SUBMISSIONS (Update)

Thank you to everyone who submitted in our last round! Our new process—where we treat submissions as a product with a limited inventory—has generally worked well, and has made things much more manageable on our end while hopefully also helping most authors get a quicker answer. We are still sorting through the free submissions from our last round—it always takes longer than expected—and don’t yet know when we’ll do anouther round. We will still be offering paid submissions/critiques on a VERY limited basis (and without any announcement), so feel free to check out the store page if you’re interested. (And, of course, we have some fantastic new titles this fall! So you could, you know, check those out as well.)

Submissions

The cat is out of the bag! (OK, we let it out, because we don’t believe in cruelty to animals, but still…) We are BACK OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS!

We’re handling things a little differently than we used to. Rather than an open form, we’re making the free submission a product on our site. It’s waaaaaay down on the bottom, which should at least give you a chance to peruse our wares and make sure you’d want to be associated with us before trying to become one of us. (Querying is like dating—you don’t want to be so desperate for someone to like you that you don’t think about whether or not YOU like THEM.)

A couple plusses about the new process—it will help us manage submission volume, because we can limit the “inventory” of submissions; we can pause and unpause the process depending on how many are coming in. (And unfortunately we do have to limit submissions; when we were open full-time, we were getting as many submissions in a week as we could publish in a year.) It will also help us track submissions a little better. You will have to put in your physical address; that’s just how the product page works.

We’ve also set up an option for a paid submission and critique. We’ve been doing paid critiques for other organizations for years; people do really seem to enjoy and appreciate the experience. It’s a premium luxury service; you will get the advantage of guaranteed feedback within a quick timeframe. (And if we do decide to launch your book, we’ll refund the fee once we sign a contract.) Supplies for this will be very limited while we get our feet wet, so please check it out soon if you’re interested.

If you are going for the free submission—or heck, if you’re considering the paid submission—we do strongly encourage you to pick up a book as well. We’d like to keep the process free, but it does help both of us if you’re willing to get to know us while we’re getting to know you.

Thanks for all your support as we work to build and grow our company!

Free submissions are available here. (Inventory permitting.)

Paid submisisons are available here.

Happy Belated Father's Day

I had a full and wonderful Father’s Day weekend—my wife bought me some nice collared shirts, and my kids gave me a t-shirt with a Rubik’s Cube on it that (God willing) I’m planning to wear for an upcoming photography session for a secret special thing. My kids know I love Rubik’s Cubes; I learned to solve them late in life, and I’m no speed demon, but the mere fact that I can spin the parts in the right direction to turn chaos into order—well, it gives me hope of doing the same in my writing, and my life. (There are few better feelings than seeing the puzzle suddenly make sense, and look the way it’s supposed to look; with the books I’m proudest of writing—Alone on the Moon and Island of Clouds and, to a slightly lesser extent, Resistance and Public Loneliness—I’ve felt that satisfaction, and so too with the books I’m proudest of publishing.)

So I had some wonderful family time. BUT, as Marge Simpson says, “Part of spending time together as a family is spending time apart, as individuals.” Billy Lombardo and/or Amy Danzer had invited me (and several other people) to the Green Mill’s Poetry Slam, held on Sundays, right in the heart of prime Father’s Day time. It was a Facebook invite, so it would have been the easiest thing to dodge, and indeed I thought until the very day of that I’d be ignoring it completely, BUT I did want to see both of them, AND I hadn’t read live poetry in quite some time.

And it was fantastic. I was delighted to see Billy and Amy, and they felt the same. (Or feigned it well!) The jazz band bookending and backing up the poetry was alive like Greek fire; the Green Mill was working its magic, which it seems to contain in an inexhaustible reservoir. And Mark Smith called me up early on, and I got to read my favorite fucked-up Father’s Day poem, a poem I wrote almost a decade ago about what was possibly one of the most awkward conversations in human history. I think it went over well as a live reading, and I have no idea how well it will go over as a blog post, but I felt the need to share:

WHAT ISAAC SAID COMING BACK FROM THE MOUNTAIN

Dad, I’m a little concerned

You seem to have a thing for knives!

I know we’ve been provided for

All our lives, Mom and I

We’ve had money, tents and cattle

Plus you slew our foes in battle

You’re a rich man, I shouldn’t bitch

But I’m gonna prattle on for a bit

Why? I’m rattled!

After that shit that just went down

Up on the mountaintop

Stop!

You were ready to burn me!

You bound me up!

I couldn’t speak!

Now it’s my turn, see?

Maybe it was bound to be this way

I wasn’t too sure about Yahweh

Yes, I ignored the Lord your God

But can you blame me?

It seemed odd

All this business with the foreskins

It seemed stranger than the fiction

I thought God was

A lotta buzz about it in our household

I’ve heard about it since I could hear

It happened to me so long ago

You were cutting things before that, though

It’s a bit of an addiction

The wealthy must love weapons

I guess that’s an axiom

Or maybe a rule of thumb

I get it

You get worried

You want to keep people from taking easily

What you worked hard for

You’ve probably had that knife all your life

Still I can’t ignore what else you used it for

I think about it queasily

Did your knife speak to you?

