My Adventure in Self-Publishing

The Red Sox Reader, first edition
Thirty years ago, my team, The Boston Red Sox, lost a World Series in the most heart crushing way imaginable, and most of what is now commonly known as Red Sox Nation fell into a state of great, unyielding depression. I, however, taking a cue from the greeting card industry, took this box of lemons fate and the New York Mets had dealt me and whipped it up into as fine and frothy a pitcher of lemonade as you’d ever hope to swallow.  As happened, shortly after the debacle in Shea Stadium, I opened the feature section of the LA Times and read an article about one Dan Poynter of Santa Barbara who had become somewhat of a pioneer in the just newly re-borning self-publishing industry. Poynter, the Times reported, had produced a remarkable publishing success with his homemade book on hang gliding, which he had not been able to sell to a mainstream publisher.  He went on to sell 125,000 copies of that book and followed it up with 21 other books. The focus of the Times article was on Poynter’s latest book, The Self-Publishing Manual, which was a distillation of all he had learned as a self-publisher. It was not just a nuts and bolts book that guided me every step of my adventure, but was inspirational as well. Poynter was near evangelical about the personal empowerment that came with publishing your own book.
Long ago, self-publishing was a reputable undertaking…no less august a literary figure than Mark Twain self published Huckleberry Finn.Over time, so-called vanity presses emerged to besmirch the reputation of self-published books by blatantly exploiting the fantasies of would-be authors for their own profit. With the help of enormous advances in technology, self-publishing has slowly been building up a reputation for offering writers the same opportunity to bet on themselves as inventors, entrepreneurs, and adventurers of all kinds have always had. If you believe in yourself, you can do it yourself.
When I read about Dan Poynter, I was as much caught up in that spirit as I was in the idea of publishing a book on the Red Sox. In truth, the Red Sox book only came about because it met so many of the requirements Poynter had laid out for a successful self-publishing venture. It would have a clearly identifiable niche audience; it would provide a clear marketing path; and it would be a subject that spoke to both my passion and expertise. I had been collecting newspaper and magazine articles on the Red Sox since I was 12-years old.  First in collection that would lead to
The Red Sox ReaderThe Sox collapse in the 1986 World Series suddenly provided me with a windfall for my collection when The Boston Globe invited some notable writers to offer their reflections on their Red Sox loyalty, among them John Updike, Stephen King, Geoffrey Wolff, David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Charlie Pierce. (The conceit of the book, expressed in the most quoted line from the introduction, was that while the Yankees may have had the better players, the Red Sox always had the better writers.) That bounty from the Globe along with the works I had stored away in my filing cabinet instantly created a book all by itself. The niche audience was easily identifiable of course--Red Sox fans, and some fellow entrepreneurs who had launched The Fan, a periodical devoted to the Sox, gave me a marketing path by selling me their mailing list.
The two other ingredients necessary to the enterprise were money and the tools of production.  The first was graciously and enthusiastically answered by my in-laws, Bill and Betty Woodsum, who invested $10,000 in Ventura Arts, the name I gave my new publishing company. The second would be answered by PageMaker, the revolutionary new software designed especially for desktop publishing. PageMaker was both my deliverance and the bane of my existence. I was new to computing as it was, and found myself well over my head in trying to use PageMaker. It definitely helped me get the book done, but between my technical difficulties using it and the sketchily scanned copies of the articles, the first edition of the book that I would title The Red Sox Reader: 30 Years of Musings on Baseball’s Most Amusing Team, (excerpt) was not exactly an example of elegant book craft.  
Nonetheless, it sold right out of the chute. Dan Poynter had promised unimagined joy upon going to the P.O. box each day and collecting bundles of book orders accompanied by checks, and he was right. It was a giddy experience that would not even be matched when the book got picked up by big time publisher Houghton Mifflin and those small, individual orders would be replaced by quarterly royalty checks. The Houghton Mifflin partnership was not even part of my plan at the outset, although it is now pretty common among independent authors to hope to parlay a self-published book into a regular book deal. Mine came about purely by virtue of Lorna’s preternatural selling ability. We took the Ventura Arts edition to the American Booksellers Association convention in San Francisco and...this at a time when you could do such a thing...Lorna approached established publishers at their booths and pitched the book to them. The result was a 4-book deal to include follow-up books on the Dodgers, Yankees and Cubs.
It was more than that, of course…the kind of glamour things a self-publishing author can only dream and scheme about…book tours and signings, newspaper and radio interviews, and a New England boy’s ultimate dream come true…a night as Houghton Mifflin’s guest of honor in their Fenway Park luxury suite.  
And before all that there were the personal negotiations with the anthologized writers for the rights to use their works. I cherish my written correspondence with the astonishingly eager Updike, who saw publication of his classic "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" in The Red Sox Reader as a chance to get his precious footnotes for the piece finally published somewhere (still only available in The Red Sox Reader!). I’m pleased to recall that I was able to maintain my cool through an extended phone back and forth with the great Halberstam. And though my editorial sense told me Stephen King’s piece was really the weakest of the collection, my publisher’s instincts told me to include it anyway…and was handsomely rewarded for that when Stephen King fan clubs, who couldn’t care less about the Red Sox, promoted the hell out of it…pushing sales, if not exactly to the horror master’s level, to pretty fantastic self-publishing numbers. 
After the 2004 season, which ended the Sox nearly century-long championship drought, Houghton Mifflin asked if I wanted to go back to the well to duplicate that success. I chose not to for a variety of reasons, both commercial and artistic. Perhaps, too, I wanted to save myself from being haunted by my closing words in the introduction of the revised edition in 1990 where I wrote: "Red Sox teams from here on out, of course, are now saddled with a dual burden. They either have to win it all, or they have to find a way to lose more dramatically, more tragically, more unbelievably than their predecessors. Frankly, as these pages reveal, winning it all would be a whole lot easier." Of course it wasn't.   
The downside in all this? In the end I came away with a touch of survivor’s guilt. Although the mass of my fellow citizens in Red Sox Nation came out of 1986 badly bloodied and beaten and would stay that way until the miracle cure of 2004, I pretty much walked away from the disaster with my champagne flute still filled to the brim. So today, 30 years later, I lift it in a toast to Dan Poynter, Bill & Betty, Lorna (always and ever), The Red Sox Reader, and self-publishers everywhere.