Self publishing or death

by Lawrence Montaigne
(Henderson, Nevada)

A Vulcan Odyssey

I belong to a writer's group called Anthem Authors here in Henderson, Nevada. I have been keeping a journal for some twenty years and when I joined the Anthem group I was inspired to turn some of my journal into short weekly vignettes to entertain the members. One thing led to another and each week a number of the writers were very encouraging about my work and kept egging me on to turn the essays into an autobiography. Over a period of a couple of years I completed A STATE OF PISSED. But some of the writers thought the title was a bit much and encouraged me to tone it down to A VULCAN ODYSSEY. I had no intentions of seeking out an agent to get the book published because, as an actor for some forty-five years, I knew how demeaning agency hunting was. But over the past few years I have been involved with Star Trek conventions, having created two memorable roles in the original series. I had visions of taking the book with me to conventions to up my visibility.

One of the members of Anthem Authors had successfully self-published a book through BookSurge and he turned me on to that company. After corresponding with one of the BookSurge execs, I decided to self-publish. At first it was a thrilling experience to see my words and photographs reproduced between two covers. But there were flaws that had to be worked out. The cover of the book was not right. I was using a reproduction of a painting an artist did of me along with two of the characters I created in the Star Trek series. The painting is vivid and almost lifelike but the reproduction on the cover had streaks of color and blotches of empty spots where the color was totally absent. When I called it to the attention of the account exec she promised to rectify the problem. It was as if there was no quality control at all with this company and since I was paying hard cash (over five thousand dollars) I wanted no less than perfect. Then, some of the photos inside the book were either washed out or the printing from the page on the back side had bled through. It took months for the company to give me an acceptable author's copy of the book. And when I thought that all the problems had been solved, I ordered two hundred of the thousand books I had originally paid for. Out of the two hundred books, I returned fifty nine back to the company as they were unsaleable. This process has been going on for a year, me placing an order for books and having to return a number of them to the company as unacceptable.

I am in my second printing, having made some changes in the text and adding a chapter at the end. Somewhere along the way, BookSurge has acquired another printer and now the cover is so dark and foreboding that it almost looks like a comic book rendition. I am stuck with it and still have five hundred books remaining in my contract. This has been a long, hard lesson. If I had to do it all over again, self publish or death, I think I'd choose the latter.

Visit Lawrence's site, Montaigne's web.