The Accidental Publisher

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.

Platform

We hear the mantra "platform." THIS guy has platform: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/09/regis-philbin-writing-mem_n_859315.html 

 Not many of us have a prayer of coming close.

I don't do this for my health . . .

After much back and forth with a potential client who continues to expect me to give him my time for free, I sent this message today. What I cannot publish under my own imprint as a book intended for readers and have no interest in subsidy-publishing is only something on which I might be a consultant or editor for a fee. Hence:

[Name redacted], I make a living, or try to, from selling my services. That means selling my time.

Your manuscript is not anywhere close to being a book. What I think of the end is irrelevant. You are not close to having a manuscript on which I could have a meaningful opinion. I do not want to waste time attempting to analyze something that is only rough notes, or to mislead you about what you have. What you have is rough drafts of what might eventually become working material for a memoir, and what it might eventually become could bear little or no relationship to what you have now. You are YEARS of hard work away from having a finished manuscript.  I do not know how to make it any clearer than that. I gave you specific advice on how to proceed if you really want to have a memoir that anyone might want to read. I will summarize again:

1. Read dozens of quality memoirs to get some understanding of what makes a memoir.

2.  Read a book or two on how to write a memoir. Start here: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/ . Then go here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395901502/ .

3. Spend a couple of years working on your manuscript. Years. Not weeks. Take classes on writing. Join a critique group and get feedback from people who volunteer to exchange that kind of review and comment.

4. Revise, revise, revise.

5. Ask some friends to read your manuscript and give you honest feedback. Then revise and revise more.

THEN, after a few years, maybe we will have something to talk about. But I will still expect a cash retainer in advance and will charge an hourly fee of at least $90 (current, and probably going up) before even looking at the new manuscript. All I have to sell is my TIME. I will not volunteer more unpaid time.

Too many people want to take my time for free. (You are not the only one.) I have had to institute a money-up-front policy after the first hour or so or I will be subjected to unending expectation of free time. Please understand. THIS IS MY JOB. And I have other projects in the works, including books of my own. Giving time away detracts from those and interferes with work for PAYING clients.

I do not know how to make that any clearer. I trust that you expected to be paid for your work on [business redacted] and expect to be paid for your work [redacted]. I likewise expect to be paid for my work.

Best wishes.

Ken

- - - - - - - -

I don't want to hurt feelings, but what else is a person to do?

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.

Yeah, there are reasons . . .

Yeah, there are reasons why literary agents and publishers (commercial, trade publishers) do things the way they do.

One literary agent friend of mine explained a while back why she sends only a bare-bones rejection letter: to prevent getting into a long, unfruitful, and potentially acrimonious back-and-forth with the disappointed writer.

As I edge toward more serious publishing than I have done before -- only edge into it, mind you, and not with plans to overextend myself or my finances -- the more obvious it becomes that it is essential to require a a basic query (short and to the point) or at most a sample + synopsis + summary of the would-be author's promotional plans and platform(s). The fact is (and here I am borrowing a riff from another agent friend), I am going to reject most queries/proposals, and I want to do it quickly.

If aspiring authors want to get into more of a discussion (post-rejection), it will have to be on the clock with a nonrefundable retainer paid (and check clearing) in advance. If I am going to even think seriously about publishing a book (normal, royalty-paying arrangement in which I pay all publishing expenses for the book) I need to be sure that (a) the author is someone I can work with productively and cordially, (b) the author can in fact write well enough for publication, (c) the manuscript meets a reasonable standard for publishing BEFORE I even commit to editing it for publishing, and (d) that there is a reasonable, demonstrated likelihood that the book will sell enough copies to readers to turn a net profit (considering both my out-of-pocket costs and my time/effort/opportunity costs).

Too many folks have completely unjustified expectations about their manuscripts, and some quickly become time sinks if allowed to do so.

A few years of learning experiences have had results.

If I knew then . . .

If I knew five years ago, or even three, what I know now, I would have done a lot of things differently -- and I hope better.  I wish I could know now what I will know in three or five years. For sure, I will know a lot more then, and it will affect what I do and how I do it and what I charge for my services and what projects I take on and what projects I decline immediately.

A current learning experience pertains to a book I've been editing on speculation (that is, without insisting on a substantial part of the fee in advance of doing the work). The author is pulling the old "the check is in the mail" (well, the check WILL be in the mail) routine, after I declined his offer to pay only after I'd completed the work. (Tedious, time-consuming, exacting work.) He's tried to cut costs, in ways that will probably end up increasing his costs and diminishing his results. If the check does not show up by Thursday -- and at that I am giving him an extra day -- I'll fire him as a client (nicely, but firmly) and block his email and not take his calls. I can refund payment for services that do not meet the need (and I have done that in the past), but cannot get a refund on time spent on dead-end projects.

Soon, after the initial one-hour consultation, I'll require a sizeable check -- and clearance of that check -- before investing another minute.

And now, the Secret Handshake for Lightning Source

I'm mailing off the last pieces of the Lightning Source account application (documentation for income and sales tax purposes) today. I'd already completed the process online, a several-day effort, much more complicated and demanding than signing up for a Lulu.com or Createspace account. LS is in a different league.

Having completed the process, I now have the Secret Handshake that provides pricing information (per unit, per page, by book size and type). They hold that information pretty close to the vest, as LS is particular about who it signs up. Clients must have ISBNs in the publishing-company name and must verify that they can meet LS's requirements for digital files, and must provide a host of other information.

Now to experiment with a non-critical project (real, but relatively low-risk) to try out the process and make sure that my files are in fact right. I want that sort of project done and delivered before publishing a higher profile, higher stakes book. That is how I started with Lulu, albeit in that case with some throw-away projects of no consequence. Then step by step I improved my practices.

Experiential learning. It's a good thing.

Bit the bullet . . . or a few bullets

As I slink, little by little, more toward commercial publishing (still on a very small scale and with risk-limiting options), I find expenses growing. Office space, for one, of course, so I'm not trying to do everything from my home. But also . . .

• A block of ISBNs from Bowker (they are not cheap)
• Photoshop CS5 (the full Photoshop, which does things that have been omitted from the much less expensive Photoshop Elements -- notably the ability to use the CYMK color scheme, as opposed to RGB, in order to meet the requirements of Lightning Source and commercial printers.
• Adobe Acrobat X Pro (in order to write the specific PDF format required by Lightning Source)

Lulu.com has been entirely satisfied -- or apparently so -- with the PDFs I have been producing, and with RGB color scheme for covers. Lightning Source says NO WAY, though -- quite emphatically -- mandating the new software if I am going to be able to use LS's services.

So . . . after putting off those software purchases for years, getting by with low-end products (including a $9.95 PDF generator and Photoshop Elements) it was time to get out the business credit card and bite the bullet.

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.