A big “thank you” goes out to Beth Ziesenis (that’s her in the photo to the left!) of Avenue Z Writing Solutions for letting me write a guest post today at her blog Life on Avenue Z. Beth is a freelance copywriter & editor out of San Diego, CA, who blogs about her newly founded career as a work-for-hire professional so, as  a kind of counterpoint, I wrote about working with freelancers from our perspective as book publishers here at TSTC Publishing. However, in all honesty, I wouldn’t rush over there to read what I had to say . . . instead, I’d suggest visiting Beth’s blog on a regular basis to get her take on the the ever hectic life of being a freelancer writer.

In particular, I think Beth’s blog strikes an effective balance between the professional and professional aspects of her life that makes it consistently engaging and interesting. Sure, much of what she writes about are cool new Web-based tools, insights while traveling on different assignments, and staying up all night to meet another client deadline. But, what I like even more is how well she integrates those posts with other ones of a more personal nature: her wildly successful Avenue Z food drive, health issues in her family, and periodic updates on her biking and running efforts.

As I used to tell my first-semester composition students, dryly recited facts alone are convincing but not engaging while anecdotal evidence is not persuasive but can be interesting. So if you want to be persuasive and engaging, a good mix of facts and anecdotal evidence is a good way to hold on to your reader until the end. After all, while the publishing industry as a concept is interesting, the people who are in the publishing industry are more interesting still. For daily updates about the business of publishing, Publisher’s Lunch is the way to go: late-breaking news, deals, and who’s going to where from where. But for the story behind the story—that is, how the people in the writing and publishing industry live their lives day to day—Beth’s blog (as a freelance writer) and Pub Rants (an agent) and Publishing Careers (a product line manager) and the Tiano Design Blog (a freelance book designer) among others do a good jog of letting us see what that life is like.

On another front, I think Beth’s blog does a good job of showing what being a freelance writer is really all about—constant networking, self-promotion, bird dogging leads for work with the never-ending tenacity of Type A self starter, and writing, writing, writing—as opposed to a particular conception a lot of people—especially those who think they like the idea of being a writer—is all about: the ever-popular tortured artist effect.  (Or affect depending on how you want to look at it.) There was a post a while back at GalleyCat (I think) where the title was something like “Wannabe Writers Talk About Craft, Writers Talk About Money.” And boy is that ever the truth!

Show me a a writer who makes anything approaching a living at it and I’ll show you someone who is writing and working all the time . . . and who doesn’t have the time for some never-ending existential angst that manifests itself by being a life support system for a couch while eating Cheetos, limpidly reading Jane Austen novels, and waiting for a call that will never come from The Paris Review to be interviewed for their Writers at Work series. As opposed to allowing you to exist in some perfect solitude amongst Plato’s forms, being a successful freelance writer requires ongoing engagement with different people in the world to a much higher degree than just going to the same job (and seeing the same people) day after day. So hats off to Beth for getting the work done that she does, juggling clients, traveling around the country, and still having the energy and drive to write the insightful (and regular) posts that she does.

Mark

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As always, blogging has been lighter than I would like. But, I can’t say that I’ve had much to say about publishing lately that has much to add to any ongoing industry conversations or concerns. I suppose I could chime in with things like, “The Kindle! What’s up with it?” Or maybe, “Printers! What’s up with them?” Or the ever popular, “Simon & Schuster? What’s up with that out-of-print provision in your contracts?”

To say the least, it’s been a weird and unexpected August this year. As Karen Mitchell Smith said to me on the phone last week, it’s never a good sign when you suddenly start getting auto-reply emails that say so-and-so “is out of the office until further notice.” Well, okay, sure: It’s one thing to get an email like that . . . it’s another thing entirely to be the one who’s suddenly having those emails sent out.

Several Thursday mornings ago I was doing some last odds and ends of editorial work on our biomedical equipment technicians career guide at my desk when I’m like, Dang, I feel kind of sick to my stomach. So I go outside to get some fresh air and I’m like, Dang, my left arm feels kind of numb. And my chest feels like I’ve got a bad case of indigestion. And then I just start pouring sweat. So I go to the bathroom and I mean my face is gray. And I think, I don’t really feel like standing up. But I don’t really feel like sitting down. I feel like being seriously prostrate. I mean, prostrate on the floor of a public bathroom! Let me tell you, at that point you’re like, I hope this is just the worst case of indigestion ever!

