Michael, this responds to your invitation to browse former posts. I put the comments here because some of the older posts won't accept comments anymore. They "sort of" are relevant.

My first book was involuntary. The Edmonton UU Church had the idea it would be "fun" to have a press of their own. (Moosemilk Press) They asked if they could have my "prairie sermons" for a first book. I said sure. Then they wanted me to edit, rewrite, etc. and I didn't. So they did. There was no money in it for me. They did it all and it paid for their second book, which was a history of the small UU fellowships in Alberta. It didn't sell, but it was a "good work" in that it recorded history. I have two boxes of the books of my sermons (the remainders) under my bed. They show up on Abebooks.com, which is kind of a kick. "Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke" if you're in need of some prairie theology. "Moosemilk Press" disintegrated.

This is not counting my pre-first book which was an aggregation of information for training animal control officers: dog breeds, how to interact with the police, anger management, but mostly just a lot of disconnected stuff, so I don't count it as "writing." Copyright, if there had been any, would have gone to Multnomah County since I did it as part of my job.

In 1961 Bob Scriver asked me to write his biography. Good thing I didn't, because he hadn't finished living it yet. He died in 1999. More importantly, both our mothers were gone by that time, which freed me to tell the truth. This manuscript is at the third publisher I've tried and I think it will be accepted this time. One turned it down, I withdrew it once (monkey business on the part of the press), and this time I went out of the US. Bob was a middling-famous "cowboy sculptor" on the northern prairie and the politics about HIM, quite apart from the quality of the book, has had a lot to do with the process. The other problem is that books about cowboy artists are supposed to be coffee table books that help sell the art - gorgeous pictures, a hagiographic tale of the artist, and maybe a connection to someone who can help you park your wealth in a work of art (while assuring you that prices will only go up.) I wrote something quite different.

But this was an obsession and obligation that I'd been preparing for since 1961, knowing that the quality of writing depends upon the quality of the writer. I'm dealing with academic presses -- this is a serious and rather technical book.

The third book is just now finished. It's a series of stories about Blackfeet from the coming of the horse until now -- 12 stories, 1 for each twenty year period. It's didactic: the challenge was to tell a story that was slantwise, surprising, yet true to history, and to move the series through periods that no one ever reflects on: the assumption is that in 1900 all Indians either became white or evaporated. I don't expect to have trouble finding a publisher, but I don't much care. I've been posting the stories as I write them (prairiemary.blogspot.com) and my web meter shows that about 300 people have been reading them weekly. They comment, sometimes anonymously and sometimes by picking up the phone and once in a long while by stopping by the house. (I'm just off the Blackfeet rez.) I used to circulate them in manuscript by handing them to someone I knew had access to a xerox machine and a circle of Blackfeet friends. I never said anything. Didn't worry about copyright. Reaction came back slowly and mixed, but very useful.

Indians are used to being written about and for a while there was a wonderful Nat Lit renaissance that made us all dizzy. Whatever confluence of influences was underpinning that renaissance has disappeared now. The tribal people themselves say that they are writing for each other: print it on the computer, home-make a cover, sell it off your arm or out of your hip pocket. Those with money go to a local printer. The public school developed an arm that collected traditional stories and published them. A U of Montana professor, William Farr, gathered up all the old photos he could find and got them published into a fine book that's been in print ever since, so useful that my copy is just about worn out. A person can get foundation support for such things.

I'll try for a commercial press for this book and see what happens. It's rather parallel to the TV series, "Into the West" except no white people, so more "Into the Future." I'm saying it would be useful for schools, happy for libraries, emotional for Blackfeet.

There are distributors who have contracts with libraries across the country to simply send a certain amount of certain types of books automatically as they come out. Some authors sell their books to publishers who connect with these distributors and they are guaranteed a basic level of sales.

Now let me switch to talking about publishing and sales. I've been on listservs for almost ten years now and learned a heckuva lot. The big literary publishers, with few exceptions, have been sold to corporate conglomerates who treat them like soup. If they don't make major and instant profits, books are simply dumped onto the remainder market for sales at a few bucks each. (I love it because the books that don't sell are exactly the one's I like best! Before Internet remainder sales and before Powells, I couldn't find them.)

In the face of this development, many small publishers are thriving all over the country. They don't have the aura of tweed and paneling, but they are vigorous, make money, and build reputations. There are SO MANY people wanting to write and be published that writers are sometimes abused: one publisher said, "We won't work with anyone who isn't willing to get out there and hustle their butt off." Some expect the author to pay for publicity or their own book tours and so on. On the other hand, one famous author when asked if a person can make a living as a writer said, "You can't make a living from writing the actual book, but you can make a living from the associated jobs: lecturing, teaching, being on panels, editing and so on.

The tech developments mean that anyone can make (or have made) a physical book in any number. There are two BIG problems with marketing those books:
1. One must pay property taxes on any stored books in warehouses. (Russell Chatham figured out how to dodge this by simply not binding them -- there's no tax on printed pages. When there are enough orders, he binds some, but he still saves money on printing large numbers.)
2. A traditional business practice is that any books not sold can be returned by the bookstore to the publisher. This is unpredictable -- a box of returned books that had seemed to be sold simply shows up -- and the books may be shelf worn or even carry big sale stickers in yellow and red. (This drives Chatham wild since he is a fine artist who designs wonderfully sensuous and cherishable covers. The stickers are very hard to get off.)

These things should be addressed by the industry but aren't since it's the soup corporations who have the biggest voices and they don't care.

For a parallel development, see Richard S. Wheeler's blog: Http://www.westernliterature.blogspot.com. Wheeler has written fifty books and has made his living this way for a double decade or so. The claim he's developing on his blog is that the book publishing industry destroyed the Western genre market by forcing stereotypes, esp. through marketing, like cover art. Wheeler writes rather subtle, funny, surprising Westerns full of nuns, rat catchers, small town journalists, and etc. as well as historical novels. Another interesting author is J. Work, a college professor who rewrites the "Idylls of the King" as Westerns. Or I was fond of Bernie Schopen's "noir" Westerns. The conversation among genre people is lively and savvy. Lots of interplay back and forth between those who write mysteries, westerns, romances, international intrigue, sci-fi, etc. Since they are plot-and-character focused, they can move from one genre to another pretty easily by changing the furniture.

I have an Indian friend with an entirely different problem: a man who has a valid, realistic, and dynamically interesting life who cannot find a publisher because he doesn't fit the stereotype. Remember what happened to James Welch, Jr., also a friend. So long as he wrote about the 19th century, publishers cooed. As soon as he came to the present, sales went flat except in France. France continued to love him so he wrote about American Indians in France! What I'm saying is that publishers strangle writing.

And that's not getting into distributors. Printing, publishing, promoting, and distributing are now often divided among subcontractors. The more a writer knows about each aspect, the better, because then maybe we can catch up -- put our weight where it matters.

Way too much stuff for a simple comment, but this is only the beginning.

Prairie Mary

Posted by: Mary Scriver on December 24, 2005 2:40 PM

For all that is good about "To Kill A Mockingbird"---I love it that Scout learned to read sitting on her father's lap, and that her English teacher thought it simply couldn't be true because you can't learn to read that way. Lovely. I'm with him. If ain't literature, who cares what literature is?

Posted by: annette on December 26, 2005 12:35 PM






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