Scribblers (15 page)

He's a skilled writer, all right, but he shouldn't try to evaluate work outside his genre.

The purpose of a critique is to point out areas for improvement, not to tear someone down.

Virginia, a soft-spoken elderly woman, is currently taking a class from Brooks. The students must turn in a love scene. Since two of the characters in her novel-in-progress are homosexuals, she has tried her hand at putting gay love on the page. She hasn't heard back from Brooks but is now beginning to worry, she tells us.

Everyone gets a laugh out of that.

“Good luck,” someone says.

“Better buckle your chin strap, dear.”

So that's the way I report it in the minutes when I get home. I summarize the members' various writings, submissions, contest entries, and conference experiences, but my longest paragraph is devoted to Bill Brooks. Never having met the man, I chide him for his harshness toward student work, which I tie to his being a rough-and-tumble Western feller. I laud those who would challenge his notions with scenes of gay couplings. I understand the group's minutes to be of the character of in-house memos, so I feel confident in expressing myself freely. I believe I'm defending the wronged. I also think what I write is kind of clever.

It appears I'm mistaken.

During my few years of sporadically attending meetings, only a couple of people have made themselves unwelcome. One was a poetry-writing hard case of a mountain man who, the first time someone tried to inquire about his work, answered, “I write what I write. You think you can do better?” He never came back. Others have been openly critical of the group's commercial orientation, which hasn't helped their popularity.

I send the minutes to Terri, who photocopies and mails them.

A few days after that, a separate mailing arrives from Cynthia.

“This is in response to the minutes of the recent meeting,” it begins. “I feel my remarks concerning Bill Brooks were taken out of context.”

Cynthia says she has enjoyed her instruction from Brooks and hopes to enroll in more of his classes in the future. While it is true that he said her work would benefit from more layering, she feels his remarks were delivered in the spirit of helpfulness.

She would never seek to criticize Brooks or any other fellow writer, she says.

It goes on for a full page.

I call Cynthia to apologize. She says she bears me no ill will; she wrote her letter when her feelings were running high; indeed, she's been worried she offended
me.

I also call Steve Brown, who says he doesn't know what the big deal is, that I just reported things as they happened.

I also call Jack Pyle, who wasn't at the meeting but is a pretty good judge of fairness. He is surprised at Cynthia's
follow-up; it looks to him like I was pretty straightforward. But of course, he can't say for sure.

I appreciate the support, though I suspect Steve and Jack are being nice. I really don't know what my future reception at the writers' group will be.

Self-publishing liberates the group's members.

Eileen Johnson, a sharp-dressing, well-spoken woman in her seventies, is the first to drag a toe in the water. Eileen and her husband, a retired naval officer, spent six years traveling through every state in the country in their motor home before settling in the North Carolina mountains. They live in Old Fort, located at the base of the last big push up the Blue Ridge to Asheville. The building of the railroad westward from Old Fort by convict laborers in the 1870s is the subject of
The Road,
John Ehle's classic novel. That monumental effort opened Asheville to the outside world. You're unlikely to travel that same six-mile grade via Interstate 40 today without passing a few broken-down vehicles unable to make it to the top.

After her move to North Carolina, Eileen began taking trips to Ireland, the land of her ancestry. Struck by the many parallels in folklore, dance, music, and crafts between Ireland and the southern Appalachians—attributable to the Scots-Irish migration of the nineteenth century—she resolved to write a book on the subject.

When it comes time to see her manuscript into print, Eileen doesn't even consider submitting to agents or commercial publishers. “Going through an agent, even in a best-case scenario, it might be three or four years before I could
hold that book in my hand,” she says. “And besides that, I'd have to go through all the aggravation.”

She contacts eighteen or twenty companies that advertise themselves as book printers, only to find that many of them deal mainly in stationery and wedding invitations and merely dabble in books on the side.

