The Writer's Job, Adventures in Management, Review of Cherry Whip, and Small Press United
If I be waspish, best beware of my subtitle ~As You Like It (sort of)
Being the 17th edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
The Job
(Not to be confused with Job. That’s someone different.)
I think a lot of us writers have it all wrong. We think our job is to get rich and famous, or at the very least make a bunch of money and maybe earn a bit of respect. But I don’t think that’s our job at all. I think our job is to create the best work that we can. After that we can present it to the world if we like and what people do with it afterwards is pretty much up to them.
Now, we can make our job becoming rich and famous if we want to. That’s fine. But it’s something different. There are probably ways to go about doing that but I don’t know what they are because I haven’t really focussed on that. I’m focussing on becoming a better writer.
Of course, becoming rich and famous can be a by-product of our work as writers. It can happen, but it’s unlikely. And it’s largely beyond our control. There’s simply no way to tell for sure if the work we’re producing will have “legs”, as they say. It’s probably a combination of luck and timing and other factors I’m not aware of. We can increase the likelihood of our work acquiring those legs by crafting it as well as we can, but after that, who knows?
Most of us who tackle writing seriously will eventually produce quality work. It’s just a function of time and effort. But after that it becomes a matter of taste. And quality and taste are not the same. There is a lot of quality work out there that people don’t like. Or worse, would like if only they knew about it (see my review of Michael Antman’s Cherry Whip below for a case in point).
Good luck chasing taste. That is a moving target. And discoverability? I haven’t cracked that code yet.
No, our job is just to write. Books, short stories, essays, screenplays, newsletters, whatever. Do it the best we can. Present it to the people of the world. Let them decide what to make of it. Maybe they will reward us for it. Maybe not. Probably not.
In the meantime, onto the next.
Adventures in Management
Some who’ve read Adventures in the Radio Trade, which covers roughly twenty years of my time in production with CBC Radio, have expressed an interest in my time in management.
It’s a whole different story.
I’m not sure how far down that path I’m interested in going. (Here there be dragons.) But there are a few little stories I don’t mind sharing.
I remember my first day in management, for instance.
I’d been looking forward to it for an entire month, ever since I’d been hired as Supervisor, Radio Audio Systems. Basically in charge of the radio maintenance department for CBC Toronto. It was a team of about 9 people, 10 including me. I was excited. Up for it. After having been some version of an audio tech or recording engineer for 19 years, this was something different. I was going to work for John McCarthy, a decent human being. That first day, heading down to Toronto from Whitby on the Go Train I wasn’t even nervous.
I had the barest inkling of what was in store. I knew most of the Toronto radio maintenance team. They’d been supporting me and my radio colleagues since my first day on the job back in July ‘88. All good people. I looked forward to working with them.
John had invited me to a demo a week before to get me started. Some guy from some company demonstrating the capabilities of a system called SAP, which constituted the back end of several prominent systems the CBC utilized. The guy doing the demo had zero charisma. It was the single most boring demo I’d ever seen, and it was eight hours long. Afterwards I thought, Dear God, I hope the job’s not all that. I told John as much. He laughed nervously, probably re-thinking hiring me.
Anyway, it didn’t deter me. I was still looking forward to the new gig.
On that first day, I walked into my new office on the third floor. New office? First office. I’d never had an office before.
“Where are management’s gold plated toilets?” I asked John.
He laughed nervously again. Turned out that not only were management perks few and far between, the dental plan was 5% worse than it had been in the union.
“You never told me that,” I accused John in jest.
Still not detered, I got on with my first day.
Someone was waiting for me outside my office that first day. Not one of my new team, an experienced engineer from the engineering department I’ll call Lee. I let him in, bade him sit down before I’d even had a chance to make myself comfortable.
“So glad you’re on the job, Joe,” Lee told me. “I need a maintenance window as soon as possible.”
Turned out he needed to install a new system in one of the racks in the 3rd floor Central Equipment Room.
“How long of a window?” I asked him.
“Six hours ought to do it.”
“Uhhh…”
First day on the job. I had no idea what such a maintenance window involved, what the on air impact would be, who even to ask about it other than John, who I didn’t want to bother right away.
Immediately after Lee left a member of my new team showed up. We’ll call her Grace.
“The HHB CD recorders are all breaking down,” Grace told me. “We have a pile of them in the shop. I don’t know where to store them and I need you to call the manufacturer cuz I think they’re under warranty and even if they’re not they need to be fixed or replaced because we need them in the studios.”
This was at least a little closer to my experience as I knew the machines. I visited the shop with Grace and I made my first management decision: where to store the broken machines. I had no idea if it was a good decision; I would only know that in time.
The morning went on like that, a queue of people lined up outside my door with nothing but problems that they needed me to fix. By noon I was in a cold sweat. I had a minor panic attack. What the hell had I gotten myself into?
I visited John in his office across the hall. I remember sitting across from his desk, leaning forward. “John,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Turns out John was not at all worried about having hired me.
