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My Life as a Publisherby Waverly Fitzgerald When I first got a business license in the State of Washington, I said my business was publishing, because I was publishing a book of compiled essays about seasonal holidays I had written for the New Times. I named my publishing company Priestess of Swords Press (in the tarot, the Priestess of Swords represents mastery of written language). The following year, my daughter and I collaborated on a book of stories about our dog and cat. I wrote down the stories I had been telling her at night and she illustrated them. We called it the Adventures of Chester and Faithfull. The technology I was using at the time was primitive. I designed the pages so they fit landscape style on an 8-1/2 by 11 piece of paper (it makes a rather awkwardly shaped book—I later changed to 8-1/2 by 14 pages which produce a more pleasingly square-shaped book). I then cut and pasted the pages to get them adjacent so they would photocopy properly back to front and in the right order. One of my favorite things about creating a book is making the little folded sample which shows how the pages go together. After the pages were pasted up, I went to my local photocopy shop and had them make copies, cut the pages in two, print a front and back cover on card stock, and comb bind them. (Later I found it was cheaper to have a printer do this and I’ve been working for years with G&H Printing on Eastlake. I totally recommend them.) That year we gave out copies of the Adventures of Chester and Faithfull as Christmas presents (I believe this was the year we first decided to make all of our Christmas presents). They were wildly popular. We were showered with compliments and years later, friends of ours will tell us their favorite stories. We’ve read them to each other, especially in times of distress, and now that Chester and Faithfull are both gone, the stories are even more precious. In the years since, I’ve given out many other books for Christmas presents. Sometimes they are holiday-related, like my Thirteen Christmas Cookies book and The Twelve Days of Christmas (a collection of folklore and recipes for the twelve days). Sometimes they contain my own artistic efforts (these are always a little harder for me to hand out as it seems vain): a year of seasonal photographs and haikus one year, a few years later, the year I took two haibun classes, a book of haibuns. Sometimes Christmas is my deadline for completing a family history project: a book on the Fitzgerald Family of Minnesota one year, and last year, a calendar featuring my mother’s family, the Wittaks of Milwaukee. I love having a deadline (Christmas present) and I love the act of designing pages, the way the form itself forces you to make drastic decision (got to cut a paragraph out of this page), the collaboration between images and words, the way they enhance each other, but most of all, the pleasure of holding an actual object in your hands. Yet even though I loved making these books, they never seemed like “real books” to me. For one thing, they were all comb-bound so they had no spine which makes it hard to find them on a shelf. The covers were unassuming black and white illustrations on white card stock, nothing that would make you reach out and grab them off a table at a bookstore. I never tried to circulate them any wider than my circle of friends, family and visitors to my website. I always knew that some day, if my Slow Time book did not sell to a major publisher, I would publish it myself. I took workshops on self-publishing as I was shopping my manuscript to an agent and later (after she failed to sell it) to a series of small publishers. Meanwhile the technology was improving. I collected brochures from companies that specialized in printing books, but I knew I didn’t have room to store a large supply of books and that’s the best way to get a cheap price from a printer. For a while I thought I would use one of the big print-on-demand companies, like XLibris or iUniverse. Both require a payment upfront (which ranges, depending on the package you choose, from $300 to $12,999). One of them requires that you sign over the copyright for a year (not a good idea) but I’m not sure which one. While trying to figure that out, I discovered that XLibris has a free service allowing members of the Author’s Guild to republish their out-of-print books. Might be time for me to republish my old Victorian historical romances. A few months ago, I heard about a new kind of self-publishing, which operates more on the model of Paypal, which I was already using to accept payments on sales of products through my website. These self-publishers offer free services but take a commission on sales. That’s how I ended up at www.lulu.com (afterwards I heard about www.cafepress.com which also sounds great). Lulu.com is a service which can create perfect bound paperback and hardcover books (among many other things) which can be ordered online and shipped directly to the customer. They take care of production, revenue collection