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Writing and Publishing, Part 58:
Becoming your own publisher:
My publishing Effort:
No-Count-Charlie:
All of a sudden, there has been a significant change in this business.
I am speaking of a process called Print on Demand (POD). This
term has been bandied about for a couple of years but it has finally
come to respectability. What is it? POD is the ability to print
small numbers of books at reasonable prices. For a guy like me
who can't seem to sell books for sour apples, it's a God sent.
In addition to print on demand, the book manufacturers are getting much more efficient. I think they are seeing the wave of the future very clearly. the ones who do not will not be around long. We have almost reached the point where a publisher will be able to be his own manufacturer. The equipment to do that is getting better and less expensive. The good book manufacturers see that. They must run like hell just to keep up. They have to give the publishers a reason to not invest in their own plant. The reasons they can best give is quality and efficiency.
With all of that in mind I took No-Count-Charlie to Thompson Shore in Dexter, Michigan. I recently attended a PDF seminar at their plant and I was much impressed by their attitude. They wanted my book. They got it. Now, we will see.
I did not go POD on this book because I wanted a hard cover version. Maybe it's an ego thing. Even so, I specified a quantity of 500 books instead of 1500 or 2000. The price per book at 500 is high, but not as bad as it would have been 5 years ago. These people have got much more competitive. Now, I can still make a profit at a reasonable cover price, if I sell books. If not, I only have 500 copies to deal with.
I'm really hoping that Thompson Shore will be my book manufacturer. I have been ready to settle down with a nice working relationship ever since I started this business. I like to have some stability in these things. I don't like being jerked around. I just want a nice steady dependable bookmaker.
On this book, I did the best cover yet. In this case, its not really a cover. It is a dust jacket. I am finally learning how to use Photoshop to get the effects I want. I have a great deal to learn yet. Photoshop is a very powerful and complex tool. I expect to become much more proficient as time goes by.
Since this is a fiction book about people I used Willy Gaffer as my pseudonym. Here is the inside cover flap of the book to give you a flavor of it.
No-Count Charlie is the ultimate dysfunctional man within a
profoundly dysfunctional family. The deck is stacked against him
from the beginning. Victimized and bullied by his brute like father,
Charlie grows up confused and disoriented. His normal reaction
to the stresses of life is to run away from them. His mother,
in an attempt to compensate with mother love, overdoes it and
lures him into a mother fixation which further defeats his coming
of age. Charlie becomes the personification of Oedipus. Even a
lovely and loving childhood sweetheart cannot draw him out of
his convoluted fantasies.
His life is further confounded when he discovers that his mother
love is stricken with terminal cancer. His is the dilemma of having
to care for the love of his life as she degenerates before his
eyes. It is the battle of his conscience with its desire to be
and do good against his complexes and weaker human instincts.
This is the classic struggle of a man's effort to cope in a world
which he did not create and truly does not understand.
I really don't know what problems this book will bring. As Karen said "We've Only Just Begun." I'm sure there will be some unforseen problems. I did send out four proof copies for review. So far, I have only had one response. I received a solicitation e-mail from Foreword magazine. I was about a media kit and advertising. I'm not sure what the implication is. It could be innocent. My problem is, I'm just very naive.
This is all I have to say about my titles. As to the W&P
series, I still have a few loose ends I want to address. First
of these is what I thing is a good query letter. I finally received
one. I'll go into that next week.
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