Toolemera Blog

More On Prize Books

It's never safe to draw assumptions even when there's been books written on a subject, journal articles covering the history of the subject and people in the know believing they know what they know.

I needed yet another copy of Solomon Barter's opus: Woodwork (aka: Manual Instruction: Woodwork, AKA, The English Sloyd), which book I addressed a while back in this self same blog. Why another copy, the third one no less? I've toyed with a reprint for some time, hemming and hawing over the book. It does have good stuff in it. Barter was, as with many of his Sloydish contemporaries, fairly rigid in his approach to teaching youngsters to become upstanding citizens through handwork.

He follows a structured approach first introduced in the Sloyd system which won wide approval throughout Europe and eventually was adapted to the needs of Great Britain by some such as Barter. For some time now I figured that Barter's book was intended for the instructor, largely because that's what he said in his introduction and that's what he says in the content.

So, here I have the 1905 edition, 4th, Revised, with a Price Award slapped inside the front cover. A Prize Award given for Book Keeping to Mr. Halfpenny, a name custom made for a book keeper.

True to the spirit of Sloyd and the expansion of young minds, those whipper snappers had to learn something about everything when they went to the Commercial School.

For me, the question remains, to reprint Barter and Solomon or not to? While they're not my cuppa, there is a lot of good stuff in there worthy of preservation so, at some point I'll getterdone. There's a ton of halftone glass negative photographs in Barter of the sort which give me headaches, but, being the intrepid sort that I am, or masochist take your pick, sometime in 2012 Sloyd will find it's way back to the light.

Maybe it's time to resurrect the Prize Book labels too? Of course today schools seem to want to award a winning award to each and every child who participates which would make things difficult, but still, perhaps.

Till next, Gary

How Did You Learn Woodworking?

How did you learn woodworking?

What Self Publishers Can Do To Befriend Their Libraries

My soapbox is around here somewhere. Ah, here it is. Now I feel at home.

I read a lot of blogs and sites by and about self publishers. There's a common theme of "how do I get my book(s) into libraries/bookstores/mainstream?" running around. People want to break out of the self-marketing routine and have someone else pick up their book for them.

Having had my feet wet in both camps and having had questions here and there from the self publishing camp along with questions from some public libraries along the lines of "who are these scammes ripping off Google books and..." oops sorry, wrong post. Never mind. Wrong soap box.

Suggestions of various sorts:

1. If you're going POD, chosing CreateSpace, the Amazon POD printer, will brand you as a newbie. A very small minority are successful once they have made a name for themselves as an author. Sorry, that's just the way it is. You can get someone to donate your book to a library to get it cataloged but don't plan on the title staying in the collection for any length of time. Sure, you can pay for CS Expanded Distribution but paying for it doesn't mean anyone is going to actually order tons of copies of your book.
2. If you're going POD, select a bona fide POD service or apply to Lighting Source, the Ingram Group POD service. They won't hold your hand so you have to know what you're doing but they are the best in the business. For minor glitches, their customer service people will explain the problems and possible solutions but on a whole, it's up to you.
3. Edit. Edit. Edit. Get someone else to edit your book before you go live. The worst thing you can do is release a title with errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation, layout, pagination, etc. There are always the PDF errors that occur that must be corrected in the Proof stage and that's almost unavoidable. It's the editing errors that should have been caught that tell a collections development librarian or a book buyer that the title is amateurish and to be avoided. EDIT EDIT EDIT.
4. If possible, avoid paperback and go with case wrap (laminated hard cover) or, preferably, jacketed cloth hard cover. If you do select paperback, go with trade paperback to let the buyer know your title is not destined for the coverless bin. Libraries need books that will last. Jacketed hard covers are best as they jacket can be protected in a polyester wrap. Case wrap covers are very popular but the book covers simply don't wear as well.
5. Avoid cloth cover books with stamped front covers and lacking a jacket. In the library world, this stands for a cheap library binding, meaning: a journal that has been bound for reference or a book that has been rebound to keep it alive and even more so, a library binding of the less expensive sort. A good library bound is buckram, finished with a tough, wear and moisture resistant finish. Those that are left without the water resistant finish simply don't last very long under use. Stamping a cloth cover with a metallic title and/or image is asking for the stamping to wear off due to shelf and hand use. To the library and book distributor buyer, this type of cover says the publisher or author wanted to cut costs. Adding a jacket costs little so why not make the book look professionally done?
6. Get your metadata right. Metadata is data about data and libraries as well as book distributors live for this stuff. Make sure you add all that is needed on the Verso page to the Title page (Verso being the other side). If you don't provide what is expected of you, They will Know and will relegate you to the Self Publishing Hall of Infamy. Catalogers have tons of work to do and original cataloging, what they have to do if there is no record for a book, or if they have to do extensive adaptation of an existing record, is made time consuming if the author or publisher does not provide the necessary information. Many a book has been shuffled to the bottom of a pile for want of a bit of information.
7. If your book is non-fiction, do a Table of Contents and an Index. I repeat: DO IT or else your book may not even be considered for more than a nano-second. If your book is fiction and a TOC would be nice, add one as a boon to your prosepective readers and reviewers.
8. Write a good descriptive paragraph for Bowker when you do your ISBN data. Don't go overboard with hyberpole. The more hype, the more likely your title will be relegated to the Inspirational/Motivational Reading genre. If that's your genre, then go for it. 
9. Get yourself a proper Desk Top Publishing program. Word and other software can be used, but all sorts of problems arise. I use Apple iWork Pages, which, while not InDesign or Quark, is enough for my particular needs. Learn about what a PDF is, what PDF/X-1a:2001 is and what your printer expects of you.
10. Lastly, do not do what has been the death knell for many a self published author and publisher: fail to replace, gratis, books that you released having substantial errors. There is no excuse for this. A publisher, self or mainstream, should stand by the product just as in any business. If a title is released and substantial errors of a structural or textual nature are found, when a corrected version is issued there should be an opportunity for buyers of the previous copies to return said copies in exchange for the corrected copy. It's ok to ask for shipping return costs if there will be hundreds of books but don't charge for shipping the corrected book. It's part of publishing and it happens. Remember about EDIT? Libraries and distributors will expect this assurance from you as part of their agreement to purchase and offer your title. Don't mess with the hand that feeds you.