Fill your head with images of what it could do?

If not, what kind of fucked-up vision did God give you?

And how did you tell it to your slaves

Without sounding raving mad, Dad?

I imagine how it all went down

Circumcision

Hopefully with precision

Intense, in tents

Did you pay someone

To hold everyone down?

Or tie them up?

Yup, I bet that was it

Shit

I can’t imagine it

What would I do if someone like you told me I had to do that?

I’d head out

Say “Your loss, boss”

Try to outrun the screams

It seems I can’t begin to comprehend it

Even though it seems you were convinced

It was a great advance in personal hygiene

A permanent covenant cemented

Demented, I say!

But you got everyone to do it your way

(I say there are two types of people in the world: the bleeders and the leaders)

Then again you did it to yourself, too

That helps when you want people to do

Something extreme

And maybe it’s not quite as bad

As this Baal thing, it’s pretty popular

It appalls me

And you, too, want to abolish it

Convert his followers

You say they’re into human sacrifice?

Well, that’s not very nice

Why would a god want that?

Maybe if there were a few of them

And they had to vie for supremacy

One would get hungry

And want to be fed with our dead

But that’s kind of speculatory

(I’m babbling, you see!)

What if there were two gods?

One of love who came before

Then one of war

Who hated creation

A god of negation

Who needed to be sated with gore

Placated with a firstborn so he wouldn’t want more

A tax of sorts

Paid in blood

Tribute to an angry god

You say you abhorred that example

But you figured God wanted a sample

Of that level of devotion

Not a whole life

Just the tip!

Taken off by your knife

You act like this wasn’t your choice

Are you some kind of freak?

Did you really hear a voice?

Was it near?

Did he speak?

Was what he said

Loud enough for you to turn your head?

(How can we know what’s real

For someone else

What they see and hear and feel?)

I know you always tell me

About how mom was supposed to be

Far too old to have a baby

You thought God did that, definitely

But why can’t you see

That that’s less important to me

Than the fact that you cut off part of my body

Without consulting me?

(Yeah, I’m still a little angry.)

I guess my life’s a fact of life to me

I take it for granted, obviously

Whereas you figure it happened miraculously

So that means the same voice can tell you to take it from me

You thought God could take what God had wrought

You led me to this place

With a silent stony face

I trusted you!

We carried wood and fire

Up this hill

Trying to get higher

(Like God needed to see us better)

But when I asked you why

We hadn’t brought anything to kill

You wouldn’t look me in the eye!

That’s when I started feeling ill

You said I should chill

The Lord will provide a sacrifice

But you’d brought cord

I tried to get away

You tackled me, tied me up

For the first time ever, I prayed

Yes, I became a believer today!

Right then

Under the knife’s gleam

When I saw the crazy in your eyes

Turn to calm

It seemed

You saw another prize for God

A ram caught in a thicket

You laughed

You said it all was a trick, a way

For God to know you were true

You figure God was jealous of Baal?

And wanted you to prove you’d be willing to do it all?

Or give up what you most wanted?

Screw you!

That’s not a God I’d look up to

Still I’m haunted, I do think you heard

From someone who wasn’t you

All of the sudden you were talking

About how good is the Lord?

It was absurd

Something happened to turn your heart

And now we’re walking home

Awk-ward!

But it’s a start

I guess

I can’t expect anything less crazy

From the man who invented the bris

Still—hey, don’t get pissed!

I think I better tell mom about this

ANYWAY, whether you are one, or you just have one—happy belated Father’s Day, folks.

SMOL FAIR

SMOL FAIR SALES ARE UP!

We’re thrilled to offer FREE US SHIPPING for orders of $20 or more—just head over to the Where to Buy page and enter SMOLSHIP at checkout! (Link for the lazy. Which is all of us at this point, right?)

And to make it more worthwhile, we have several titles on sale for $10! Stuart Ross’s Jenny in Corona, Christine Sneed’s The Virginity of Famous Men (a Booklist Editor’s Choice!), Billy Lombardo’s Morning Will Come, Vojislav Pejovic’s American Sfumato, Alice Kaltman’s Staggerwing, and Sally Poppe’s Moxie.

Also, did we mention Meiselman by Avner Landes is NOW ON SALE? (Editor’s Note: No, we did not. You already knew that. You are me.)

ANYWAY, yes, we’re all nostalgic for AWP, and going places and seeing people in general…on the plus side, you can browse our offerings without making awkward eye contact…YAY!

