Reinventing the Wheel

In my last blog I recounted the self-publishing experience of my first cartoon book in 1976. I would now like to jump back to fairly present times, nearly 40 years later to 2014. In January of that year I lost my job along with 20 other people where I was employed. No problem, I thought, I will get another job after I take a small break from it all. I had 4 months severance pay, so things were good. I had been writing some science fiction novels in my spare time since 2008 and figured that this was the time to self-publish one. Now please understand that the last time I had self-published anything was back in 1985, so I figured that things had probably changed a little since then. Yeah, right.

Back in those early, heady days of self-publishing, we just did it, no copyrights, ISBN numbers, permissions or worries about making money or anything else, just get the material out in print and move on to the next thing. These days now, everything is about making money off the writers. Here is a little bit of statistics that I looked up for this blog. “The number of self-published books topped the 1 million mark for the first time in 2017, according to Bowker’s annual report on the number of ISBNs that were issued to self-published authors. The total number of ISBNs issued last year rose 28% over 2016, to 1,009,188.” Are you kidding me? Wow. This is a very big business thing now, not just basement copiers printing out fanzines, but everyone and their dog doing books. What was I thinking? You can drown out there in that sea of books if you aren’t careful. There is every service imaginable to writers and self-publishers now, editing, evaluations, formatting, ISBNs, cover designers, printing, e-processing, marketing, bookstore placement and tons of companies that will do it all for you for a small fee. Yeah right.

I settled on Amazon KDP for self-publishing, easy, cheap and mostly do-it-yourself. A quick edit, formatting, and my own cover design, (being an artist is a good thing sometimes). Bang, right there on the great Amazon itself, buy my book, I will retire now. Me and a million other self-publishers. Yeah right.

So, let’s do some more books, make lots of money. The cartoon books were my first experiences in self-publishing and my first love. So I will just re-release my cartoon books in electronic fashion. Yeah, right. Unhappily, times have really, really changed. That space ship, the Enterprise, that I used in my first books, no, no, no. Very copyrighted and jealously guarded against pipsqueaks like me, can’t use that. The monolith itself? movie copyright again. Reminding the people in power that I did several books in times past using their legally protected icons, a very, very bad idea. So what’s a poor artist like me to do now?

(One of the problems with being an artist is that you can design your own book covers. But you can also get carried away if you are not careful. I kept trying to decide on something that would work, but couldn’t decide. But finally, my own art work is always the best way to go.)

[image error]