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The Boston Globe July 4, 2001, Wednesday, Third Edition
Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
By David Mehegan
Kristen Magnacca of Upton wanted
to publish her story, in her own way.
Magnacca, 40, and her husband, Mark, had been married 10 years, hoping and trying to have children. In 1997, she had a disastrous ectopic pregnancy, followed by a deep depression. After a time, she resolved to work her way out of her despondency by telling her story in a book. While it was well underway, the story changed happily: Her son, Cole, was born.
Last November, "Girlfriend to Girlfriend: A Fertility Companion" was finished, but Magnacca was reluctant to turn it over to a publisher. "I wanted to keep control of the book," she says. "It was so personal; I was sharing such intimate details. I'm not really an author."
In a new twist on independence, she decided to publish the book through a high-speed technology called "print-on-demand," a little-known but growing channel through which writers can skip commercial publishing yet create a book and make it available to readers.
For a $399 basic fee, a Web-based firm called 1stBooks Library (1stbooks.com) put "Girlfriend to Girlfriend" in digital form and made it available through the Ingram catalog, the distributor used by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. For anyone who searches it out on those retailers' Web sites and orders it, a single copy is quickly created by print-on-demand and shipped within days. Magnacca hired her own editor and supplied art for her own cover. Her paperback book is priced at about $15, and she gets a 30 percent royalty on each copy sold.
Magnacca is pleased. "The book has been doing well," she says, "and we have been contemplating going to a mainstream publisher."
1stBooks is only one of a number of print-on-demand publishers - others are Xlibris, iUniverse.com, and Universal Publishers (upublish.com) - that have cropped up in the last few years and are shaking up the writer's world, if not yet the publisher's. They offer various services for various fees, depending on how much service a writer wants, but they have one thing in common: For a few hundred bucks, they let anyone be a published author, of a sort.
Print-on-demand resembles old-fashioned vanity publishing in that any book will be accepted as long as it is not pornographic, libelous, or wholly illiterate. Since there is no advance, a writer may have to sell a lot of books to make any profit above costs.
It differs in this: With a vanity publisher, an author pays for an actual printing of books, perhaps several thousand, which he must then get rid of any way he or she can. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory, while there is a distribution channel that pays a royalty on all books sold.
"The folks least well served" by mainstream publishing, says Jon Feldcamp, founder and chief executive officer of Xlibris, "are those who create the value in the first place." He says a million people write regularly, and a half-million books are written each year.
Most of those go into what Feldcamp calls "the filter - the agents and the editors," and never get into print. "We were interested in using technology to provide people with access to the market and a shot at success."
For many of those writers, it's a way of realizing a dream without professional literati giving them the bum's rush. Howard Olsen, 57, of Salem, owner of a machine shop, loves the books of Stephen King and Tom Clancy and wanted to be a novelist. Four years ago, he wrote a thriller called "Diplomatic Immunity." But when he tried to publish it, all he got were rejection letters. So he, too, used 1stBooks. He has since published several more 1stBooks novels. His first two, he says, sold 700 copies total, mostly by word of mouth.
Promoting his own books, Olsen set up signings and readings at local Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. The stores would order the books ahead of time to have on hand at the reading. For him, the whole experience has been a thrill.
"When I went to the new Barnes & Noble in Peabody," he says, "there is a staff-recommended rack. I looked over and saw my book with Stephen King on the left and Tom Clancy on the right. There I was, Howard Olsen, sandwiched in with the greatest. What a feeling! The hair on the back of my neck stood up."
For authors who have gone the traditional route, that feeling has come from the experience of being selected in the first place. "I sold my first book to Knopf in 1984," says Cambridge-based novelist Liz Benedict. "It was a huge validation to be picked out of all the books they consider. It's always a validation when you are recognized by someone other than your mother and your best friend."
"Just the fact that a publisher is paying you validates the creative process," says novelist Roland Merullo of Williamsburg. "If someone puts out their own money, they are taking a risk for your book."