She finally learns that the best friend of self-publishing writers resides in Nebraska, a company with a 250,000-square-foot plant devoted exclusively to short-run book production of two hundred to five thousand copies. Those interested can obtain a free kit that exhaustively details the company's many options relating to cover design, photographic reproduction, typefaces, page counts, paper stock, bindings, proofs, shrink-wrapping, shipment, and many other things, along with all the itemized costs pertaining thereto. For a fee, the company's designers will provide as much assistance as the writer desires. Other fees are levied for acquiring an International Standard Book Number, creating a bar code, and filing with the Library of Congress. The company can also supply counter displays and print postcards, bookmarks, brochures, and posters advertising the book. Its sales pitch to writers focuses on its two- to three-month turnaround time, the high degree of control its customers retain over design, production, and sales, and the 40 to 400 percent profit realized by some of the books it prints.

Eileen titles her effort
More Than Blarney: The Irish Influence in Appalachia,
creates her own imprint—Wolfhound Press—and, given her subject matter, publishes under her maiden name, Eileen McCullough.

By the time the book comes out, she has traveled to numerous seminars on Irish subjects and procured address lists of her fellow attendees. Her initial sales are to these people, whom she targets by direct mail. In peddling her book, she much prefers speaking to Friends of the Library organizations and appearing at storytelling festivals and book fairs to signing in bookstores.

Her book is sold in scattered outlets in the mountains and, to her great pleasure, in a couple of stores in Ireland, but truth be told, it is available at relatively few places. Still, she is well satisfied with the venture. She clears enough profit from her thirty-five-hundred-dollar investment in a thousand copies of
More Than Blarney
to finance the printing of another book and to pay for a couple more trips to Ireland. She wishes only that she had hired an editor to catch some of the errors that leaked into the book.

It is Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese who spread the self-publishing fever. Having already written a pair of gardening books for a small commercial publisher, they have in place a network of bookstore and gift-shop contacts throughout the mountains.

In quick succession, Jack underwrites the publication of a couple of mysteries—the second of which is
The Sound of Distant Thunder,
which he once submitted to my company—then a novel called
After Many a Summer,
then a large-print collection of short stories, all through the same Nebraska printer Eileen discovered, all in the company's standard 5½-by-8½ paperback format. Meanwhile, Taylor puts out two collections of homespun humor and a memoir of his boyhood.

All of this enhances their attractiveness to groups looking for speakers. Counting their gardening books, they now have their own mini-store of nine titles. If a person who stops at their table doesn't like mysteries, he or she might be receptive to humor or short stories. Like Eileen, they keep their expectations realistic—Jack contracts mainly for print runs of two thousand copies—and realize a satisfactory profit. They are persuasive spokesmen for controlling one's own fate, rather than praying for the kindness of commercial publishers.

In Jack and Taylor's wake come self-published historical novels, memoirs, mysteries, a young-adult novel, travel narratives, an account of spiritual awakening dedicated to Buddha,
Grandpa Stories, Earth's Only Paradise,
a book boasting an improbable back-cover endorsement from Desmond Tutu, and others.

Spirits run high. High jinks abound.

In the absence of any book reviews to draw from, and having few contacts in the publishing industry, the members write blurbs for each other's work.

“A delightful new series character has been born … sure to make a hit with mystery fans,” Jack Pyle writes for a friend's book.

That friend returns the favor, calling Jack's first mystery,
The Death of Adam Stone,
“a tense tale that will keep you snatching at pages right up to the surprising end.”

Jack releases
The Death of Adam Stone
under Eileen Johnson's imprint, Wolfhound Press. When one reviewer gives the opinion that the book should have been rewritten, Jack writes back on Wolfhound stationery, says the magazine
could stand some editing itself, and signs his letter Lenore Johnson, one of Eileen's aliases.

Our undisputed king of self-publishing is Steve Brown.

Steve makes the trip to Asheville from Greenville, South Carolina, and so is the second-farthest-traveled member of the group, after me. He is the kind of person I normally don't like—loud, opinionated, driven. Then again, he is kindhearted and protective of those in need. Among all the members, Steve is the person most welcoming of guests and is always the first to leap to the defense of anyone verbally challenged by the group, as he did for me on one occasion.

