Self-Publishing Success in 1974
Part Three: Connecting with the Small Press Community
After self-publishing The Lizard of Oz, we began to make contacts with other small publishers, joining the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP) and following up on the helpful leads in their monthly newsletter. But more importantly, we exhibited at Book Affair, a small press book fair that was held at Boston University in April 1975, and the New York Book Fair in NYC.
Follow-up from contacts made at those events brought half a dozen more store orders and orders from two small press distributors for 100 copies each: Atlantis in New Orleans and Bob Koen in New Jersey. The distributor contacts proved to be dead ends — there were no further orders. But more important than sales was the opportunity to meet and talk to other small publishers at these book fairs. We realized that we weren’t alone, that others were running up against the same obstacles with distributors, reviewers, bookstores, and were trying to work out solutions, and in any case were enjoying publishing what they wanted to publish the way they wanted to publish it. There was a sense of excitement, that all these little individual efforts were part of a “movement,” that in the universe of publishing, the center was shifting, and we were watching it and making it happen.
At the NY Book Fair, I tired of telling about my book and started asking the visitors about their lines of business. One visitor was a reporter from The New Republic who subsequently mentioned me in a brief account of the fair. Another was an agent who said he wanted to handle foreign rights to The Lizard. (Nothing came of that.) Quite a few were editors at large publishing houses.
In the fall of 1975, on the basis of the previous publicity I had received, my mother managed to get me scheduled for two local TV appearances in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Hank Grissom of the Illusion in Lancaster (a store that had repeatedly reordered) got me scheduled for a radio interview show and an autographing session at his store. I was scared stiff, never having appeared on television or radio, but it all worked out beautifully. We got a prominent story in the Lancaster New Era. We sold about 50 copies in four hours of autographing at the Illusion, and the store took three dozen more copies for follow-up sales. We also got orders and reorders from half a dozen other stores in the area.
By then, it had become difficult to trace the source of sales. We had had orders from about 150 bookstores, distributors and jobbers from all over the US and Canada. For the most part, they contacted us directly. We found that mailing promotional material for a single book to a bookstore simply did not pay, unless you had some special reason to expect them to be interested. Some stores ordered just one or two copies; others ordered half a dozen or a dozen. A few reordered at odd intervals. (Follow-up letters didn’t seem to bring reorders. They happened on their own or they didn’t happen at all.)
Although we received orders from a number of individuals on the West Coast, we weren’t able to make inroads with the bookstores or distributors there. Small Press Traffic in San Francisco took a few on consignment, but Bookpeople, the small press distributor, simply ignored our correspondence.
Returning to the Globe Book Festival in the fall of 1975, I was one of the scheduled speakers and had an opportunity to talk to an audience of about a hundred for an hour. WBUR-radio interviewed me there, and one of the broadcasters took an interest in The Lizard. At his prompting, I wrote a radio script of The Lizard. Later, on two other occasions, I was approached by groups of people wanting to do The Lizard as a radio play (like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). I rewrote the script several times, and once a public radio station in Provincetown actually put together a cast and recorded the whole thing, but the volunteer group dissolved before completion of the post-production work. It has never been aired.
The Globe Book Festival appearance led to two brief mentions in Publishers Weekly (in a story on small publishers in New England and in a write-up on the Festival itself). Then orders started to come in as a result of a review in the newsletter of the International Oz Club (The Baum Bugle).
Meanwhile, a drama teacher at an elementary school in Sharon, Massachusetts, developed a play script based on The Lizard of Oz and staged a delightful set of performances. I later rewrote her working script, which included lots of improvisation, into a play that other schools could use.
A junior high school class in Pennsylvania and another one in Pennsylvania used The Lizard as an English text. And a college professor at Millersville State in Pennsylvania used it as a text for freshman English.
In 1976, when the second printing ran out, we ordered a third printing of 5,000. We also put together a short collection of children’s stories written by me, including my favorites: “Now and Them,” “Julie’s Book: the Little Princess,” “The Little Oops Named Ker Plop,” and “Mary Jane’s Book: the Book of Animals.” We followed the same model as we had with The Lizard and hoped to build on that success.
But we soon discovered that for all the hard work we had put into getting The Lizard known and distributed, we were starting from zero again with Now and Then. A two-book publisher merited no more attention from bookstores than a one-book publisher. And reviews were totally random. An enthusiastic reviewer from Booklist broke the publication’s rules and sent us a copy of what she had written, but the magazine never published it. And without reviews in either Library Journal or Booklist, we were virtually shut out from the library market.
Gradually, it became clear that while — thanks to inexpensive offset printing — anyone could become a book publisher, it was still virtually impossible for a tiny publisher to distribute its works. We were sinking lots of time into this, and could see that we would never make a profit. We had gained much by the experience, but the second time around, there was none of the original excitement and newness. We had made a lot of friends and learned a lot about the workings of the book publishing world. Now it was time to move on.
So while continuing to work as an editor of high tech magazines, I shifted my personal time to our children (Bobby, born 1975, and Heather, born 1977) and to trying to complete a novel that I had been mulling over for years, and which was eventually published by a traditional publisher (Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin) as The Name of Hero.
Reviews of The Lizard of Oz:
“An intriguing and very entertaining little novel” — Library Journal
“A snappy hip fable” — Booklist
“A commentary on our times done delightfully” — Philadelphia Bulletin
“Carroll and Tolkien have a new companion” — Aspect
“A work so saturated that the mind is both stoned with pleasure and alive with wonder” — Lancaster Independent Press
“A gallery of figments of contemporary culture that could take its place on the library shelf of memory along with classic figures of children’s fiction” — Valley Advocate
