There come times when you have to make big decisions. A few weeks ago, I made one. For a variety of factors, a deal I thought I’d made to get the book published wasn’t progressing as I’d hoped. I’ll spare details on this, but some thoughts came to mind, and they were provoked by people I admire.
The first was from the subject of my previous book, who had struggled to get his first novel published. One night, talking about the frustrations he’d suffered, he suddenly had an inspiration: “Hellfire, we’ll publish it ourselves.” And so he did, raising some money and getting it privately printed.1
I also thought of an observation Natalie Merchant2 made in a recent interview. When she went solo she could have become a big-time pop star, but that’s not what she wanted. What mattered to her was doing the work she wanted to do, and doing it her way. One of her projects3 took a long time and required her to spend a massive amount of her own money, which took her nearly a decade to recoup. But it mattered that much to her to stay true to her vision, so she took charge, spent the money and did the hard work, and has never regretted it.
That kind of thing chewed at me as I thought about Peace. I’ve spent this long working on the book, rounding material up, doing all the things one must do in order to write a biography. I’ve been through it before, how it feels to turn over the product of a very intimate and personal process to a publisher, who will then turn it over to people you don’t know and who don’t know you, and then your work becomes subject to their vision. I had a vision of how I wanted Peace to look, how I wanted the cover to look, how I wanted the interior to look. I couldn’t be guaranteed of that if I went with an outside publisher. I wouldn’t have the control I wanted. I knew what I wanted, I knew how I wanted it to look, and I didn’t want to sacrifice that. This had to be done my way.
As it happened, I had the tools and know-how already. I have InDesign and Photoshop and Illustrator. I have close to 35 years of experience with document layout and design. I’ve got more than two decades’ experience with Photoshop and Illustrator. Why not see what I could do? One long weekend4, that’s what I did. I had Brandon give the text a very careful read, and he caught a lot of things that got past me and made the whole thing much stronger.
The other bonus is that it’s really easy to self-publish these days, especially if you can supply press-ready PDFs. And, as it happened, that’s what I know how to do, and IngramSpark could do the rest. And, last Friday, the result came in the mail:
Mind you, this is the printed proof. The moment you send something off, you find a whole lot of things got past you, and I have spent the last several days fixing those last little things. Some of them were fairly important, and others of them were tiny. I knew, though, if I didn’t fix them I would kick myself every time I saw them. As the great Dan Gurney once observed, “If you have the chance to make something beautiful, and you don’t…well, what does that say about you?”
Even then, even with all its imperfections, I was impressed by how it looks. It’s a solid book. The dust jacket is even more gorgeous than I imagined it would be. The paper inside is bright and opaque. The binding and cover feel nice and solid. This book looks and feels the way I hoped it would, and I am happy with it. It’s not the deal I would have gotten had I been able to interest a big-name publisher, but I’ve more than made that up by the fact that I have been able to this my way and make the book, in appearance and in substance, the way I wanted it to be.
The final revisions will be sent to Ingram in the next few hours. Once that file is properly in place and I’ve approved the e-proof, expect the book to go on sale really soon after. You’ll be able to get your local bookstore to order it in, and I’ll also be setting up a link here for you to buy it through this website.5 There’s also a chance I may have a limited supply of signed copies later on, too.
Stay tuned. It’s almost here, at long and blessed last.
- The flip side was that the publishers that had turned the book down had solid reasons for doing so. Travelers’ Rest was a raw, overwritten book that really needed editing help. But Robertson really wanted that book published, and he got it published.
- An inspiration in so many areas of my life the last 30 years or so.
- Leave Your Sleep, from 2010. It is beautiful, and the care she invested into it is evident throughout.
- With the Masters Tournament on in the background that Sunday afternoon. It’s the only golf I watch all year, and it’s because the broadcast itself is such a throwback to the way things used to be done. It’s very soothing, no doubt thanks to all the bird sounds.
- Availability through Amazon is a question mark. Since Amazon operates a competing publisher, availability of IngramSpark books through Amazon can be goofy. I’ll also tell you that if you order the book through the link I put here, my collaborators and I will see more return, and we’ll appreciate that.