Look On the Bright Side: You Can’t Burn An E-Book
The putative publisher seated at the putative Mark Twain's putative desk in the putatitive basement of the putative Territorial Enterprise newspaper building, C Street, Virginia City, Nevada. Photo: Lionel Rolfe, c. 1989
BY NIGEY LENNON
In Spring 2011, I found myself — as I often have — unemployed, unfocused, subject to chilling if not entirely unexpected visits from the Nameless Dread by night. Due to the sagging economy, all of my attempts to secure editorial or publishing work had proven worse than futile. My second career, music, was similarly problematic because of drastic changes in the industry and my own reluctance, at the ostensibly dignified age of fifty-something, to play in toilets for peanuts. My literary agent had seemingly vanished from the face of the Earth, and I couldn’t say I blamed him: despite prolonged and agonizing efforts, it had become painfully obvious he was never going to unload a single one of my book projects even after selling his immortal soul. In short, the Universe had apparently seized a bullhorn and was announcing, to resounding disinterest, that I was ugly and my mother dressed me funny.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t confronted similar impasses before, but previously I’d managed to weather them by reinventing myself — for example, switching from non-paying musical pursuits to low-paying scrivening, or investigating witness protection programs. At this juncture, however, such disingenuous dodges seemed worn threadbare. Spiritually and financially, I was bankrupt, staring into the abyss, clueless.
Out of desperation, my thoughts turned to my one business venture which could honestly be termed a success. This was a publishing company I had started with my then-husband, Lionel Rolfe, in the early 1990’s. We called it California Classics (clearly, we were in the grip of hubris), and for over a decade it miraculously survived earthquakes, homicidal authors/royalty disputes, changes of venue, and other vagaries. We published a few titles, gained a certain notoriety, and kept the dire wolf (all six hundred pounds of sin) more or less away from the door, before eventually receding into the sunset, perhaps even mourned by the one or two readers in Los Angeles.
The obvious question was, could I go back, Jack, and do it again in 2011? Obviously, publishing had changed dramatically in the intervening two decades. In 1991, we had dealt strictly with “dead-tree media” — ink on pages, bound in covers. In 2011, media was increasingly electronic: flickering pixels on small screens. From the publishing standpoint, there were a number of advantages to this electronic approach: extremely low cost of production (the process of printing physical books carries a hefty price tag, whereas e-book production is downright cheap, if not free), massive distribution potential (virtually the entire world is online), the exciting concept of interactive media (psst, mister, wanna see some really dirty pixels?). Not that I was myself a consumer of electronic books — I didn’t own an e-book reader or even a smartphone, so I’d have a rather steep learning curve. But given my other options — punching a register at Target or slinging hash, if my back and knees held up — it seemed like a sufficiently intriguing prospect.
You have to start somewhere. In my case, after considerable thought (about fifteen minutes’ worth), I decided to call my e-book publishing company AirStream Books. E-books exemplify the concept of instant gratification: they’re literally streamed through the air (if the publisher is lucky, this is presumably after electronic payment has been tendered) from the publisher to the reader — no need to waste time and gas on a physical encounter with one’s local bookstore. But I had another reason for choosing that name, as well. Familial mythology always hinted that I was conceived on a glorious night in an Airstream trailer. Call it a cosmic epiphany, if you will. On second thought, let’s not.
I was lucky enough to convince California Classics’ former distributor to add AirStream to his list of publishers. I was elated. Now I could forge bravely ahead with my business plan. The first thing I realized was that I needed titles to publish. (I can’t figure out for the life of me why this realization struck me so belatedly, but as we all know, it’s not nice to make fun of the mentally challenged.) I decided to republish my own out-of-print books first, and follow up with some of California Classics’ better-selling titles. First off, I reprinted Cal Classics’ bestseller, my memoir Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa. Next came my biography, The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain’s Wild Years, and in close succession, my collaboration with comix artist emeritus Bill Griffith, Alfred Jarry: The Man with the Axe and Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles, another classic. Finally, I added Cal Classics’ second bestseller, Lionel Rolfe’s Literary L.A.
