First, you have to have some impetus for writing a book. Be it your abnormal love for cars that resemble guppies (Citroen D.S., Jaguar XJ220, etc.), or your wife’s prodding that you need to do something with your life other than practicing car racing on Xbox Live while she works, you have to want to put a car book together.
Photo License FLICKR Creative Commons - Jaguar MENA
In my case it was likely a combination of vanity and lack of social skills that made me take up the pen. Actually that’s a lie, I use a keyboard; the only time I take up a pen is to appease my wife’s desire for inscribed cards that border on Hallmark copyright infringements. Lucky for her, I refuse to write Hallmarkisms and always find my own style when signing cards with platitudes. My wife Kellie is lovely though; she sweetly reassures me that I could save time and just buy the Hallmark card almost every holiday/birthday.
But I was discussing vanity and a lack of social skills. Regarding vanity, I love when I tell one of my car stories and the room breaks into a riotous laughing. I can’t recall this ever happening but the concept sounds great. And on the topic of social skills, it’s seldom that I’m in a room of friends. It turns out there just aren’t enough grumpy conservative car nuts in the local area to fill a room as my friends… or maybe there are but everyone is scared someone would die. I don’t know. Long story short, it was while in college that I realized that I might be able to reach someone that would laugh if I wrote my stories down and launched them out into the World Wide Web.
And that’s exactly what I did, blogging about every grand thought I had for a number of years. After many angry friends and family members I learned that it’s not always best to write your thoughts in public record.
After college I finally had a little more money. Gone were the weeks I planned my eating by how many items I could buy on the dollar menu (and I ate every scrap of lettuce that fell out of that Big-n-Tasty)!
So what did I do with my new paycheck? Responsible things like invest in my retirement and purchase a house?
No way. I started playing with motorsports. I bought cars and motorcycles and used them hard (ish, they were still cheap and broke easily). Then I’d blog about my experiences. And less people were pissed off when I wrote about my car experiences. As a matter of fact some people even seemed to enjoy my motorsport blogs. So I kept doing it.
I’ve probably got about 10 years of motorsport blogging under my belt and according to Google my “views” are approaching 200,000. I decided to collect some of the better short stories together and publish something of a “Greatest Hits”. Why? Well, remember the vanity. Plus, if I sold a few maybe it’d pay for some racing parts!
At first blush it sounded awesome. I’d copy and paste my old stories into book format, publish it, and watch the money roll in.
And then I started reading some of my old blogs. Whoo boy. Who was my editor? That’s right, I didn’t have one. Or if I did, it was 11 o’clock at night and she’d kept our children alive all day and couldn’t be considered super alert. They were bad. Just like this one probably is.
Finally I picked some stories I wasn’t completely embarrassed by and started editing them, which in some cases meant largely re-writing and making new mistakes I’ll see in two years.
It took a month to edit the stories to a point where I might not be embarrassed to have friends and family read them.
And then a different problem arose. You see, I can’t use just any picture to illustrate my stories. When I blog I get to use photos that photographers have released to bloggers for use as long as the blogger is not making money. These photos are called “Creative Commons”. But if I try to do anything commercial with the photos, like write a book, they all want me to pay for their photos or they’ll sue me.
Side note - I used to copy and paste any photo from the internet into my blogs and then some creepy lawyer type from the UK threated to sue me with a 5 page email dissertation on why that’s illegal. I’m poor, so in general I think people that make money on copyright pictures on the internet are lame. I should be able to steal anything if it’s on the internet! GO BERNIE SANDERS. Kidding… I think.
I had to delete all the Creative Common photos I’d used in my blog. That meant I had to revert to pictures I’d actually taken for the book. True, the book could have gone without pictures but I’ll be honest, I know my writing isn’t Ivy League, and I figured some photos could give the book a needed boost. Who doesn’t like illustrations in books? But consider the differences in the Creative Commons photo below and my stock photo.
Photo - Flickr Creative Commons License, Photographer: Jim Culp
Mine
Digging through all my old photos finding applicable photos for the stories took at least another couple weeks. Bear in mind, with two very young kiddos and a wife that thankfully still likes to hang out with me for some odd reason, most of this was done in the period from 10 PM until I fell asleep with my face in the keyboard.
Finally, after a month and a half, I had what resembled a book in Microsoft Word format. And I was going to give people their money’s worth. This baby wasn’t short! In 6x9 inch size it came out to 350+ pages.
So I kindly asked Kellie to proof read it. She said “Sure, as soon as I have time”.
I asked a few other people. Same response. You know who has time to read your 350 page manuscript, even if they have good intentions and possibly would if they did have time?