My soapbox is now clean and sparkly.

Till next, Gary

 

Why Libraries Are Generally Not Fans Of Vanity Press Publishers

Librarians look to a variety of sources when it comes to collection development, or, the decision making process in what books to add to the shelves. There are a variety of monthly professional journals, weekly newsletters, daily eMail newsletters, even warm blooded people making recommendations. It's the reviews in sources such as Kirkus Reviews, The Library Journal and others that drive the selection process.

Getting a book reviewed in these resources is vital for an author and a publisher. If a review is luke warm or negative, the author or publisher may very well go back to the mats and rework the book, make improvements according to the review and try again.

What has been known as The Vanity Press, renamed Self-Publishing to spruce up the image, gets a bad smell where Libraries are concerned. Aside from the occasional Children's or Young Adult book, it's tough for a SP book to get reviewed and purchased by libraries. As a result, commercial Distributors also tend to avoid SP books.

That leaves SP authors and publishers on their own, needing to market their own goods on line, through personal appearances, through Amazon, etc. Some are successful, most have a brief run and then lose steam and a very very few make a living at it. Those that do make a living at it typically are picked up by a legitimate publishing house or large distributor.

The POD Self Publishing industry has been changing the paradigm over the past few years, resulting in an influx of author/publishers who believe they have the right to publish and that the world must accept what they offer without question. Self Published authors and publishers can get really touchy about their books. It's this entitled attitude that continues the poor reputation of the "vanity press" in the eyes of Libraries and Distributors.

What about Toolemera Press books? I do facsimiles, or close facsimiles of classic books. The titles already exist in library catalogues. They have MARC codes or are easily catalogued. Although this is by definition a Vanity Press/Self Publisher operation, libraries have had no problem adding titles to their collections either by donations, by recommendation or by collection selection. These books are cataloged as historical facsimile reprints, not self published and that's the difference. In addition, once a Librarian sees the book, they know what it is, how it will fit into the collection and that further titles will be of the same form.

We'll be issuing a handful in hard cover just to fulfill the needs of some libraries who prefer a hard cover, dust jacketed book. Why not case wrapped? Case wrapped hard cover are becoming popular, but they really don't stand up to lots of shelf use. The laminate wears out, the gutters fracture and the library is forced to buy another copy.

Why am I writing about this? Joel and Chris and a bunch of their fans may well think I'm pursuing my "vendetta". Sorry guys, I left my fedora out in the rain. I prefer my Tin Cloth Filson in any event. This has been a subject in the POD community for some time now and in the Library community too. It's also come up during conversations with various people who have asked about how to get a book of theirs into print.

Till next, Gary

19th Century Children's Prize Books

Purely by chance, I've had a string of conversations with people regarding the question of reprinting various titles, of finding various titles as gifts and of providing some reference information for to a public library that was researching nineteenth century apprenticeship for a high school project.

Alert: this is not a bombastic lambasting (never thought of that one before, but it does sound bombastic, doesn't it?) of certain Lost Arts Press titles. It's just that these are the books that some of these various people referenced in their questions to me.

My answers ranged from the politically correct to the historically correct, a situation which gives me hives. Librarians don't like PC, we like our information to be accurate and if it's not accurate, we like to be clear in why we don't know what we don't know about what we don't know.