Part 1 of How to Not Publish or Sell Your Book Well: A Failed Publisher’s Guide

“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.

Part I

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.

Meanwhile, it was 2005 and I was living in Pittsford, NY. I had finished my MA in English a couple years prior and had been teaching English comp. and lit. at two community colleges. Teaching was a ride and a labor and a love at times, but I was losing interest. After three years, I quit teaching and spent the summer in my sweaty apartment, living on crackers and cheese. I sold my air conditioner to pay part of the rent and my poor brother and I soaked all summer. It was a hard time for me. I couldn’t even get a job at Borders. I am a Buddhist and I chanted every day to have my mission revealed to me. Day in and day out I seemed to float in this haze of fear and anguish. It might have also been malnutrition.

I found myself returning to writing, as I always do when I face myself in the starkest moments. Before being a teacher, a publisher, or an editor, I am a writer. So I searched through my computer files for old stories and ideas, to remind myself of how long this commitment to writing has lingered. And I came across a manuscript.

A short novel I had written in three days in fall, 2000 as part of the Anvil three-day novel contest. I had not won. But Shahrul and Cullen, who were starting their press, read it, and Shahrul (more than Cullen) liked it. And he said he wanted to publish it with their new press. And he said, in his stern, steady, Shahrul way that I would have to sacrifice something in order to get the novel to where it could be. I was in my first semester of grad school. What he meant was that I would have to take time away from school and devote it to the novel.

I was driving down some long highway a couple weeks later, on my way back from a visiting a friend in White Planes when I realized I was terrified of editing my novel. I was clinging to this idea of being published. It gave me a sense of confidence, identity. I was 23 and I wanted to “arrive”. I had tried to rewrite the opening chapter, to restructure the plot. But I had no idea what I was doing. Sharhul would say things like: “this needs to be more vividly written” and he would pass on some smart writing techniques from Douglas Glover, the Canadian author who was teaching a graduate fiction writing course at Albany at the time.

I was just, well, too unfocused and immature to deserve the opportunity. I couldn’t edit my own work. I couldn’t see the larger picture and I didn’t really know what ways of saying things were better than others. I mean, give me one sentence and the idea behind it and I could make it conform better. It was my best gift. But give me a whole mess of sentences, with an amorphous, shifting idea that wasn’t formed, and in fact, I was trying to form through the making of these sentences…well, I didn’t know what I wanted it all to mean and so I never quite got my footing.

I never officially admitted to myself or to Shahrul that I had quit the novel, but I left for South Africa in July 2001 and I didn’t return to Albany ever again. I was consumed with graduate school and my new Buddhist practice, and I was still deluded and young enough to not allow myself to just directly face that I had failed.

I don’t stay up nights thinking about it. There was a musical in highschool I had a lead in that I lost because I stopped working hard at it. To me, that is more tragic. The novel had merit, but rewriting your own novel, at 23, with a decently bad case of ADD and too much of an inferiority complex to actually ask for help…well, I generally forgave myself.

But in 2005, while plumbing the depths of my computer files, I came across the novella. It was called “The Shape of the Butterfly” after a metaphor I wanted to pull out of the chaos theory concept of the Lorenz Attractor. A summer of intense introspection and sweating had left me leaner physically and emotionally. I allowed myself to feel the remorse I had for wasting my chance to publish a novel and to take advantage of a friend’s generous offer.

I wrote an email to Shahrul immediately, thanking him for the opportunity and apologizing for not following through with it. He wrote back in his kindly, staid manner and said that it was alright and that he would call me. He called and I asked him how the press was going, how their book was selling, etc.

He said that it wasn’t really going anywhere. And my perception of these young, savvy guys in Albany, NY living the intellectual-bohemian lifestyle and making things happen like making books appear in the world, died. Or it began the very first twitchings of the long, slow, disillusioning death that it would take over the next two years. Because it was still quite alive a moment later when he said: “You want to take over the press?” And I screamed, “Yes!”

What followed really did change my life, but not for the reasons I thought it would. What I soon learned was that the press was no more than an idea, a floating signifier, a “magic” ring given a hero to supposedly summon bravery from some supernatural source, but it really just a bit of polished tin. There was nothing concrete or actual about what I received when I got the press. I was given no start-up money and I know that Sharhul had taken a substantial loss, as he was the one who put up the money for the 3,000 copies of 4×1. And now, I have sold enough copies to equal about $600 in profit- over 3 years. And hundreds of hours of work. Yes, I know. Bad business decision.

But I am not a scrooge, and I tend to follow the spirit of that old miser’s nephew Fred who loved Christmas and said: “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!”

to be continued in four parts…

Part II