mythic errors

Ken just described catching the last errors just as the press was rolling as a “mythic” experience–like the woman tied to the train tracks, the train approaching, headlights there, escaping just in time.

Yet another horrific printing mistake

Thank God for designers who wake up in the middle of the night and say to themselves, “Did we change the page numbers in the Table of Contents after re-designing the book?” This is what the wonderful, kind, especially great Kathy McInnis did last night.

We literally stopped the printing presses as they were starting to roll. And the Table of Contents has been saved.

That would have been a very embarrassing mistake.

Yes, indeed.

Books for Sale

The website is fully operational now, and you can buy books from www.catalystbookpress.com using major credit cards or your bank through Paypal’s secure website.

Yay! I’m up and running.

And running is the operational word.

off to printing

Last week, I finished the design on Ken’s book, Are You Famous? Touring America with Alaska’s Fiddling Poet, and I got it off to press. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life! And I’ve never had so many people be so nice….

Let’s start with my dad, who has designed books before, who uses Adobe In-design for some of his geological reports. Despite being busy with his own work (which pays about 200 times more than what I don’t pay for his free advice), he read through the first few chapters of the book, made both copy editing and design suggestions, and spent a few hours on the phone with me talking me through the software.

Or maybe we start even earlier, when Sara Juday, a salesperson for Ingram, and a friend of Ken’s, helped me work through some design issues. I had cheerfully designed the book and cheerfully made what corrections I thought were necessary and cheerfully sent it off for Advance Reader’s Copies to be printed. And the results weren’t bad, I swear, but they were clearly the efforts of a beginner. “You need more leading,” Sara advised me. “And you need to choose–either justify all the chapters or let them all be ragged. Personally, I like the ragged look but most nonfiction books are justified.”

And then there’s the wonderful, talented, generous Kathy McInnis, who designed the book cover and, 16 hours before I sent the book off to press, offered to look at the print ready files. Then she spent nine or ten (or maybe more) hours tweaking it; I know she was up late that night because at 1 a.m. her time, she was still working on it. I could really see the difference when she was done. Such small but important changes!  She was generous with her time and didn’t charge me for it because, she said, she wanted my book to be successful. She had had a lot of help when she was starting out and it was her turn to offer help, she said. Thank God for the Kathys of the world.

And then there was Ken Waldman himself, who read through each new draft, making corrections, offering suggestions. At the very end, I’d submitted the files to the printer, and offered to send him the print-ready .pdf so he could print copies of Robin Metz’s introduction with the new design, so he could point out to prospective buyers that the design was so much better than the Advance Reader’s Copy and they could see for themselves, now, couldn’t they. And then he called me, literally 30 minutes after I had submitted the files to go to print for a proof copy: “You’re gonna hate me,” he said. “But I found an error on the first page.” The first page! The first page! You can’t let something go to print if there’s an error on the first page. God, how had we missed it? How had we missed it? But we had, and so I had to make the changes, and submit new files, even though it cost me $40 to make the changes. ($40 is a cheap way to catch a mistake, much better than spending $4000-5000 for printing costs, only to discover the same error.) Yes, I’m grateful to Ken, and grateful for the fact that he keeps a good attitude about it all, even while I make the many (perhaps inevitable) mistakes of a first-time publisher.

In the midst of it all, there was the panic because I’d forgotten to enter the book information into Bowker’s and it wasn’t yet in Ingram’s system, so bookstores couldn’t order it much less find any evidence that it existed, and of course Ken is trying to set up readings and in-store events and the like.

Will the mistakes never end?

They’ll all be great stories someday….yes, someday.

Getting A Book Out the Door

I’ve been tearing my hair out getting Ken’s book off to press. If anybody knows people who blog about fiddle music, poetry, folksy stuff, or both–especially if people read their blogs!–let me know so I can send a copy of the Advance Reader’s Copy to them.

appalling: leaving graduate school, starting a small literary press

One of Ken’s acquaintances  was apparently appalled the other day to hear my story: young writer with a novel published by Knopf (The Confessional by J.L. Powers–great name, huh? great title, huh? ); rising star in academia (well, I’d like to say I’m a rising star, but perhaps “adequate graduate student at Stanford whose advisors are sincerely sorry to see her go but who understand she had divided loyalties from the start” is more like it); now to forsake grad school in order to begin small literary press that may flop, may succeed, but will probably never bring her fame and fortune but will, instead, cost a whole hella lot of money.

This person wasn’t appalled by the young writer part, especially since there’s no way I’m leaving that behind and I hope to have a voluminous and bright publishing career ahead of me, despite the fact that I frequently despair over my non-Judy-Blume-esque stature. (Hell, I’d settle for a few fan letters every once in a while.) Anyway, I think she was appalled by the fact that I’m leaving my Ph.D. program at Stanford to start a small literary press fer god’s sake.