“Don’t be spooked,” he told me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Of all the things John could have said to me, that was the best. “Don’t be spooked.” I’m not entirely sure why, but those three words calmed me down, reassured me. I resolved not to be spooked. I rolled up my sleeves and worked through each problem one by one. Sorted them all out and got on with the next.
I would keep doing that for another sixteen years in a variety of management positions. And thoroughly enjoyed… well, maybe not every minute of it. But I did have a good time, for the most part. I never got spooked again, and never for one second did I regret moving to management.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ~ Groucho Marx
Cherry Whip
by Michael Antman
Cherry Whip is an elegantly constructed, superbly written novel about a young Japanese jazz prodigy named Hiroshi who visits New York and immediately falls ill, placing his budding career (and perhaps his entire life) in jeopardy.
Executed with precision, compassion and wit, Cherry Whip kept me turning the pages. Hiroshi lives and breathes on the page. Neurotic but charming, I enjoyed his company. His misadventures, including a tragic subplot involving his older sister, are compelling and affecting.
Antman writes beautifully on every level: prose, theme, structure, and character. Cherry Whip is out of print, which is a shame. It's a terrific book that deserves a much wider readership.
Author Michael Antman will be a guest on season three of our podcast Re-Creative.
Distribution
Three weeks ago I started surveying book distribution outfits in an attempt to understand exactly how these companies operate and who’s out there. There aren’t that many of them, so I’ve been tackling them one at a time.
Four weeks ago we looked at a company called Ampersand Inc. Three weeks ago we had a gander at Canada Book Distributors. Two weeks ago we examined the collapse of Small Press Distribution. Last week we examined Asterism.
This week we’ll look at Small Press United.
Small Press United
Small Press United (SPU) was, in their own words, “created to meet the needs of small and start-up publishers. With dozens of sales representatives in the U.S. and Canada, SPU sells books to chain and independent bookstores, wholesalers, libraries, the gift and specialty markets, and online retailers.”
They are a division of IPG (Independent Publishers Group), but don’t use their model. Their approach is tailored to small indie presses looking to get their books out with low risk. They only make money when a cash flow is created for the small presses in question (as opposed to charging fees, which is how most distributors make their money).
SPU works closely with the Independent Book Publishers Association to help small publishers succeed. A distribution agreement with SPU “comes with a new or extended one-year membership to IBPA, a $129 value.” A membership with IBPA “helps its members learn about the publishing industry as well as how to become better publishers and promoters of their books.”
Over 15 years, SPU has worked with IBPA to sell more than 2.6 million books.
So how does it work? First, you have to fill out a somewhat detailed application form online, including information about every book in your catalog, past, present and future. (I imagine this would take a while if you were Random House. But of course, they are not for an established publisher like Random House.) Books must be in both print and ebook form. SPU is okay with small print runs, though I can’t quite tell how small. (They mention 50 books at one point, and 10 books at another.)
If and when your indie press is accepted for distribution with these folks, SPU presents your titles to book sellers in small bundles throughout the year (usually this is done via large catalogs two or three times a year). Each title is “featured on a full page that includes a color cover image, book description, author bio, endorsements, review excerpts, and other pertinent sales information.”
They distribute data about each book to “90 online booksellers, including Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com”. Their print customers consist of “every sort of book dealer in the U.S. and Canada, many thousands of customers overall.”
In short, this distributor looks like a potential candidate to distribute Donovan Street Press books.
But we shall see, as there are several more distributors to cover.
Donovan Street Press Books (So Far!)
Adventures in the Radio Trade
"In dozens of amiable, frequently humorous vignettes... Mahoney fondly recalls his career as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio technician in this memoir... amusing and highly informative." ~ Kirkus Reviews
A Time and a Place
“Entertaining, chaotic adventure.” ~ Publishers Weekly.
A note as well that the hardcover version of A Time and a Place now features the new cover, and is available at a much less expensive price than before.
Other Times and Places
“ …a lovely little collection of sci-fi and fantasy short stories, fun and well written.” ~ Charles P. Kelly
The Deer Yard and Other Stories
“Partly memoir, partly fiction, The Deer Yard is more than merely a good read …well-written, gentle stories, well worth reading.” ~ Ottawa Review of Books
Coming Soon
The Gates of Polished Horn by Mark A. Rayner. We are well into the editing process and the cover is being designed as I type.
Re-Creative: the Podcast
Our podcast Re-Creative (hosted by the author of this newsletter, Joe Mahoney, and author Mark A. Rayner) is currently on a brief hiatus, but will resume shortly.
Appearances
I’ll be at the Mother’s Day Market in Richibucto Saturday May 11th from 9am until 2pm.
This has been the seventeenth edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
Right- it was Small Press DISTRIBUTION that folded! Well, I'll check out SPU, then.
I know that, recently, a major distributor of small presses in North America went bust, and it had "Small Press" in its name. Is this one still in operation?
Regarding the creation process, for myself and others, I think George Orwell probably put it best: "Our job is to make life worth living". Even if it's not actually REAL life.