So, here I am, about to start again at editing Dharma Rain, and much more laid back about the whole endeavor. I am more focused than I ever was, and a more consistent worker. Yet, I am also much more realistic about what I can accomplish. I like to think that I would be a better editor now than I would have been at any time before. I like to think things like this because it makes the passage of events seem destined somehow. Meaningful. It redeems them and me.
After the failure with the artists I called it quits on the press. I called it quits on a lot of things then in October 2006. I curled up into myself, lived off unemployment, and finally settled into my mind enough to ask why I kept finding myself in the same unhappy situation, with so much wasted energy and self-sabotage. The answers flowed back to everything from my parents and their troubled relationship with jobs and money, to my own sense that what I really ought to be doing with my time is writing instead of promoting other people’s writing.
To kill the time, I applied to four PhDs. One at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Irvine, and U Washington. One by one, the rejection letters came in. By then rejection felt almost normal. You see, pain and rejection have followed me almost everywhere.
So, the following two years offered labor and loss and failure and yet an incredible education. In my vain attempts to ‘make this thing happen’ I taught myself a lot about the internet, about marketing, about selling books and talking about books. I, alone, had to play the role of every person in the publishing house.
And whenever I tried to bring people on to help me, it didn’t work out. Most of them were much like Cullen and Peter and Shahrul…in their mid-to-late twenties and still idealistic but short of time and money. And they were smarter than me, maybe, because they knew enough to not put their priorities with this nebulous mess. But it was my nebulous mess with the face only a mother could love. And I was its new mother.
“And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
-A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
I must implore…
Though my mistress is deserving,
I deserve more,
For I do the serving.
The creator of Inconundrum Press, Shahrul, is a logical man. He is more logical than any single person I know. His tastes run to the literary, but even that could not suppress his eventually getting an MBA. When he started Inconundrum Press, it was with the help of two English-major friends: Peter and Cullen.
Shahrul had a head for business. He tended to clarity and keeping things simple. His motto was to exact the greatest gain from the least amount of effort, like any efficient system. Therefore, the three of them acquired a manuscript from a noted author, published it, ran a contest to drum up attention for the press, and then sold the book online. There was no marketing plan, per se. There was no elaborate strategy to get distribution for the 3,000 copies of this book that had been printed. They would do more books and those books, in turn, would generate more attention for the first book.
The problem was that the follow-up books didn’t happen. Interest fell away and the attention and care the press needed was too much. The book didn’t really sell well at all and Shahul was getting his MBA, Peter was finishing his PhD, and Cullen had other interests to pursue.
This is the first in a series of online conversations between myself and interesting people taking place on Friday nights.
Tonight I spoke with Raquel, a writer/editor who is finishing her MA in Publishing, and Brooke, who is finishing her PhD in Visual Anthropology at Temple University. Her forthcoming essay “Grief: Reflections on Ethnography” will be published by Encyclopedia II.
As you may know, I am a writer with an MA in English, concentration in Literary Theory. My list of pubs can be found on my Write page.
I hope you will find some use of our conversation and if you have any thoughts to add, please comment.
Nina Alvarez