That's an immortal quote from Richard Grayson, our visiting writer this week--straight out of a novel he rescued from oblivion via print-on-demand (POD) publishing. If we have learned anything from him, we have learned this: be obsessive, be creative, and DON'T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY!
Welcome to the conclusion of my interview with Grayson, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...Jason Boog:
How did your first POD revival of With Hitler in New York work? Can you describe the process?
Richard Grayson:
Hitler was published in hardcover in 1979, and disappointing sales led my publisher to cancel a planned trade paperback edition. The book went out of print when the publisher couldn’t afford to keep all those unsold copies in a warehouse. I bought up a lot of copies for a nickel a book, but I couldn’t even give two thousand copies away.
When my parents gave up their flea-market business’s mini-warehouse space, where I’d stored the books, I ended up throwing away maybe 300 copies in a dumpster.
There weren’t many solutions to keep out-of-print books alive. In the mid-1980s, William F. Buckley and theater critic Stuart W. Little put together an annual mail-order catalogue through which authors could sell their OOP books. I listed Hitler in it, but the Buckley-Little Catalogue was expensive to print and went out of date quickly so it lasted just a few years.
Then, in 1999, the Authors Guild – I joined in 1978, just as soon as I got my first book publishing contract – joined forces with the print-on-demand publisher iUniverse to start Backinprint.com for its 8,000 members.
All I needed was a letter from my publisher stating that Hitler was out of print and two copies of the book – I had plenty more! – so they could re-shoot the original pages and put them in a POD trade paperback. Buckley – along with the estates of Thornton Wilder and Mary McCarthy – was one of the first Authors Guild members to bring out a Backinprint.com reprint.
As a Guild member, this cost me nothing upfront. The only charges were for the copies I myself ordered, and I got an author’s discount. To save money, they use a standard cover format with a simple design, letting me create the blurbs (from the original newspaper and magazine reviews of the book) and bio material for the back cover.
The edition had a new copyright page and a full page in the back of the book describing the Guild’s Backinprint program. Other than that, the 2000 edition has the original pages with the same design and font.
I could have paid extra to have a back cover author photo and a custom-made front cover, but basically I was just trying to keep the work in print to have a record that With Hitler in New York existed. As my other hardcover books – Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, I Survived Caracas Traffic and I Brake for Delmore Schwartz – went out of print, I did paperback books with Backinprint.com.
I haven’t really tried to market them at all. They’re available online from the Backinprint.com bookstore as well as from Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. I get my little royalty checks annually from iUniverse. And they’re now digitized by Google Book Search, where people can browse the book, search within it for words or phrases, or link to more information about the book or how to buy a copy.
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I recently published my first book (The Long Harmattan Season) and have decided to blog about my experiences as a first time independently published author. You can follow my musings at http://thelongharmattanseason.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Uche Nworah | March 15, 2007 4:41 AM | Permalink to Comment