My Self-Publishing Odyssey

by Barbara Hudgins
(Basking Ridge, NJ)

I started in self-publishing back in the 1980s, before print-in-demand was a gleam in the inventor's eye and before writers could e-mail whole manuscripts to editors or printers. In fact, my first editions of New Jersey Day Trips were typeset in something called mechanicals before they were sent to the printer.

New Jersey Day Trips was born because as a mother of two young children I found the guidebooks to New Jersey to be severely lacking. I began by writing a column called Trips & Treks for a local newspaper. As I remember I got a big $15 per column. (Not bad considering that many travel e-zines on the web today pay absolutely nothing!) Having the newspaper behind me made it easier for me to get into museums, amusement parks and other attractions.

The printing of my first book was for 2000 copies and it took me two years to sell them through. I knew nothing about self-publishing. A friend did the book design and we used a local printer. The cover wasn't laminated and smudged easily. Even so, several bookstores took it because there was little around for New Jersey day trippers.

By the 5th edition I had a more professional-looking book and was selling a minimum of 5000 copies a year. Because the price was low, I wasn't making that much money. Once I got a distributor who took 55% I had to raise my price. But by this time I was selling about 14,000 copies an edition. (I came out with a new edition about every 2 ½ years.)

By the year 2000, my kids were out of college, I was divorced, and arthritis had set in my fingers and my knees. Walking was no longer a pleasure. Bookstores were closing right and left. And the wholesaler who had gotten my books into the B&N and Borders stores was showing signs of imminent collapse. The 9th edition of New Jersey Day Trips was the last one I self-published. I contacted Rutgers University Press which has a large NJ interest section, and offered them the book.

Since I could no longer get to all the places I wanted, I took on a co-author, a man I had met in local writing group, for the 10th edition. He had been a magazine editor, photographer and sometime writer. Together, we signed a contract with Rutgers. They gave me a very small amount for the rights, and my co-author and I shared the royalty. We did get an advance, but the royalties from university and small presses tend to be on the frugal side. In fact, getting a percentage of the net rather than of the retail price is becoming more and more the norm for many publishers.

Rutgers University Press was able to get me book-signing slots in many B&N and other bookstores, but I discovered that driving all over the state to sell a few copies of the book was hardly worth the price of gas considering the small royalty I received. I had made much more money self-publishing my book than as the author of a traditionally published book. The only thing I saved on was the initial investment--which for an offset printed book, including cover and interior design and a printing of about 6000 copies, had run me about $12,000.

Skip to 2005. I decide to write a book about writing a travel guide. Actually, Crafting the Travel Guidebook covers destination and regional guidebooks, outdoor and recreation guides, travel memoirs and how-to-do-it books. The motivation for writing it? First of all, there are several good books on travel writing but they all concentrate on writing articles. Mine concentrates on the book market. Secondly, during an encounter with plagiarism in the 1990s, I had to deconstruct every guidebook on NJ for my lawyer to prove that the author for a well-known publisher had taken my words almost verbatim. This author had also plagiarized other books. I spent hours analyzing the various opening paragraphs and the construction of entries in his book and compared them with others. The result was a fascinating. Different writers had approached the same subject in so many different ways.

Also, in working with a co-author, I found we had several differences of opinion. For one thing, although he was careful about details and liked history, my co-author did not go in for colorful descriptions. I mentioned this to him, and he answered, "Everybody knows the sea is blue--why bother?"

In the Travel Writing 101 chapter of my book, I list the following:

*Color: Is the sea blue, azure, gray, turquoise, green with algae or almost as brown as the sand?
*Light: Whether it's the neon lights of a casino, or the morning light on desert sand, light plays a part in the physical description of things.

I go on to list smell, taste and touch as other senses that should be evoked in travel writing. My co-author was the inspiration for this! This chapter turned out to be the most popular with reviewers and readers alike, although many people were impressed with the sections on publishing, self-publishing and subsidy publishing since they didn't know the difference.

In 2007, I published Crafting the Travel Guidebook as a Print-on-Demand book using Lightning Source as the printer. I paid someone to create the cover and design the interior, although I had to send the proofs back a few times to get what I wanted. I still had some ISBN numbers left over in my Woodmont Press account so I only had to add a new 978 prefix to a number I still owned. (Believe it or not, ISBN numbers were free when I first secured them, and I had the option of getting 100 at the time. I'm still kicking myself for taking only ten!)

Since it is a niche book, I have not tried to place it in bookstores, although I think a few travel bookstores might be interested. I am selling primarily through the Internet. The book is available at Amazon, bn.com, buy.com, and all other places where the retailer can buy it from Lightning Source.

I do not have a Paypal buy direct button yet but I intend to get one up on my www.Woodmontpress.com site. I am also planning to take certain sections of the book that would be of interest to a wider audience than just travel writers and sell them as e-books from my site. These include the chapters on non-fiction structure and the list of publishers (which I plan to widen). Many friends who have read the book and several reviewers mention how much the book encompasses and how much knowledge I have of the whole field of publishing. I'm going to try to present that knowledge in bite-size packages in the future. In the meantime, Crafting the Travel Guidebook is the perfect gift for the person who dreams of turning his travel lore into prose.

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