My Publisher/Myself

Abstract

When I started writing in 1960, I expected to put in ten years of daily work before producing something worthy of publication. By 1970 I was a little ahead of schedule. I had an M.A. in creative writing with an honorable mention in the 1964 Joseph Henry Jackson Awards for my thesis novel. I had published one short story in a little magazine and was contributing monthly articles to Freedom News, one of the many Bay Area underground papers of the sixties. I had written the first novel I thought worth publishing, Ella Price's Journal, which a New York agent had been trying to sell for two years. And I had just finished The Comforter, a mystical fantasy which I sent off to my agent. After several months of silence, I wrote to ask him about his progress with either novel. He replied that my second novel was so bad he would never show it to publishers for fear of prejudicing them against me. I knew he was wrong, but what could I do, fire him? Then I'd be even worse off. As an unpublished novelist I'd had a hard enough time getting him. I remember holding his letter in my hand, shaking it at my husband Bob, and letting my anger pour out. Do you know how many writers have published their own books? I shouted. Virginia Woolf! Thoreau! D. H. Lawrence! Upton Sinclair! I didn't mention Dostoevsky and Mark Twain because at the time I didn't know that at the height of their fame, each had gone back to self-publishing. Blake! Shelley! Whitman! O.K., Bob said quietly. Let's do it. We went to our friends out of whose basement came the Freedom News and hired their typesetter to do The Comforter on their justo-writer, a cranky machine which justifies margins and prints a serviceable, newspaper-like type. We got quotes from printers. Bob studied and drew dozens of butterflies trying to perfect one for the cover. At each stage there were new problems, new decisions I felt unprepared to deal with: page size, cover design, title pages, location of page numbers. Had I ever looked at all those books I'd read? In all those years of reading, writing and juggling abstract ideas in the classroom, had I lost the ability to make something real? At the worst times it was Bob, the practical building contractor, who quietly asked the right questions, learning what we needed to know to go on step by step to completion. Eventually we had 3,000 paperback books, produced at a cost of $1,800. We priced the book at $1.95. With 40 percent to bookstores, 12 percent more to distributors (if we could even get them to take it), printing costs of sixty cents per book, postage, wrapping, invoices, and gas for delivery, we might clear twenty cents per book. Out of this twenty cents would come any promotion we did, not to mention wages for us as publishers or royalties for me as author. Obviously we would be lucky to break even. But we had been warned by a bookseller friend that no one would spend more than $2, if that, for a novel by an unknown. People didn't buy novels much, anyway. Now if you could write a how-to book ... . The important thing, we had decided, was to get me in print. We tried to think of that $1,800 as spent for fun, as some unpublished authors take a trip to console themselves for not being in print. And, of course, we had hopes. Our naivete was reflected in the cover we designed: a single black butterfly on a white background. No