![]() So, the discontented voice in my head repeats, if we cut them the hell out, we can survive on far fewer sales and still spend the summers on the French Riviera and the winters in Gstaad. ![]() The fact is that I write, illustrate, design, and endlessly promote most of my books which means that the publishers just need to ship them to China to be printed, have a few lunches with the guys at Barnes & Noble, spend a week in Frankfurt at the book fair, and in return pocket 92% of every buck you spend on my books. I console myself with the fact that most of my self-help advice is not in fact terribly helpful.Īn extension of this desire to self-publish - given fresh urgency of late because of my involvements with one publisher that unceremoniously remaindered one of my books that meant the most the most to me and another that declared bankruptcy just as we are in the last stage of prepress and may or may not come through with the goods in October - is to self-publish a book or two through Amazon in the hope that at least those people who already know and can stomach my books might buy enough copies without the encouragement of the Media Industrial Complex to make up for the loss of piddling royalties I get from my various legitimate publishers to be worth the trouble. But somehow I keep coming back to this particular oasis to drink, perhaps because at its core, blogging just requires typing on the keyboard and hitting “Post.” I am currently laboring under a self-imposed requirement that each post be titled “How to _ ” which is liberating, in that the first two words of the post have been written for me and I can generally take off from that ruining start, and confining, in that I am always wrestling with that part of me that insists I must be a hard-blowing expert while I generally feel like my nature is to be a distracted incompetent and so having the title be necessarily proscriptive can be a challenge. This blog has occasionally undergone this sort of metastasis as I have inflated the ambitions of my soapbox to unwieldy heights, like writing a long essay every single day or not at all, and it is not a pretty sight as I’m sure you as a long-time reader will recognize. What starts out as whim develops all these rules and procedures and expectation until eventually the mere thought of working on it further seems a frightful chore and bore and I wander off to the next. Then I made the Shut Your Monkey podcast and then the Art for All podcast and I did what I so often do with so many creative projects which is to start with a flicker of an idea and then keep researching additional ways to make the production more and more elaborate until it collapses under the weight of my own unreachable expectations. I was reading the recent issue about podcasting in New York magazine and it made me think yet again about reviving my podcasting efforts which initially began more than ten years ago with a podcast and then a video podcast that no one ever knew about. Anyway, the idea of making my own little books has haunted me since I was six and the fact that you can make them more easily and more professionally than ever keeps that flame alive. A similar impulse happened when I came across the Newspaper Club, a company that prints small-run newspapers, and I was obsessed with the idea of making an issue or two, but which, like my fantasies of letterpressing and screenprinting, died under a bleak vision of exhausted cardboard boxfuls of unwanted printed matter stacked to the ceiling of Jack’s former bedroom, sort of like the warehouse scene at the end of Citizen Kane but more ramshackle and sad. ![]() I loved the book but was also curious about how he’d had it made which turned out to be a company called Scout that makes little books of a certain size and length, and the cuteness of these little books, essentially pocket-sized pamphlets with kraftboard covers, reminded me of the books I used to love to make as a kid and I badly wanted to make one again. ![]() Mike Lowery just sent me a little book he made and had printed ( How to Keep a Travel Sketchbook ). I’ve had a bunch of ideas and projects simmering on the stovetop of my mind and, because most or all of them may never get out of the kitchen, I thought I’d serve them up here and see what you think.
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