With technological advances comes the ability to
publish your own book.
(This article by Michael Pollick, which includes
references to Eat First, appeared in the Business Weekly section of
the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, November 25, 2002.)
Charles Dittell is part of the workaday world.
From 9 to 5 you can find him at the offices of Sarasota County government,
programming on a computer or helping somebody else solve their digital
problems.
But when it comes to exotic silver and black enamel art objects known as
Siam Sterling Nielloware, Dittell is the ruler of his own miniature world
of commerce, a world that runs on automatic.
Niello is an ancient jewelry-making craft that enjoyed a resurgence in
Thailand during the 1950s and '60s. To encourage the craftsmen, the Thai
government sanctioned the use of the word Siam, the former name of the
nation, on silver pieces made in this ancient way.
If a customer somewhere on the planet types in "Siam Sterling" on an
Internet search engine, he is likely to find his way to Dittell's Web
site, and the one available book on the subject: "An Overview of Siam
Sterling Nielloware."
The author? Charles Dittell, of course.
Total price: $19.95. Click on the PayPal logo to use your Visa,
MasterCard, Discover or American Express card.
On Amazon.com, it is even easier. Type in Siam Sterling, and guess who
pops up? A couple more clicks and the book is on its way to your door.
Dittell is one soldier in the revolution now going on in publishing.
"There is definitely huge growth," said Karen Jenkins Holt, managing
editor of Book Publishing Report. "It has to do with technology. It will
keep getting cheaper and easier to produce books."
Old-fashioned still works
Pat Ringling Buck had the benefit of word processing
when she wrote "The Ringling Legacy" in 1995, but everything else about
her self-published effort was old-fashioned.
The book has been quite successful, as self-published ventures go.
"I have sold almost 7,000 copies of my little book," she said. "There is
nothing like it, quite. It is a quick read."
Circus magnate John Ringling was her great-uncle, and Buck is an
accomplished free-lancer.
But her secret weapons were inside information and a friend in the
business. She knew the gift shops manager at the John and Mable Ringling
Museum of Art. She knew he was "dying for an inexpensive little book" to
address the basics of how the Ringling name became so intertwined with
Sarasota history.
After having the book typeset by professionals, printed, and bound in
paperback covers, she did the rest herself.
She orders 500 or 1,000 at a time, and stores them right there in her home
office.
"I do the delivering. I do the bookkeeping. I do the whole thing," said
Buck.
While she might pick up some extra sales on the Internet, she has chosen
not to.
Her market, in her opinion, is strictly local. "My book was so directed to
Sarasota that I never attempted to sell it any farther away than
Bradenton," she said.
While it is difficult to say for sure, the success of Buck's "Ringling
Legacy," and an earlier guidebook to the Ringling Museum, probably helped
her and two co-authors land a contract for a new book coming out in
February.
That one has big league backing. University Press of Florida will publish
"History of Visual Art in Sarasota" in February. Buck's co-authors are
gallery owner Marcia Corbino and Ringling School of Art Selby Gallery
curator Kevin Dean.
Deeper into cyberspace
Dittell relied much more heavily on new technology for
his "Overview of Siam Sterling Nielloware."
The advent of the digital camera alone made a huge difference in the task,
which Dittell began in 1996.
It wasn't just that he avoided buying and developing film, although that
was important. He also could see the results immediately on the computer
screen. That meant he could try again if needed, while the lights were
still set up, the backdrop in place, and the object shiny and ready to be
shot.
Then, when the photos were shot, Dittell could crop and size them for
publication right on his own computer. In the past, he would have had to
take his glossy prints to a print shop for conversion into another format.
Dittell also leveraged the use of his word processing software.
He wrote his book using Microsoft's Word Perfect. Then he used the
program's more advanced features to arrange the text and photos onto
electronic pages on his own.
That saved him on any typesetting charges. He loaded his finished
electronic product onto a memory disk, drove over to Kinko's, and asked
the copy service to create master copies for him.
For the first printing, Dittell used another company for printing and
binding.
For the second run, he has bought his own machine designed to attach
plastic comb bindings to perforated pages. Dittell will ask Kinko's to
print right onto perforated pages, then bind his books himself.
Despite all this, Dittell didn't go as far as technology could take him.
Print on demand
When Sonia Pressman Fuentes brought out her family
memoirs in 1999, she didn't have to buy boxloads of books, and she didn't
make any trips to Kinko's.
 Instead Fuentes, a 1960s pioneer in the feminist movement, became a 21st
century pioneer in a new business called "print-on-demand publishing."
Her title: "Eat First -- You Don't Know What They'll Give You -- The
Adventures of an Immigrant Family and Their Feminist Daughter."
Turned down by conventional publishers, she published the memoir by
writing a check in 1997 to XLibris Inc., which was formed only two years
earlier.
Fuentes turned in her completed manuscript and paid a fee, roughly $1,000,
to XLibris, which designed the copy into a book, created a cover, and made
it ready to print.
A typical printing deal would require the author to take delivery of 500
to 5,000 copies of the book. In print-on-demand, the printer sits on the
electronically prepared book until actual orders are received.
Using newfangled printers, XLibris can print as few as one copy of a
requested book.
The company charges $19.54 for Fuentes' book, eventually sending her a
royalty. A typical royalty would be 25 percent, or $4.89.
Fuentes puts a lot of energy into marketing her book, which has become an
XLibris best seller.
But industry-watchers say print-on-demand publishers must receive more for
a book than the traditional market will bear.
"The problem with print-on-demand is it is costing to print what the book
should be selling for," said Barbara Quanbeck, founder of Word Wrangler
Publishing Inc. She helped Fuentes fine-tune her memoirs before they were
turned over to XLibris.
"Who is going to pay 20 bucks for an author nobody ever heard of? Nobody
except friends and family," Quanbeck said. The book should be selling for
half that or less, in her opinion.
Quanbeck recommends that self-publishers consider other printing
alternatives, which are not as forbidding as they once were. She refers
clients to printers who will produce as few as 500 books at a time for
less than $4 apiece.
Back in Sarasota, Dittell says he never expected to rival Random House. He
just wanted to make his contribution to the knowledge of the world.
"I knew it was not going to bring in significant money, but I felt like it
should be done," Dittell said. "Nobody knew anything about these items. If
I could finally learn about it, why not share it with others?"
|