This led me to an interesting round of contemplation. As I delved into the fascinating world of e-publishing, I began to notice that many of the titles available for purchase were considerably shorter than what I considered to be “books”. People were now selling long articles, pamphlets, short stories, etc., and referring to them as e-books. I was concerned about this. What did it say about the attention spans of e-book readers, or for that matter of e-book authors? I also noticed something else, something analagous to what I’d observed in the music business some years back, when computer-based music software began to be readily available: suddenly everybody was a musician, and just as suddenly, there didn’t seem to be any listeners left — a conundrum which had essentially ended the musical profession, at least as regards profitability. Now, similarly, it seemed as if virtually overnight, every blogger on the internet had become an e-book author. Was quality publishing dead?
No matter. Onward and upward. The next point of interest on my AirStream journey came when I had, after much labor, uploaded my first few e-titles. In conventional (perhaps we should refer to it at this point as “analog”) publishing, book sales depended on publicity. This was usually relatively simply, if not cheaply, achieved by hiring a perky publicist to chat up potential media outlets: publications, influential media figures, reviewers, broadcast outlets, and the like. But things are different now that anybody can be, and generally is, an author and/or a publisher. The most accepted, if not the easiest, way to drive traffic (to be honest, I prefer the older, more dignified term “encourage custom”) to one’s e-merchandise, is through the use of social media — Facebook, Twitter, and the countless other electronic watering holes where so many people squander their lives between hanging up their jackets and quitting time. I am not alone in having serious doubts about the sanity of social media. Here’s how Tim Kreider, one of the few true geniuses writing and publishing sociopolitical essays and comics today (hey, Tim, make a note of AirStream’s contact info, willya? I’d love to publish your next book once you’re sick and tired of being ripped off by the majors), described his own queasy odyssey into the netherworld of e-publicity: “I dutifully created a Facebook page, where I now Like things and am Liked in return, am sometimes Poked and wonder what being Poked signifies, and share important news with my Friends like ‘Sorry I haven’t posted in so long.’ I joined Goodreads, where I was instantly befriended by the other guy who’s read ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’. But I secretly drew a line in the sand at Twitter. Most prostitutes have their boundaries, and for me tweeting was the one act so degrading I had to quietly take it off the table. Despite all my efforts to make myself Liked, I still have only 700-some friends on Facebook, which makes me the Internet equivalent of what in the ancient Indian caste system was called a ‘dog eater’”.
I created a Facebook page for AirStream (http://www.facebook.com/pages/AirStream-Books/190898914268754), as well as a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/AirStreamBooks), which I figured could be used to publicize and support the main AirStream website (http://airstreambooks.net). Like Tim Kreider, at first I was mortally abashed at the idea of condensing everything down to 140 characters in order to tweet on Twitter. I debated getting things off to a rousing start with a first post: “By the time you read this, I will have shot myself. Thanks for reading” (55 characters, not counting punctuation) — but I figured it would probably just eliminate what few followers I had. But business is business, and now I’m just as brazen and terse as the next attention-challenged tweeter. Unfortunately, everybody who subscribes to Twitter or Facebook seems to be so busy tweeting and/or Liking and/or posting mythical PhotoShopped images of themselves, that they evidently don’t have time to read other people’s tweets or posts. Entropy reigns supreme in social media, it seems.
The other day while running errands in darkest suburbia, I happened upon a most interesting sight. A large donation box, of the type used to collect old clothes for the ostensible benefit of unfortunate people with unpronounceable diseases, was tucked away in the corner of a parking lot. On it was a sign: RECYCLE BOOKS HERE. The more I thought about the larger implications of this, the more horrified I became. Being an e-book publisher is one thing; contributing materially (or virtually) to the downfall of literacy as we know it, is quite another. But then I cheered up: the majority of people who were making deposits into this book-recycling box were probably just getting rid of Danielle Steele bodice-rippers or Mockingjay sequels, so it was actually a good thing. As strange as it may sound, people who buy e-books actually seem interested in reading them (it helps that a lot of the e-books they download tend to be under 50 pages), while a lot of the people who buy “real” (as opposed to virtual) books at this point in time often wind up ruining them with sand and salt water, or spilling coffee on them. Taken in context, this curious fact is maybe the ultimate irony in a field that is so ironic it’s downright post-postmodern.
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Nigey Lennon is the founder and publisher (and scanner and file converter and author-scourge and burr-grindermistress) of AirStream Books, http://airstreambooks.net. She is the author of eight or nine published books, the good ones of which are available as e-books on the AirStream website. Go there now.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
