Lightly Held Books

With the preparation of a manuscript, the design of a book cover and a couple of digital uploads, Don and I have become book publishers. Or at least I have. He still has way too much to do with his own film business, but given the turtle-ish speed of the book business, I think I can handle it.

We published a memoir scavenged from the weblog we published from 2002 to 2009 called Living in the Flatlands. We used Amazon’s CreateSpace and an imprint we set up which follows the Lightly Held theme we’ve used for filmmaking. We’ve ordered proof copies, which will arrive in about ten days, but, given Don’s amazing visual sense in designing the book cover, and a CreateSpace template, I expect the result to look like a real book! It’s kind of a trial run, but we didn’t want Flatlands to disappear. The blog came to a natural end upon Jesse growing up and going to college, and our family changing.

Living in the Flatlands will be available as a paperback and also in a Kindle version. I am coming around to self-publishing partly because I have grown to understand the economics of the publishing business. As someone said, “the pie is smaller now.” Any fool can publish, of course, and many do. Marketing and distribution are utterly foreign to me, but it is possible to get your work out and it will just have to take its chances. For Amazon, distribution is partly accomplished by keywords. “The world’s become a big database,” says Don.

I’m well aware of the controversies surrounding Amazon. It does take business from small, local bookstores. But independent bookstores which build on their strengths as community centers are thriving. From my work in the library, I know what best-seller-dom is like. Entertainment! For all those books that the few big publishers don’t want to take a chance on, small publishers step in. Most use print-on-demand technology such as CreateSpace! We certainly appreciated the freedom to put into our book what we wanted. Our ideas are subversive to the corporate culture we are using to get them out.

What this means for So Are You To My Thoughts is not quite certain. I’ve had some interest from agents. A typical response was, “while this sounds like a strong project, I'm afraid it doesn't strike me as a likely fit with me and my particular editorial contacts.” This year I will be working on Book 4 of the series, entitled Pulled Into Nazareth. After finishing it, I am thinking of taking off next year, 2015, to publish the first four books. I would love to have a dedicated editor for them, but it is a lot to ask when there is no financial incentive whatsoever.

As a younger person I longed for certain kinds of books that I usually couldn’t get my hands on. Now, when everything is available yet time is so short, getting people’s attention is difficult. However, I still believe that a book is a Trojan horse. Particularly in a conformist culture, which we are once again becoming. You can still take a book to bed with you and your friends will never know. The ideas in it may change your life.