Within the world of traditional publishing, there is a measure of disdain for the print-on-demand phenomenon. "That's not publishing," says Matthew Miller, founder of Connecticut-based Toby Press, a small and selective fiction publisher. "The publisher has a moral reponsbility to make his writers better writers, and the author has an obligation to want to become a better writer. We are talking about art and craft. You can get away with crap in the world and the literary world, but there are standards of literacy and expression."
But some people just have other things on their minds. "We print one copy and send it to the author," says Lynn Zingraf, general manager of iUniverse.com. "We have authors who are done then. They are published and are happy. They put the book on their bookcase, and it sits there." Zingraf also says published writers whose books have fallen out of print can bring them back, in a sense, with print-on-demand. Even if no one but the author buys a copy, the book is at least available.
Some writers have done surprisingly well. Ralph Fertig, a retired judge who lives in Los Angeles, wrote a book on Jewish history called "Love and Liberation" and published it with iUniverse.com. He worked so hard to push it locally that it recently made No. 4 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. When arranging signings and readings in stores, Fertig says, "I told them the books would sell or I would buy them back at cost. They have sold." There are also first-rate writers with special reasons to take the print-on-demand route. Philip Simmons of Center Sandwich, N.H., finished a nonfiction book a year and a half ago. His agent could not find a publisher, even though Simmons had published short stories and a book of literary criticism.
"The editors loved the writing, the literary quality, the intelligence," says Simmons, a 43-year-old English professor on disability leave from Lake Forest College in Illinois. "But it fit uneasily in established categories. The marketing people did not know how to sell it."
In 1993, Simmons was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - Lou Gehrig's disease. That incurable degenerative disease is usually fatal within two to five years. Simmons and his wife, sculptor Kathryn Field, have two children. His book, "Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life," is a series of reflective essays about coming to terms with the disease.
"I have a terminal illness," Simmons says, "and in looking at the ultimate writer's deadline, I had to decide: Do I keep waiting around for my agent to sell this book, or do I go ahead and put it out there somehow?"
He published it with Xlibris. By dint of his own dogged promotional efforts, much like those of Kristen Magnacca (his Web site is learningtofall.com, hers is www.girlfriendtogirlfriend.com), Simmons sold 4,000 copies in the first six months, which has led to what he sought in the beginning: a contract with a commercial publisher, Bantam Books.
"I had to weigh in the balance the fact that there is still a stigma associated with self-published work," says Simmons, who managed to finish climbing all 49 New Hampshire mountains higher than 4,000 feet just before his legs became too weak. "I had my own crass, snobbish, and elitist notions of publishing, but I decided it was worth the risk for the gain of getting the book out there in a matter of months."
Bantam (a part of the Random House-Bertelsmann empire, which has a minority stake in Xlibris) plans to bring the book out next January. Toni Burbank, Bantam's vice president and executive editor, says, "It's in beautiful shape." Simmons had data showing that "Learning to Fall" sold well in all parts of the country, and that 40 percent of buyers bought two copies, one for themselves and one for someone else. "It all said, here is a gem waiting to be discovered," says Burbank.
Yet she could see why Simmons had difficulty placing the book in the traditional way.
"Had it come to me as a manuscript," she says, "I might well have turned it down. We see hundreds of spiritual autobiographies, but how does one . . . introduce a new author? The first-time author does not have the 'platform.' That's the new lingo: 'Is he already known, has he been on "Oprah" or "Nightline"?' "
Whatever the fate of a print-on-demand book, there seems often to be a high degree of pride and satisfaction in just bringing it into existence. One hears this from Aaron Allan, a Toronto-based author (under the pen name Harlan W. Carson) of hard-boiled private-eye novels published through 1stBooks Library.
"You have to take control," Allan says. "You can't think, 'I have done my job, now someone is going to discover me.' It's not so. You have to be willing to work hard, wear many hats, go public. You must persist. I decided, when print-on-demand came along, I'd be a fool not to take advantage of it."
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