The Accidental Publisher

Long time, no post . . .

I've neglected this blog for far too long. Time to begin some serious catching up.

For the moment, I'll mention that the memoir I alluded to months ago (last June, was it?) is now available. Although the publishing date is officially March 14, 2012, Amazon.com is already shipping it and I'll have a short run (16 cases) in hand next Wednesday, February 8, 2012. The book is I Can Dance: My Life with a Disability, by Laurie Hoirup.

Caution: Age 18 and up only. Laurie is very frank about several sensitive and personal subjects. This is not a book for kids.

This has been a long process, involving round after round of edit/proofing, and of course design and formatting, cover design (by Jeannie Reusch, willdesignforchocolate.com), and the various steps required for publishing.

For those in the Sacramento, CA, area, a signing is planned for 1 to 4 pm, Saturday, March 24, 2012, at The Marketplace, Folsom Blvd. at Mercantile Drive, Rancho Cordova.

BarnesAndNoble.com is offering pre-orders, but past experience suggests that on March 14th they will cancel pre-orders for the book. They did that with a previous book (my first via Lightning Source, about which -- both the book and LS -- more later.

Meanwhile:

Order Form for
I Can Dance: My Life with a Disability, by Laurie Hoirup

For a limited time, I Can Dance (list price $19.95, trade paperback) is available direct from the publisher with free shipping in the U.S. While supply lasts, the first copy in each order via this offer will include a custom-printed signature bookplate. I Can Dance may also be ordered through bookstores on the bookseller’s usual terms. ISBN: 978-1-937123-01-7

One copy, $19.95. Additional copies only $16.00 each from publisher for a limited time.

PLEASE PRINT CLEARLY

How many copies do you wish to order? ___ (limit 6 per order). Total enclosed: $_________

Name: ___________________________________________________________

Address: ______________________________________________________________

               ______________________________________________________________

City: _________________________________________________________________

State and ZIP Code: _____________________________________________________

Phone number or email address (in case of question about your order):

        __________________________________________________________________

Please enclose check or money order payable to Umbach Publishing, as follows:

For larger quantities, or for resale, please contact Umbach Publishing. Also available to bookstores via Ingram (after March 14, 2012).

__1 copy:   $19.95

__2 copies: $35.95

__3 copies: $51.95

__4 copies: $67.95

__5 copies: $83.95

__6 copies: $99.95

California residents please add 7.75 percent sales tax.

If you wish to place an order for a larger number of copies, please contact publisher Ken Umbach. Email ken@umbachconsulting.com or phone 916-812-9178.

Books will be mailed as soon as available. Publication date is March 14, 2012.

Mail completed form and check or money order to:

Umbach Consulting & Publishing
6966 Sunrise Blvd., #263
Citrus Heights, CA 95610

Introduction to The Big Book of Ken's Corner, coming soon

Working draft . . . might still revise . . .

Introduction: Life in Ken’s Corner

Since November of 2008 I have been writing a weekly column for Senior Spectrum, published in Sacramento, California. When the editor (at that time Stephen Baetge) talked to me about the column, he said it should be one thousand words and about anything I felt like writing about. Each week’s installment should have a few topics, not one essay straight through. And it should be in the spirit of my predecessors in the column, Dutch Packard and Stan Gilliam.

It was quite a responsibility, as Senior Spectrum has been around for several decades, and Dutch and Stan were much appreciated by their readers. (It was Dutch’s illness and passing that led to Stephen contacting me as a potential new writer for the page-2 feature.)

Stephen died as a result of an automobile accident in October, 2010, but Spectrum and its “Ken’s Corner” column continue, now under editor Susan Carlson. You can visit www.senior-spectrum.com week by week to see what else is in that always-interesting paper, both opinion and news.

From time to time I hear from readers. Their comments and encouragement are always appreciated, and sometimes the source of new ideas.

As for ideas, as you can see from this collection of columns, ideas are everywhere. We all experience life, so “slice-of-life” writing, with a tilt toward humor, nostalgia, or the peculiar, is a popular style. It was not a natural style for me, though, as for decades my writing was in the form of technical reports, policy analyses, bureaucratic documents, and other formal work.

One of the nicest comments I’ve received on “Ken’s Corner” is that reading it is like having a conversation with a neighbor over the back fence. That catches the spirit of the thing, as I am, basically, writing my side of a friendly conversation, sometimes drawing on events and observations and sometimes picking out bits and pieces from the past. A box of old magazines and access to newspaper archives and other of the endless resources of the World Wide Web provide ideas whenever a look around the neighborhood fails.