and distribution. All you have to do is provide the content. I wanted my book to look beautiful and professional, so I hired a book designer, my friend, Joanna Powell Colbert, who took time away from her own big art project (the Gaian Tarot deck) to design the inside of my book. She also designed the book cover which features an original piece of art from an artist whose work I had admired for many years, before she showed up as a student in one of my Popular Fiction classes at the University of Washington: Anna Witte. (www.annawitte.com). Joanna provided me with the files I needed to send to Lulu, and I was able to work through the steps involved in creating a paperback book. I designed the back cover myself and it’s the most amateur part of the book (I couldn’t figure out how to do some simple things with the text, like italicize titles and move elements around on the page.) For the next book I publish, I will design the front, back and spine as one piece so I have more control over the way it looks. Lulu sets a production cost based on the number of pages in the book and the author sets the overall retail price. Customers can download a copy of the book (I get all the value of that; I’m not sure what the product looks like). When books are sold off the lulu website, Lulu subtracts the cost of production and gives me 80% of what’s left (I get about $9 for a $20 book). If the book is sold through an online retailer (like Amazon), I will make about $4 a book (that’s because the retailer buys the book at close to the production cost). That’s still better than the 10% to 15% royalty I would get from a major publisher, although not as profitable as printing the book and selling it myself. But the nice thing about Lulu is that anyone can order it directly from them and Lulu will print it (that’s the on demand part of print-on-demand) and ship it. I don’t have to keep a stack of books in my basement or put them in packages and take them to the post office for shipping. Lulu also provides a distribution package which you can purchase for $50 which provides you with an ISBN so that your book can be sold through online retailers like Amazon and Borders and Barnes and Noble. My book has been approved for an ISBN but the final version has not yet been printed. That means if you order a copy how, you will get a soon-to-be-rare first edition, with a typo n the back cover. In a few days, I will publish the second (and official) edition. Would I recommend self-publishing to anyone else? Absolutely if you are trying to produce a limited edition book for family and friends. This is a great vehicle for collecting family stories, sharing the stories of your life with your children, producing calendar of photos for holiday gifts or compiling all the genealogical research you’ve done. Instead of spending endless hours at the copy shop and mailing them out to everyone, you just upload the files to Lulu, then hand out the web address. Even better, you can make some money on the sales (although you could also set the price so it only covers the production cost if you don’t feel comfortable charging for your work). The trick, as with all self-publishing, is finding your audience. If you have an audience already (as I do with my website) you can promote your book through your website, workshops and marketing. If your book is online (either at your own website or listed with an online retailer) and it covers some unique subject that people will search for (say how to identify wild grasses) you will surely be able to sell your book. If your subject is more general, say women and work, you might have a harder time. I never recommend self-publishing for novelists. It’s just not the way people look for novels. Can you imagine typing into a search engine “detective novel set in Seattle featuring a female PI who’s hunting for a Sixties radical who’s been underground for thirty years”? (That’s my detective novel.) I know of only a few cases where a self-published novel made it big. One was Eragon by teenager, Christopher Paolini, who spent a year with his family criss-crossing the United States giving talks at schools, libraries and bookstores, until the well-published novelist Carl Hiaasen (whose teenage son loved the book) recommended it to his publisher. (Read the full story at I’ve been very happy with the Lulu process and will use it again for my next projects: an anthology for my writing group, a weekly planner for my School of the Seasons website and a calendar based on the French Republican calendar (my Christmas gift this year). Perhaps I’ll eventually reissue the Adventures of Chester and Faithfull, and include the latest story (written by my daughter) about how Chester and Faithfull tried to get rid of our newest pet, my daughter’s Chihuahua, Pepe, by mailing him to the North Pole at Christmas.
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More articles on writing by Waverly Fitzgerald: Getting the Most Out of Summer Writing Conferences Imitation: Conscious and Unconscious |
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