Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
(Mwah ha ha. Silver Bullet just gave me access to their submission engine. Now I can update this thing any time I want. And edit stuff. Be afraid).
If you've ever dealt with a gatekeeper, in any industry, you know that you simply need to find ways to go around the gatekeeper. It works the way censorship is treated by computers -- as damage.
Networked my brains (what I have of them) right out. Retailers and publishers were very interested in my experiences with Booksurge which has proven to be the best print-on-demand company for the buck.
But then I got to thinking about Lulu. Here's how they stack up against Booksurge:
Booksurge has machines in the USA, the Netherlands, and Australia. Lulu is putting in a machine in Spain. Booksurge has points on them there, but they're catching up.
Lulu has FREE upload and a much more hands-on method of manipulating files, so once you get your hard-copy you can slap yourself in the head at all the typos, fix the files and re-load 'em.
I've been carrying samples around from both companies for about five years, and they both have good, tough bindings. But after about a month, Booksurge's intense-color covers start to flake, and they look like they've got dandruff and they go all curly and bendy; Lulu's pigments stand up and their cover stock stays as neat as being thrown into suitcases will allow.
Booksurge is owned by Amazon, so the moment you load a book, it's processed for Amazon, too. You pay $35.00 (Amurkin) to Lulu to get one of their ISBN numbers -- officially, at least, they're the publisher, which is how they get you around that silly Ingrim 10-book limit (we'll be coming to that) -- and get loaded to The Big Woman.
They allow your customers to buy books directly at lower rates than you can get through the retailer sites. You need to push trade yourself from your blogs and websites and forums and general net buzz.
I'll be putting together all the Desert Peach and Stinz books into full collections this year, and they will be available through both Lulu and Amazon.com, and, if it ever gets its act together, through Baker and Taylor.
B&T have a very sloppy order tracking system, and their shortage report office works faster than their accounting offices. Because they order one book at a time, small presses -- in order to make a little profit and not end up in the red -- are forced to send them books by U.S. Postal Service media or bound printed matter rates, with an additional small charge for certified mail. The shortage office reports these books as missing before they come in, and then the accounts offices think that the small press has not delivered the book. At this point I've denied Baker and Taylor any access to any of my books except through Booksurgedirect, which is the wholesale site for Booksurge. Any distributor can access this site. Any retailer, too. And retailers can pick up much nicer discounts by going through Booksurgedirect.
Libraries normally order their books through small presses, but because of Baker and Taylor's unwieldy and poorly-organized order and tracking systems, more and more libraries are starting to order books from small publishers through Amazon.
Ah, Amazon. Hundreds of orders. Never a one lost. You send them books, and twice a month they drop the dollars into your accounts. Simply a dream system -- and all they need to track your books is a shipping number, written on the package, and enclosed in a packing slip. That's all. Amazon is taking Baker and Taylor's small press business away from them, because B&T will not take the trouble to rework their order system. Goodness gracious (and I use the Victorian language consciously, because B&T is smack in the high collar era) -- B&T still orders by sending paper orders through the mail! They used to send orders by fax, until even that technology went the way of the old teletype machine. I imagine they'd send orders by carrier pigeon or stagecoach if they could get away with it.
Then there's Ingrim. Silly Ingram. "We require ten different books from any given publisher." What if that book had been Ulysses? I wrote Ingrim a polite but pointed letter, saying that, while everybody else will have my books, Ingrim will not. Because I don't want to bother with another gatekeeper. Does it make Ingrim look more powerful not to be able to get books? Or just on the wrong side of the gate?
And now we come to Diamond.
Diamond has been very cooperative in an attempt to make the POD option work. I can't give details, but both Diamond and Booksurge tried to work with each other to make the two systems link up. They're not there, yet, but they made a good effort. I think that Diamond can see the future, and while it's having as hard a time as all the rest of us trying to stay afloat, it's at least willing to take out its old brass ship's telescope and see what that thing on the horizon is (the recent news is that Diamond is paddling like hell and stripping for action!).
In the long run, everyone will find ways to get around the gate-keeper. Then the only ones left abandoned behind the gate -- will be the gatekeepers themselves.
PS. It's the next week. Just got back from Norwescon, the big west-coast (USA) sci-fi convention. A surprising thing happened. Many of the writers in sci/fi write work for hire for recognized series, especially those with movie connections, ie., Star Trek, etc. I was describing the Writer-Booksurge-Retailer-Customer link (Writer - Printer - Retailer -Customer) and when I began to talk about how, if a movie company wanted to save even more money, it only had to upload (cheaply) a full book pdf file to Booksurge, and then flog the book through Amazon. Their eyes lit up before I could even get to this sentence:
"NO PUBLISHER!?"
It hit them that the publisher -- another money-sucker -- can be completely cut out of the chain. A couple of them then said, "But what about editors?"
"Easy," I said. "We hire the editors. They have to compete. Only those that understand NEVER to change the author's voice will be able to compete. The frustrated writers who force everybody in a company to have an identical voice will be out of work."
Then it hit me. "What's WRONG with me? To hell with paying editors! Let's edit and pay EACH OTHER for editing! We're writers -- we'd never dare mess with another writer's voice. We'd just check continuity, research and typos!"
"Genius!!"
Another writer gasped: "And we're already doing most of our agent work!"
"Let's fire our agents!"
One really nice agent whimpered, "But I'M an agent...."
"Not YOU. You're a GOOD agent. We'll Keep YOU."
We can now seize the means of production. Carpe artificium, awready! _____________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: last time I was promoting Dimestore Productions.
It's an APA, or forum-run fan site, and the entire model is based on American Idol. It's okay for distributing a few books, if you don't mind putting up product without links back to your own site. You'd do best to do it yourself with Regent Publishing or Morgan.
Attempting to do business with them has led to major holdups with three books in a row. I wouldn't so much mind except the guy didn't keep me informed as the process piddled around while he found and lost short-run printers and all of a sudden decided he wasn't a publisher any more, just a distributor. Look, people, you just have to TELL me. And don't claim you never got my emails when I have your returned email in my discard bin! A dumb trick like that is what gets the White House into trouble (I send the Prez all my PolList email so they can never claim they never saw it; it's in their puters!).
Working with these wanna-be co-ops is kind of like working with Adam Post. I keep running into these guys. Wait. Maybe this IS Adam Post, with a changed name?
If you are serious about moving product, you need to go through Amazon.com, Booksurge.com, Lulu.com and Diamond.