When people ask me what my column is about, I always say, with a pause and a thoughtful look, “It’s about a thousand words.” That is pretty much all I can nail it down to. I could also say it is about myself. Well, it is that, and probably as close to a memoir as I will ever come. But it is also about the world around all of us: critters in the yard or the house, friends and family, work and play, worries and pleasures, sights, sounds, tastes, memories, and flights of fancy. I hope that readers will relate to these everyday observations, and that writers might take some inspiration to look around themselves for ideas, to rework those ideas through their own life experiences, and to commit those ideas and experiences to paper.

In addition to two and a half years of weekly columns, I’ve also included here some other short pieces, including my notorious satire about California’s mythical “Velcro fields” plus thoughts on that piece, and a technical communicator’s take on haiku.

─Ken Umbach

All told, about 130 columns, plus a few other pieces.

Coming in a few months . . .

 

Revised version of cover . . . still a work in progress . . .

 

Over 400 pages of brain dump. Price is tentative. Does not leave a lot of profit margin, but should work ok. I'm doing the proofing/editing now, and still tweaking the cover. This book is the proof-of-concept for working with Lighting Source. I think it will have a local audience, and might be of interest to my social network friends.

Step by step . . .

Yesterday I requested Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN), for my new, bigger compilation of Senior Spectrum columns, The Big Book of Ken's Corner: With a Cat Named Boo, some 127,000 words, 415 pages. The number was emailed to me this morning, and I put it on the copyright page of my editing copy. (I'm going through line by line on a printed copy, looking for previously missed typos and making other adjustments and fix-ups.)

I had to request a PCN account with LoC. In order to do that, I had to have a block of ISBNs (ISBN is one of the fields in the PCN request form). That, in turn, required registering with Bowker and buying the ISBNs (probably way more than I will ever use, but time will tell).

As part of the whole process, because I am not going to have a large offset print run, but will continue to use POD (including a short run up front), and because Lulu is too expensive for my purposes now, and Createspace did not seem right for my most serious planned books, I needed a Lightning Source account. That, of course, also required ISBNs and some other preparation. By the way, the PCN is one of the requested fields for the Bowker/Books in Print listing. All of these things tie together.

The one place where I really simplified is to simply publish as Umbach Consulting & Publishing. No invented publishing company name. (I tried picking one a while back, but all the ones I wanted were taken or were too much at risk of infringing on someone's trademark. I should have kept a dba that I used many years ago, but let lapse.) I'll split the difference by referring to "Umbach Publishing" for short, but for the record, as publisher, I am Umbach Consulting & Publishing. Ok, fair enough. I am very bad at pretense, make no bones about publishing my own work and that of selected other people, and see no need to use a more imaginative name. (Anyway, there are good examples of individuals whose names are also their publishing company names. It is not as though this is unheard of.) Yes, there are pros and cons. C'est la vie.

In any event, The Big Book of Ken's Corner is my proof-of-concept volume for Lightning Source and the right steps with ISBN and PCN. Yes, I think it is a pretty good book, in its way, even if primarily for a local audience. The fact that nearly all of the content has been published in a newspaper column says something for it.  I'd rather make it the first test of the new approach (as opposed to my old method of using Lulu.com, self-publishing on training wheels) than make someone else's book the first test. When I move on to a book by another author -- one is very much in the works, albeit not yet signed to a publishing agreement -- I'd like to have the procedures down pat.

I also have to be sure that I can properly use a Lightning Source cover template with Photoshop CS5. So far, so good. It is trickier than what I do with Lulu, but one step at a time.

I'm not exactly giving away trade secrets here . . . this is the kind of thing we talk about at NCPA and that everyone else in my shoes eventually learns. But I might as well document the process for those who wander by The Accidental Publisher.

Busy day . . .

After preparing draft of tax return -- always made a little more complicated by the business side of it, good old Schedule C -- I started exploring Mobipocket and the PubIt site for the Nook. Oh, that was after putting a third book on its way to the Kindle store.

This whole e-publishing thing is becoming addictive. Friction-free publishing! The hazard, though -- and I am definitely at risk of this -- is to proceed in too much haste. It is just too easy to get nearly instant gratification via e-publishing. Publish in haste, repent at leisure?

Well, the initial experiments are done . . . and I have time to do the next planned book carefully. But it is going to take tedious work to prepare, edit, and revise to satisfaction and to prepare promotional approaches. Once done, that one will hold whatever interest it starts with (niche, but should be real), as it won't go stale -- not any more stale than its century-old core, at least.

Coming up this year . . .