As it turns out, all this was not case of indigestion. But, thanks to our ever-invaluable (and ever mis-titled) departmental secretary Melanie Peterson, barely an hour later—and after having a completely blocked artery blown open with a round of angioplasty—I was the proud recipient of two shiny new stents (with a third to follow next week). And all this for a guy who had been to the hospital once in his life—other than visiting other people now and then—for a tetanus shot when I was 14.

As for what happened next, well, thankfully—thankfully for me at least—this is a blog about publishing as opposed to maudlin/narcissistic navel gazing. Put another way, that is, what was said between my blushing bride Melody and myself at all points along the way—both pre- and post-angioplasty—was just between (and for) us.

What I can and want to say is how grateful I am to everyone in the office—Melanie, Grace, and Lindsey—for carrying on with the business of book publishing while I was out. August is always the busiest month of the year for us as the the majority of our book sales are fall adoption orders. Books get sent to print, are double-checked one last time, and thousands of them are invoiced, boxed up, and shipped out. The ways in which different things can fall through the cracks in a variety of unexpected areas just exponentially multiplies this time of year. But, thanks to Grace and Melanie—with Lindsey as the newbie pitching in—they made the executive decisions to get everything pushed through the way it needed to be done. One of my primary goals in getting the publishing operation up and running has been to create a system that works independent of who is or isn’t there on any given day because otherwise things will inevitably grind to a halt at the worst possible moment. But, thanks to everyone who was left while I was out, they made the publishing operation work the way it is supposed to (and has to) work.

(Of course, many thanks are due to everyone who offered their kind thoughts and wishes in person, by phone, by mail: my dad and mom, Tiffany Flowers and Don Rehwaldt, my father-in-law Butch, Sarah-Jane Sanders, Rudy Cantu, Carmen Keiningham, Tammy Turner, Tom Woll, Tom Dutton, Roger Bowles, Jim and Ramona McKeown, Mike Huneke, Melanie’s parents, everyone at the TSTC Waco bookstore and ADP program, plus everyone else I’ve forgotten.)

So, in addition to being back to work—more or less, at least, since I’ll be out again next week for stent #3—and certainly getting closer to being back to being my old self, I figure I can start worrying about Kindles and printers and contracts and the like. But, until at least acknowledging all that’s gone on the past few weeks—and offering thanks to a variety people—it certainly seemed just a bit disingenuous to skip over all this as though it had never happened at all.

(And, finally, apologies to Jason Brown for co-opting the title of this post from a collection of his short stories.)

Mark

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Having just gotten back from spending the end of last week—February 21-23—at the 2008 TCCTA convention, the first thing I must do is thank Bobby King of the Dr Pepper Bottling Group in Waco, Texas, for generously donating lots of diet and regular Dr Pepper to give away at our booth in the exhibit hall. Once again this year, especially in comparison to the gigantic booths by the likes of Cengage and McGraw-Hill, ours was the little booth that could and having Dr Peppers to give away certainly drew in a lot more foot traffic.

As I always say, working exhibit booths at conferences is something of a mystery to me in the sense that you never can tell—despite talking to loads of folks over two days—what’s really going to pan out or not. But, as always, some unexpectedly interesting things happened that, in my mind, made the trip well worthwhile in ways I never would have predicted.

First of all, I have to say “hats off” to Dr. Otto Wilke of the Texas State Technical College Waco math department who came up on Friday and helped work the booth for about five hours. We published his book Contemporary Math I Using Maple or TI-89 last fall and it was great having him there to talk about it in detail to other math instructors.

Plus Todd, our editor, was unable to attend due to some last minute complications so I appreciated not having to be there all by myself. Then again, as Otto told me, he wasn’t particularly there for my benefit. Instead, he had gotten his first royalty check for his book last week and he said he was ready to make some more money. Now that’s the kind of author/instructor I can work with! And, if you want to know an added benefit of attending these shows, I saw several of our authors in attendance and at the very least they were happy to see their books on display with all the other textbooks from all the other publishers, both large and small.

In addition, our booth happened to be next to the American Technical Publishers booth so I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Robert Deisinger, president of the company, and Peter Zurlis, vice president of production. They do the kinds of publications that we do—technical instructional materials—but given that the company was founded in 1898, they’ve got something of a head start on us.

On the one hand, you could say we’re each other’s competition. On the other hand, as I’ve seen time and time again when talking to different publishers, both Robert and Peter were very generous with their time and ideas in talking about publishing in general and their book operation in particular. Plus, they had some very interesting ideas about the difference between sales (signing a contract on the bottom line) vs. marketing (advertising, catalogs, conferences, direct mail pieces). They moved away from having sales reps about 25 years ago because their product line is so specialized it didn’t justify the on-campus presence the way a Cengage can do.

