to send samples, and which ones, along with your polite pitch-letter, worded very much like a Beatles' song.

Over a long period of time, there was a lot of printing and envelopes and stamps. Neat piles of paper across the carpet. I remember it as all very stressful. Then off they went.

Then they came back. Most of them, though I eventually stopped counting. Unopened, with angry red ink. Sometimes in stamp form, some in pointed handwriting: No Submissions!

I would hold the envelopes up next to the listing in the book and shrug. Enough of that. And into the drawer it went.

However, there was a lot to suggest that things would change in terms of publishing. To what extent and precisely how, no one could guess (except for, of course, some future Bond Villain I can think of, currently making our world a more magical place).

When my Dad started out in the printing industry in the 1960’s, in the Washington D.C. area, printing was as important as tourism and points were called picas. When I was a kid, he co-owned a large company that did pre-press and color separation for offset lithography. He had to start his own courier company to get all the elements around town. They owned an early computer system that could do basic effects, like put the texture of an orange on an apple. By the 1980's, the loan on one piece of equipment, around the size of small car, started at a million dollars.

These days that’s called Photoshop. You could probably do most of it in your phone. The building's still there, though.

Book publishing for authors traditionally breaks down to a writer convincing an agent to convince a publisher to add their words to the thousands of pages they’ll be printing next year. Because mainly their business is filling warehouses with books. They get paid more when the books sell. It’s a shame when they don’t. Either way, they also make money to produce them and write off any loses. Publishers are simply printers with snootier cocktail parties.

The simple market psychology of all this is rooted in the fact that life is short. People simply want somebody to sign off before they waste their time paying attention. So, the better the person vouching for the individual, the further they fly. As a reader, if the Big Publisher likes you, and the airport kiosk sells you in a big way, then how bad could you be? And the Big Publisher simply figures, well, that Fancy Agent likes this writer, and the Fancy Agent needs to make money as much as I do, so let’s give it a whirl. They pay themselves to do the art, they pay themselves to the do the marketing. You fly yourself to do the talk shows. And they make much more money printing text books.

So I guess I decided to wait until that all went away a little bit.

I'd spent my High School and College years learning to be a community newspaper reporter. Then that kind of reporter and that kind of news went away. I showed up in Los Angeles and spent a few happy years on independent movie sets, in offices making pitches, finding locations, feeding crews, renting equipment and navigating the world of post production, until technology, 2008 and a poorly-timed Writer’s strike drove independent film from the Earth. So I know how things end. What I started looking around for instead is something brand new.

And that’s Ingram and that's Amazon. And that’s direct-print publishing.

My Bride now publishes a travel magazine which has an almost half-million piece run, twice a year, through POD printers. The magazines pop out, one at a time, from a big, automated, printer/binder system at a fraction of the traditional cost or time. And each one is fully customizable.

My first real job was sweeping the floor of one of my Dad's printing shops. Those warehouses full of spinning metal plates are gone. The eccentric and expert press operators with gigantic overtime checks, gone. Cans and cans of ink. Huge pallets of paper. The scary machine with a big open blade that could cut through a telephone book. Trucks so full of paper they sink into hot asphalt. That noise. Those smells. Gone. My first newspaper job on a small-town daily, my chair a few feet from a pair of swinging doors and a whirring press spitting our words onto the street. Long gone.

The good news is, you may never have to buy a chatty lunch for an overpriced book agent ever again.

Full disclosure, here’s Amazon's hustle, good and bad. Your book, even electronically, is an item for sale like anything else on Kindle Publishing, a corporation both benevolent and evil, sort of like fire. They give you a marketplace and access to remarkable technology that lets you format and distribute your work, yourself, directly to a reader all the way across the world. Not for free, of course. They take their cut on both your ebook and your paperback. And . . . (if you'd happen to like not disappearing into a vast abyss of competing products) they want you to buy their ads, per click, in a big way, on a regular basis. If enough clicks become sales, you win. Either way, pay up. Sounds fine. Except . . . Amazon. Those folks don’t make it easy. Again, that’s another essay for another day.

So, where does that leave us?

A traditional publisher does, and always did, look to the author to promote themselves, or at least have the decency to be famous in the first place. Which is why a celebrity chef or former actor or disgraced politician will always have a place and there will always be that industry on some level. Coffee tables need books too. This won’t change. These authors will always carry the full support of a giant, historically successful mechanism.

For contemporary fiction, however, for the first time since Guttenberg first published the bible, somebody writing a story really has nothing standing between themselves and the person reading. (And yes, this includes in airports and on beaches.)

Fine, but with this sudden rush of words into the marketplace, how will the cream rise, as it were? What about all the inevitable not-ready-for-an-audience nonsense?

Don’t worry. Turns out, everybody’s a critic. I am confident it will all find a way to curate itself . . . and so begins the next hustle.

Which brings us back to me. Hi. In my experience, making things is easy. It’s showing it to people that’s hard.

I pushed the publish-on-Amazon button on this book last year and headed to the airport for the holidays. The sensation was that of walking around with all of your skin peeled off. Terrifying, but, you know, brisk.

It reminded me of this one last story. At that printing shop I worked at as a kid, a guy came to the loading dock one afternoon, looking for a box of books they’d just put together. The book was, I think, a history of classic matchbook covers. They were his. Put it together himself. Paid for it himself. He had no real way to sell it or anything. This was end of the 80’s. Maybe flea markets or something. Fellow collectors.

There was real teenage dissonance for me in that moment, looking at that poor guy smiling down at the first book he dug out of the box, turning it over in his hands. I mean, it’s not like somebody picked him up and brushed him off and said, hey, come with me, my super-special friend, because you too are an extraordinary creator of thought, with a stamp on your spine that proves to all that you are one of us!

Isn't that the way it is supposed to happen? Wasn’t he cheating somehow? Or pretending? Wasn’t this just a regular guy?

Yeah, Paul, so he was. And so am I.

Portions of the material in the article were previously published at www.yndotStreet.com

#publishing #creativity #innovation