Self Publishing My Book

Publishing my book-the why and how. I get notions. When I get notions I like to follow where they lead. I never let sayers of "it can't be done" or "it is a waste of time" or "you are crazy" deter me. If I had listened to those negative voices I never would have realized $800,000 from a twenty-five page Scrabble strategy book. The whole incredible story of that book is a small part of my present memoir "Landsberg's Law".

In my life I have been involved in some wild, interesting and revelatory escapades as well as something no one in the world has ever done that led to my being included in the Guinness Book of World Records. So I got a notion to write a memoir. I proceeded in an unusual manner.I emailed a chapter about every two weeks to ninety readers around the globe. Forty were friends and fifty were people who knew me or knew of me from a chat room in the Scrabble world. The benefit of this process was immediate feedback and instant editing by many of the ninety.

I did not necessarily intend the project to end up in publication but so many of the ninety urged me to publish that I began a search for the best way to make a book. Of the myriad possibilities I selected working with a printing firm. I would present the formatted text and they would print exactly what I sent them. I could select my own cover, type font and type size. After exhaustive Internet research I chose Morris Publishing in Nebraska. It was a very good decision since they were great to work with and did a fine job.

I embrace unintended consequences. If you do nothing, nothing will happen. Doing this book led to many new and renewed friendships. It led me to become president of the Laguna Woods Writers Club. It led me to discover self-published authors are mostly denied access to traditional venues of commerce. This led me to conceive www.selfpublishersplace.com It is a totally free website devoted to promoting and marketing self-published books. The site also contains an international forum and my blog.

"...I took the road less traveled by and it made all the difference."

Luck

A beachcomber finds an incredibly valuable jewel encrusted throne. He hurries back to his grass shack and hides the treasure. A malefactor witnesses the scene, follows the beachcomber, kills him and steals the throne. The moral of the story is "people who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones."

All seriousness aside, this little story touches on the nature of luck. Here is a folk story told, with minor variations, in many cultures. "A young boy living on a poor farm in Russia asks his father if he can have a horse. His father explains that they are too poor to buy a horse. The boy cries saying that he is surely the most unlucky of boys, not being able to have the one thing in life he really wants. His father simply says that maybe he is unlucky and maybe he is not. A year passes and the boy befriends a wild horse and takes him home. He asks his father if he can keep the horse. The father tells the boy that he can keep the horse if he can feed and take care of it. The boy jubilantly exclaims to his father that he is surely the luckiest boy on earth. The father simply says that maybe he is lucky and maybe he is not. A few years pass and the boy takes a terrible fall from the horse leaving the boy with a lame leg. He tells his father that he is surely the unluckiest of all boys since he can no longer run and play with his friends. The father says that maybe he is unlucky and maybe he is not. A few years pass and war breaks out. All of the boys friends are taken into the army where most of them die but because he is lame the boy was not drafted. He tells his father that he is the most lucky of boys. You know what the father says and you get the point if this folktale"..

At any moment in time we cannot know what event may ultimately prove to be fortunate or unfortunate. As creative people we often have negative experiences that become material for books, films or poetry. The trick is to transmute the lead of life's disasters into the gold of your art in the crucible of creativity.

The Cooked Game

A man passing through a small town asks a cab driver if he knows of any poker games. The cabby tells him that just the hotel runs a game but it is crooked. Later that night the cab driver encounters the tourist exiting the hotel and asks him what happened.

“I played in the poker game and lost all my money.”

“I told you it was a crooked game.”

“I know, but it was the only game in town.”

This famous poker story is illustrative of the situation existing in the publishing and book marketing business. A few major publishers have gobbled up the small houses and they control what books are marketed in most bookstores. The mass market minded publishers spend a great deal of money promoting their books, the book stores have overhead, they all must make a profit and this expense is passed on to the customer who frequents the book store since “it is the only game in town”. But wait.

Technology has made self-publishing simple and inexpensive. Last year more than 82% of new book titles were by self-published authors. These authors are generally excluded from bookstores and traditional marketing venues. There is a myth that self-published books are necessarily of inferior quality. Let me dispel this misconception by naming just a few authors who have self-published: Mark Twain, John Grisham, L. Ron Hubbard, Walt Whitman, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, Carl Sandberg, Gertrude Stein, Deepak Chopra, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, Tom Clancy, Mark Landsberg and countless more.
Consider a revolutionary idea with me. There are millions of self-published authors. What if we avoid the crooked game by eschewing bookstores as well as books from the established publishing houses? We can support our fellow self-published authors by only purchasing each other’s books. It would not be long before we would have our own book outlets, reviewers and best sellers list.

Why support a rigged system? Let us start a new, clean game where the book buyer can deal directly with the author, cutting out the expensive middleman. Another self-published author, Benjamin Franklin, said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence “We must all hang together or we assuredly shall all hang separately.” Let us declare our own independence and let it start here at selfpublishersplace.com.