In the end, though, it was the odd, unexpected moments that will stay with me the longest: accidentally dumping three cases of soft drinks on the sidewalk and having a group of African tourists volunteer to help me gather all my stuff up, going to a private dinner with my wife—she’s a history teacher over at our local community college—graciously thrown by another textbook publisher and seeing, relatively speaking, how the other half lives, and navigating downtown Dallas traffic in a fifteen-passenger maroon van with all of the sound and fury that implies.

Mark

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Today I have to offer many thanks to Lori Cates Hand, of JIST Publishing, who also has the blog Publishing Careers. In one of those crazy circuitous ways the Internet works, Lori used to work for Joe Wikert, of Wiley Publishing and Publishing 2020 blog fame, who recently plugged her blog on his. Anyway, she commented on that post to thank him and also invited publishing industry folks to contact her to offer whatever advice/thoughts they might have about breaking into the business. Anyone who knows me knows that I have no problem holding forth about publishing and after some emails back and forth, Lori was generous enough to post my answers to the questions she sent me about publishing in general and my background in particular here.

While our blog deals with a lot of day-to-day publishing operations issues—and most publishing industry blogs deal with different specific areas like agenting, editing, graphics, marketing, and so on—I think Lori’s blog is helping to fill a very necessary space for those people who want to break into publishing but aren’t yet quite there. It’s a good read with a lot of useful information and I would certainly recommend it to anyone inside/outside the publishing world.

Mark

I often point out to people that I came into book publishing rather late in life after spending 10 years teaching college English. One day I was finishing grading final exams for an American literature class, the next day I was moving all my cubicle belongings to an old conference room on the far side of the campus to begin setting up TSTC Publishing. Initially I read and read (and then read some more) books about publishing—many of which are on our Recommended Publishing Resources page—to figure out what needed to be done. Books, however, will only take you so far and after while I began to feel like I was operating in a vacuum trying to figure out what the best next steps would be to keep moving us forward.

After a while, it dawned of me that I might talk to other publishers, especially those I might chat with as I traveled around to the various TSTC colleges. Last month I was out in West Texas and was fortunate enough to meet with Rue Judd, the founder and driving force behind Bright Sky Press in Albany, Texas. I just kind of showed up out of the blue on Friday morning as I was driving from Sweetwater to Breckenridge to see if someone might be around their office to talk. Given that, I was extraordinarily fortunate to be a recipient of Ms. Judd’s generosity as she spent three hours talking to me about publishing in general, her publishing background and Bright Sky Press in particular, and took me to the weekly Albany Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Rue started her publishing career in the late ‘70s while living in Washington D.C. as her husband was a lawyer there. At that time, she told me, there weren’t really any good desk calendars that were focused on the nation’s capitol. So, she worked with a couple of different photographers who took pictures of the city during its different seasons and she was able to put together a 52-week calendar that had a different picture for each week. By the time she went to print she had pre-sold 10,000 copies and away she went on her publishing career. First she did museum posters, calendars, and postcards and later on moved into book publishing.

In the last ‘90s her husband retired and they moved back to his hometown of Albany, Texas. Some people in the community wanted to publish a book about the county courthouse there—Shackelford County, I believe—and it was a natural thing for her to help out with it. Then, the next thing you know, she started Bright Sky Press and is publishing 15-20 books a year: coffee table books, cookbooks, sports books, and a whole slew of titles related (usually) to Texas.

She was kind enough to give me a copy of one of her recent publications, Revealing Character: Texas Tintypes. It is a collection of photographs of modern-day working cowboys taken by Robb Kendrick utilizing 19th century tintype photographic processes. I just saw an ad in the new issue of Texas Monthly stating that photographs from the book will be on display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas, through April before moving on to other locations after that.) It is an absolutely gorgeous book, very well put together, and I would highly recommend it. On the business side of things, I was also interested to discover how she had kept a low retail price ($34.95) through her printing connections and how, as well, that Frost Bank had underwritten/sponsored the book which made it economically viable from the get go.

As I said, Rue let me tag along with her the weekly Albany Chamber of Commerce luncheon—a very interesting introduction to the local business scene—and over the course of the time I spent with her she passed on much sage advice about getting print runs (and sales) up, keeping printing costs down, and various distribution/marketing issues.

All in all, it was a highly productive and enjoyable way to spend three hours. For having shown up more or less out of the blue, I couldn’t have asked for anyone to have been more generous than Rue Judd. And I would certainly recommend visiting Bright Sky Press online; there are a variety of books on a variety of subjects and there’s bound to be something for almost anyone.

Mark