Okay, I can see that my decision is not the kind of decision one makes if one is seeking job security. And granted, I’m leaving STANFORD’S Ph.D. program. Nobody does that. Well, nobody except little ol’ me. Who is mighty pleased with herself, by the way, except for those moments of doubt when somebody else expresses how appalled they are by my choices and then self-doubt rears its ugly little head. (But, girl! that head is UGLY! and it’s LITTLE, too, by golly, with beady little eyes.)

Anyway, please. Let’s be realistic. Who wouldn’t leave the academic world, if they had the choice? The problem is precisely that: choice. Once you’ve invested that much time and money into something that has no worth outside the academic world, most people don’t have anything but that world! I can’t find the link now, but a couple of months ago a blog on Atlantic Monthly posted something about how unhappy professors are in general. I stopped reading when the comments reached something like 600….but there was lots of lively debate, some people protesting that they were *very* happy, thank you very much, while others tried to offer reasons why profs would be so unhappy (such as low pay for such high education, zero choice for where to live, a career based completely on other people’s opinions of the worth of your scholarship but the people who care about your scholarship are less than 5 other people on the planet…that type of thing.)

So….Yes, I have my moments of doubt. Yes, I worry, too. What if my Ph.D. in African History from Stanford is the one thing that will keep me employed and well-fed when the world falls into a deep economic depression and everybody is starving to death? (Ha! That’s a likely scenario. Not the economic depression and starvation part, but the Ph.D. in African History Saves The Day part.) What if I regret it, can never return even to a Ph.D. in NON-African History at State University of Podunkville USA, and I live the rest of my life wallowing in luxurious regret? Well, okay. It could happen. It also could happen that I’ll win the lottery someday, despite the fact that I’ve never yet played except for the little lottery cards that my father-in-law slips into my Christmas stocking every year and which haven’t even won me a cent. (My husband, on the other hand, usually wins a couple dollars, and then his dad wins a couple more and gives them to Chris. Something akin to the biblical verse, “To he who has shall be given more, to he who has nothing shall be taken even what little he has” or something like that….)

You see my point. My point being: well, damn it all, I’m doing this thing. Some people tell me I’m stupid, some people tell me I’m brave and an inspiration, some people don’t say anything at all. The truth is, I’m not stupid and I’m not brave. I just want to spend my days writing, as best I can, and reading, as best I can. I love books–published books, non-published books, books in traditional format, books online, books books books. I can’t get enough of ‘em. I pay $60 every month for a storage unit just so I don’t have to get rid of my books. Those books in that storage unit will, at the end of three years, cost me more to keep than if I’d just thrown them all out and bought them again at some later date. But I don’t care. I can’t throw them away. I love ‘em. Just like I love the fact that I’m leaving Stanford’s prestigious grad school program–all for the love of books.

More BEA experiences

Medusa’s Muse has written a couple of interesting blog posts about her BEA experiences…

Book Expo America And This Small Press

I spent last weekend at BEA, Book Expo America, an absolutely overwhelming insight into the book world. This is actually my second trip to BEA, so I was forewarned. My mother always used to say, “Forewarned is forearmed,” but, um, well, I’m not sure if that’s true. The sheer number of people, books, and other publishers would put any little publisher in her place and send her back to the very small unimportant San Bruno with her tail between her legs! Oh, well. There’s no way Catalyst Book Press can compete with giants like, oh, Knopf or Random House or hell! even Harlequin. But I guess that doesn’t matter. The books I’m bringing out are important books, and they’ll make a difference in people’s lives. I feel extraordinarily lucky to be working with some of the writers who’ve agreed to be part of Catalyst’s books–Ken Waldman, Ann Angel, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Ariel Gore, Tina Cassidy, and all the other writers, named and unnamed, who have put a piece of themselves on paper and staked a claim on their art and in Catalyst….

Anyway, at BEA, I visited with Ingram’s and Baker & Taylor, both of which seem willing to carry my books so bookstores & libraries can order them. That’s not the same as having a sales force but it’s something very important.

I got a number of totally cool books, including a signed copy of The Reggae Scrapbook and the latest y.a. offering from Ellen Hopkins, Impulse. I felt totally dwarfed by such giants as Judy Blume, Sherman Alexie, and Neil Gaiman. (On my personal blog, I’ve written about this, which you can read here.)

Here’s a few things I heard this weekend that are worth quoting:

*In a panel about how to create loyal online communities: “Failure on the internet comes free” and “People create an emotional bond to authors via blogs–there’s a sense of family, even while it can be creepy.”

*”Story of the production of the book can be as interesting as the story inside the book.” Hmmm. Not sure I believe that. But it’s worth putting up here.

* ”Blogging is like note-taking for all the other writing you do.” Okay. Maybe. But if you write blog posts that are essentially your book, aren’t you giving away all the goodies? Maybe that’s why I haven’t yet created a wildly popular blog that’s made me an internet celebrity, feted at places like the BEA.

Okay, my FAVORITE from one of these infamous internet celebrities: “I blog 16 hours a day!” What? 16 hours a day? When do you eat? When do you sleep? When do you shower? When do you do other, personal, private things that should remain between you and the toilet?

P.S. I’m glad to say that I met a fellow newbie to the book business, who has become a good friend in the last few months.