No one. No one has time to read your 350 pages. Not even your grandma. Especially if they’ve already read a few of your blogs and already possess the knowledge that you’re not the next Hemmingway. Only my kids have time and energy to review 350 pages.
By this time you’ve read each story 15 times and you believe it says things it doesn’t. Seriously. When you’ve went through it a number of times your mind starts reading it without reading it. You’ll look at a sentence and read it as perfect because that’s what you want there, when in reality you left out the subject or verb and you misspelled your best friend for life’s name.
So after a couple people have reviewed the first chapter, and you’re sure the other twenty-four are perfect, you’re ready to upload your file to the publisher.
You press upload, wait 20 minutes, and review what the publisher’s program picked up… and it’s completely jacked up. Your chapter titles take up half a page. Your pictures overlap text. Any special fonts you had are now in Chinese. An odd error causes a two page gap between each picture and the following text. Your photos look like they were edited by an impressionist painter.
So now you have to change things in your original Word file and wait 20 minutes, each time, to see if what you changed fixed the corresponding problem at the publisher’s software. And during each 20 minute upload you guard the computer like a Rottweiler, protecting it from family members who might want to use it (or watch Curious George, if you’re my two year old).
Days later you’re down to 6 pages with formatting issues and you’re thinking “Screw it, six out of 350 pages ain’t half bad; let’s publish this bad boy.”
So you press publish. And you’re really really really excited. And then the publisher’s note pops up, “Your book must be reviewed by our team and may be available in 2 to 7 days”.
Days later you get an email, “Your book was successfully reviewed and uploaded. It is now available for purchase but first you must release the ransom we put on it by purchasing a copy”.
Ok, I paraphrased but that is essentially what it says. Hoping the review caught the formatting issues the software was jacking up you excitedly peruse the online preview they sent only to discover that the errors are still there. You imagine the reviewers laughing when they found the screw-ups as they say, “Look what this moron is trying to publish. Definitely not the next Hemingway.”
Impressed that a huge website is hosting your publishing, you’re sure that just by putting the book for sale you’ll sell thousands.
A day goes by and no book sells other than the one you bought. Ok, you realize you’ll have to market. You took marketing in college, no problem.
But you’re not as excited anymore after this cooling period. Which is bad. Because now you’re supposed to hock the stupid thing. And you hate sales pitches.
First you tell your friends and family. Strangely, with the formatting errors and because they might have already read the blogs, you’re a little embarrassed. So you don’t tell them in person, you put it on Facebook. Cool, they’ve been notified. You’ve got five hundred friends, you should have 100 hundred sales in a day or two right?
The next day you have four sales. Two of them yours, and two from your parents.
What’s even more awkward is you’re such a gem socially you haven’t logged into Facebook in 6 months. You’ve got friends requests from people you went to Junior High with and now the only reason you’re logging in isn’t to be friendly, but to sell your stupid book. You’ve become the marketing scum you hate. You might as well go get “Direct TV” tattooed on your butt because that’s the company you keep.
Days later the late adopters have also bought your book. You’re up to 12 sales because there still exists friends and family that are dutiful although they’re wondering what they’re going to do with a 350 page book that’s too ugly to be used as a coaster.
You’re scrambling because you believe your creative genius just hasn’t been realized yet. You need the right audience, car guys. So you go out to every car magazine you can think of and explore the “Contact Us” pages collecting emails. You spam them all with links to your book and a short biography of your illustrious writing career (“…almost 200k ‘views’ on Google!”). You also log onto their forums and tell all their subscribers about your amazing new car book.
And then silence. You sent 40 emails and not one person even sends you a reply. Wait, you did get one! Excitedly you open the reply to find, “Out of Office Reply: Bob will be gone until Tuesday”.
You decide to cruise back to the forums to find out what sort of snarky remarks people have wrote on your posts and follow up. You find all your posts were deleted by forum moderators as spam.
The silence isn’t deafening, but your blood pressure rising might have side effects. You haven’t been so ignored since captains were picking teams for recess basketball in 5thgrade.
You grouse to your coworkers because they’re forced to be in your presence, and at some point ask the question, “How do I sell books”?
One of them immediately responds, “You need something scandalous, put sex in each chapter.”
Your father works with someone who successfully self-published a book. You ask that guy for tips. 1st response, “Well, car guys like scantily clad women. Put scantily clad women in it.”
So there you have it, and that’s where I’m at. If you want to successfully sell car books have scantily clad women in every chapter. I’m a Christian, & father of two girls so there’ll be none of that junk for me. So my book will probably sell 15 copies over the next two years. I don’t think I’ll make the NY Times best sellers list. And that’s my car book publishing experience.