I have two books under development this year. One is an enlarged collection of my Senior Spectrum columns, and maybe a few other essays, or simply a second volume. (Hey, it will be a series!) The other is a new, annotated edition of a long out-of-print, public domain book on word use and abuse, by a fellow who was prominent on that topic a century ago. That one is laborious, as I have to type it in myself, from a musty old copy of the book purchased in a used book store, and format, annotate, introduce, and so on. The book is of course wildly out of date, and will appeal only to die-hard word buffs and language nit-pickers, but it is a period piece. It might have potential as an ebook more than as a printed book, so it might become my first experiment on the Kindle, and maybe a few other platforms.

The Zombie meme got me

Ok, I am weak.

In the news lately has been some academic's revision of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which, among other bowdlerizations, he replaced the N word with "slave." (Yes, I won't even use the epithet in question even to discuss it.)

My associate Ferman Q. Hardleby suggested replacing the epithet with the wildly popular "zombie." And hence, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim. As it happens, Ferman Q. was scarcely the first to come up with that title, but may be the only one to make only that one-word change (212 times in the book) and not to inject scenes of "zombie mayhem."

The book reads curiously well with that replacement. Other offenses (such as "Injun," the dialect form of "Indian") remain, and no element of the plot is changed in Ferman Q.'s edition.

The ease of putting a POD/ebook up via Lulu was too great a temptation.

Sales will probably run in the low single-digit range (and remember that zero is a single digit).

It's been way too long . . .

It's been way too long since I posted here. I was reminded of that recently when a friend told me that he had stumbled across this blog and had found information of value in it.

Although I have some book projects in mind, and two in the works, I do not intend to publish any more books by anyone other than myself (or edited/modified reprints of public domain works). The only exceptions would be books by immediate family members -- and only one looks like a real prospect.

Sales of Evelyn Swift's Wyla the Witch and The Lostcreek Legacy are at a standstill, and I've pretty much recognized that the remaining stock of copies will have to be disposed of in some way (properly accounting for tax consequences, of course). With Evelyn no longer here to promote the books (and unable to do so for some time before her passing on account of illness/disability), there is little I can do, or at that I can do at all well. I cannot very well hold signings. No one wants the publishers autograph. (Well, almost no one.)

The late Chuck Myer's Melanoma Melodrama sells an occasional copy here and there (U.S. and U.K.), including via iPad downloads (THAT came as a surprise to me). I have only a few copies on hand, and I have converted those to personal use, along with a stack of Wyla, Lostcreek, and Capital Crimes. Sales of the latter are in the hands of the authors and editors, who have their own supplies to use for Sisters in Crime/Sacramento Chapter fundraising purposes.

I'll give copies away (having accounted for and paid applicable CA use tax) or use them for charitable fundraising purposes.

All of the books were worth publishing, despite small sales and unprofitability, so that is something.

Currently planned books will be print-on-demand (maybe with a few copies for local sales or promotional use), and very low-risk undertakings, other than some investment of my own time. Well, I have to do something with my time, so crafting some books is ok.

Meanwhile, at long last, as an opportunity came up to lease convenient and inexpensive office space, I took the bait. I'm now set up in an office two miles from home (good walking distance in good weather for walking), with a few hundred books: writing, reference and source material for some of my projects. When I can get a couple more sets of shelving (the store was out of the ones I wanted) I'll bring more from home. CD player and stacks of music CDs help to complete the setup.

I'm reading a book by Kirt Hickman, titled Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness. I find myself talking back to the author as I read, but I'll save further comments for later posts. Kirt contributed the book to CWC-Sacramento, which put it up for bids as a fundraiser.  I made the winning bid.

Long time, no post

I'd had a book planned for this fall, but had to cancel it a few months ago as infeasible in terms of costs and distribution. I'm reluctant to publish any more books by anyone who is not myself or immediate family. There are just too many nuisances involved, and too many limits on what I can do, given reluctance to go out on a financial limb. But time will tell. Next week I am to spend a day with people at Lulu.com, the company that has done my book printing and other facilitation. If some problems can be resolved, then I might revisit that decision. But more likely, if the company can make it more feasible, I'll set up books for self-publication by others. That is, I'll do the design, typesetting, and other mechanics, for a fee, and then hand off the project entirely to the author to then be pursued under his or her own name.

RIP Chuck Myer

Chuck Myer, author of Melanoma Melodrama: A Medical Memoir, died last Saturday, surrounded by his family. Wonderful man. Sad loss. Memorial service will take place tomorrow, Sept. 13.

He was universally liked and respected, a man of wide accomplishment.

The Sacramento Bee has an obituary.