Self-Publishing Success in 1974
Part One: Producing the book
Back in 1974, when a rejection notice arrived, my wife Barbara said, “Why don’t we do it ourselves?” That was all the encouragement I needed.
We had no experience in book publishing and no money. But in the back of my mind, I had always wanted to start a little book publishing company, so why not start with our own book?
College had instilled in me a respect for the editorial judgment of established publishers. I saw the role of the writer as an extension of the role of the student: you submit your work and patiently await approval or rejection.
But The Lizard of Oz was a unique story that evolved in ways that gave me confidence that the public, young and old, would enjoy it. Over the three years of collecting rejection slips and kind but confused letters from editors, I had also been getting helpful feedback from a wide variety of people and rewriting and rewriting again.
The story of the story began when I visited the elementary school class of a friend, Judy Morgan, to read the kids some stories I had written. I wound up visiting a number of classes in the same building. And there’s no better audience in the world than fourth and fifth graders. When I finished reading, they’d swarm around with questions. One time, they asked what I was going to write next, and I popped off with a couple titles: “The Quest for the Holy Mackerel,” “The Lizard of Oz”…
They wanted to hear “The Lizard of Oz,” so I started writing a story with that title and with the kids themselves as characters. I went back a couple times to read them new chapters; then school ended, but the story kept growing, going its own way, until it became a “fable for all ages,” a story intended for adults that kids like too.
That summer, I went around with some musician friends to coffee houses in the Boston area, reading the story aloud to audiences of strangers, getting immediate reaction to new chapters and revisions. By the end of the summer, I was two-thirds through, quit a librarian job I had at the time, and went to my parents’ place in Pennsylvania, where I wrote the last third in about two weeks.
As the manuscript followed its meandering path through the mails, I returned to Boston, did some freelance Russian translating at a penny a word, and then went to grad school in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Each publisher typically took three to four months to return the manuscript. I’d address it to the trade book department, saying that this was a story intended primarily for adults, although children would like it too. And I’d get back a rejection note from the children’s book department, saying that they were sorry, but this didn’t really seem like a children’s book. Frequently, I ended up trimming and revising before mailing the story off again. All in all, it was a valuable experience (frustrating as it seemed at the time), forcing me to rethink what I intended to say and reconsider whether the words I had chosen conveyed what I meant them to.
While at the U. of Mass., I chanced upon a note on a bulletin board. Christin Couture needed a book to illustrate for a course. I got in touch with her, and once she started drawing the characters, it was hard for me to imagine them any other way. The Humbug, the Redcoats, the Witch, Mr. Bacon, Sir Real, Prince Frog, the Weatherman, the Mothers of Fact, Joan of Noah’s Ark, and the Lizard himself all took on new life in her drawings. So copies of the illustrations accompanied the manuscript in its rounds from publisher to publisher, until my wife and I decided to go ahead and start our own company.
We weren’t totally ignorant of printing and preparing copy for printers. I was working for Benwill Publishing Company, writing and editing for Circuits Manufacturing, a monthly technical trade magazine. And on my own, back when I first started writing The Lizard, I had hand lettered a couple of my children’s stories (“Now and Then” and “Julie’s Book: the Little Princess”) and had had them printed and stapled together like pamphlets.
I had seen The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook in bookstores. Now I bought a copy, read it quickly, and brainstormed with my old roommate from Yale, David Gleason. He had recently earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and was in the habit of taking a hard practical look at business projects. He also had experience in dealing with printers and had done some silk-screen printing himself.
Hand lettering, I thought, would suit the child-like tone and anti-machine content of the story. It would also enable me to put the words where I wanted them on the pages, ending the page where a thought ended and shaping the words to fit the shape of the illustrations. But, as Dave pointed out, production costs depend largely on the number of pages, and normal hand lettering would leave a lot of wasted space on the page. He suggested lettering it large and have the printer reduce it. So long as the reduction was the same on each page, the printer could do it with a single camera setting and there would be no extra charge. I settled on a reduction to two-thirds, which brought my lettering down to about the size of regular type (11 or 12 point).
I used a felt-tip pen and regular typing paper, stopping and cutting off strips when I made mistakes. Barbara lined up and pasted the pieces together on large sheets of paper. Inside of two weeks, working nights and weekends (we both had full-time jobs), we got the camera-ready copy together and delivered it to the printer, a “book manufacturer” that would both print and perfect bind the books — Semline in Braintree, Massachusetts.
Dave designed the cover starting with Christin’s line drawing of the Lizard. And he hand-silkscreened the covers for the first printing. (Silk screening 1,200 covers with two colors of ink is not the simplest task in the world. I wouldn’t advise anyone doing it to save money. We did it this way because The Lizard was our very first book, and we wanted the first copies to be unique, collector’s items.).
All in all, we kept the production cost of 1,000 copies (128 pages) to about $1,000, which we borrowed from a bank as a personal loan. We had decided to start a company on August 15. On October 4, we picked up the finished books at Semline and dashed into the Boston Globe Book Festival, where we had rented an exhibit table for $50.