An Alabama native, Steve was a combat platoon leader in Vietnam and later worked in sales. At the time I met him, he had been writing novels for fifteen years but had never published a single word. He spoke freely of mystery greats like Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, of big advances and movie deals, as if he were a member of the club, but it was easy to sense his frustration.

In the end, all it took was a serious conversation with Jack Pyle, who told him he could continue standing on one side of the table with the book-buying public, or he could move to the other side and sit with the authors. If there was no one willing to publish his stuff, and if he really believed in it, he should assume the burden himself.

Steve's first self-published novel is
Of Love & War,
a story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Following that comes
Color Her Dead,
a mystery starring Myrtle Beach lifeguard and part-time finder of runaways Susan Chase. Next is
Black Fire,
a literary novel set in Alabama, and then
Stripped to Kill,
a second Susan Chase mystery. All appear under Steve's
imprint, Chick Springs Publishing, coined from Chick Springs Plantation in
Black Fire.

The last page of
Black Fire
is followed by an excerpt from its proposed prequel, “Black Funk.”
Color Her Dead
has a free excerpt from
Stripped to Kill,
which in turn features both an excerpt from a third Susan Chase mystery and an interview with Steve Brown.

Steve possesses a flair for garnering blurbs—quotes touting a books merits, usually featured on the back cover. He asks me to write one for
Of Love & War,
and I oblige. But when the book comes out, my quote is nowhere to be found, though there are four others on the back cover, one on the front, and twenty-four inside, before the title page. They come mostly from World War II veterans but also from people identified as bookstore managers, professors of history, ministers, doctors, attorneys, retirees, secretaries, students, teachers, and writers. By
Color Her Dead,
he is getting quotes from published authors.

At one of the writers' group meetings, I sing the praises of Charles Price and the novel of his I've edited. Steve asks me for Charles's address so he can solicit a quote for
Black Fire.
Charles has mixed feelings about the matter and so writes an endorsement he feels won't be used.
Black Fire,
he says, is “crowded with incident” and reads “like an action-movie scenario.” Steve runs it prominently.

By his fifth book—
Radio Secrets,
a stalker novel—he no longer needs to ask for quotes, as he is able to use review excerpts from publications as mighty as
Library Journal
and
Booklist.

Always a popular man among the group, Steve blossoms
into a hero for the downtrodden unpublished. There is an air of excitement when he blows into the room. His absence is publicly regretted during those sessions when he has obligations elsewhere.

He talks of his editor in North Carolina, his artists in Asheville and Dallas, his printer in Michigan. He shows off the plastic table tents he sets up for his book signings. “Myrtle Beach Mysteries,” one of them reads. “Suspense,” “Southern Gothic,” and “Pearl Harbor” are the others. He brings his color-coded index cards bearing the names of bookstore contacts from Asheville to Atlanta. He tells about the legwork he does in advance of each of his autographings. He describes the bumper sticker on his car, which advertises his Susan Chase website, not to be confused with his Chick Springs Publishing website. Visitors to those sites can see Steve's schedule of autographings and read a chapter from each of his novels, chapters from a couple of books not yet published, and a complete novella,
In the Fast Lane,
which is dedicated to Stephen King.

In the span of eighteen months, he puts out six novels and sells twelve thousand copies.
Of Love & War
goes into a second printing of two thousand copies and
Color Her Dead
into a third.

As far as I know, his overarching ambitions are still to be picked up by a New York house and to get a movie contract. If he remains a distance from those goals, he is at least closer than he was.

At last word, Steve has been approached by a couple of writers about publishing under the Chick Springs imprint. He is working out an arrangement whereby he would collect
a consulting fee for guiding them through the entire self-publishing process. They would pay all costs—which Steve estimates at eight thousand to ten thousand dollars per title—and ship the books from their own homes, just as he does.