DISTRIBUTION AND VALIDATION

OK, so the Tortoise Books blog has been taking a backseat lately to pretty much everything else. Jerry (who’s writing this but will be avoiding the first-person singular) tends to prioritize writing for money over writing for attention or exposure or whatever. So he’s been busy finishing his latest book, and editing other forthcoming Tortoise books, and the blog’s been relegated to the farthest-back bench seat in the multi-passenger van that contains his various writing personas. But every so often, his inner blogger needs a turn in the driver’s seat, especially when there are announcements that seem too significant for the blogger’s rowdy and immature younger brother, the tweeter. Such as this one: Tortoise Books is now officially set up on our new distributor, Publishers Group West!

Slow and steady wins in the end—even in publishing. Over the past eight years, we’ve worked to build a reputation for quality and (one hopes) fair dealing as well. We believe we’re putting out books as good as any on the market, and treating the people who created those books with dignity and respect. We’ve worked hard to get those books in front of readers; in the last P.C. (pre-COVID) year, we sold books at a dizzying away of fairs and festivals, as well as doing several large and lucrative (and labor-intensive) online presales and bookstore events.

But hard work alone isn’t enough—and in this business it’s all too easy to work hard, rather than smart. It’s a lot of work to lug books to festivals and promote pop-up fairs and what-not; sometimes that work pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t. (Granted, that’s actually part of the charm of small-press publishing—it’s a gamble, and you never know whether any particular book launch or pop-up festival or online presale will pay off. A few years back, Jerry was headed to a bookstore event and was a little worried about turnout; he called a friend for advice, and heard the following: “If you won every time you sat down at the table, you’d probably get bored.” The event ended up being sparsely attended, but the perspective helped.) We turned a small profit for 2019, the first time we’ve done so for a full calendar year; the big summer festivals helped, as did events like Northwestern University’s Summer Writers’ Conference and the CWA’s Let’s Just Write! Conference where we got to sell books to authors in the Chicago writing community.

Needless to say, 2020 has been different—but even if it hadn’t been, it was clear after last year that festivals and online sales alone would never turn this into a full-time business. (“You tend to win the game you’re playing,” someone else told Jerry last year, and that stuck with him; winning the festival game might be fun, but takes a lot of time and energy, so much so that it’s often distracted us from the bigger and more lucrative games.) And while we’re certainly looking forward to selling books face-to-face at festivals once all this is over, the bigger game is the regular book retail market. It’s a big enough game, in fact, that you need to be part of a team.

Like it or not, we can’t do everything, nor can our success ever be completely dependent on the fruits of our own labors; if we want to make money, other people have to make money, too. (There are perhaps fewer more pernicious myths than the American one of individual accomplishment, or the Ayn Randian submyth that it must happen through selfishness; our success is not only dependent upon our authors and their readers, but also on our suppliers and booksellers as well. Our independent bookstore friends need to make money, the book printers need to make money; like it or not, even Amazon needs to make money. And each offers something the others don’t, so it is in fact possible to support them all.) And yet we can’t build individual relationships with every independent bookstore on our own; while we’ve worked hard to get our books in Chicagoland indie bookstores, there are stores we’ve never been to in the area, to say nothing of the ones in the rest of the country; even going to bookseller’s conventions, one can only do so much.

The same goes for the online marketplace. IngramSpark and Amazon’s KDP platform have allowed us to sell books globally without having those bookstore relationships everywhere. We’ve sold books in every one of Amazon’s sales regions, and while the numbers are miniscule, it’s something that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago. Discoverability is a huge problem, though; everyone’s drowning in an ocean of content. (“Infinite content,” as the Arcade Fire put it, in a memorable phrase from an unmemorable album.) We’ve made a lot of connections on Twitter, but every author on Twitter is lowkey (or highkey) hawking their book, and since we sometimes buy those books and then don’t get around to reading them, we can only assume the same is happening on the other end. Even online book promo tools can only do so much; while we scored a BookBub promo deal for Joe Peterson’s Gunmetal Blue and sold more books in one day than we’ve sold in any other month, the deal was expensive and didn’t quite pay for itself. We got to see our KDP sales bar chart get really big, and then get really small again; we were hoping it would be some kind of permanent breakthrough, but our monthly sales numbers soon dropped back down to where they were. We’re grateful for the bump in sales and the new readers, but we simply couldn’t afford to grow sales for every title that way. It was exciting but not sustainable; we needed to do something else.

Enter PGW. There are a few distributors out there that we thought about approaching, but the ones in the Ingram Content Group were highest on our list; they have a pretty wide behind-the-scenes reach in bookstores. We have a certain amount of validation, which is important in this business. (Everyone needs to get validated at some level; everyone needs someone else to say, “This is worth checking out.” Books need blurbists, because blurbs are like eyebrows; you don’t always notice them when they’re there, but when they’re gone, things look weird. And publishers need distributors, because otherwise there’s not much separating us from any of the innumerable POD outfits that have sprung up around the globe. We’ve gotten some review attention from trade magazines and newspapers, but not nearly as much as we’d like; now that we have a distributor, we will, one hopes, end up getting a little more.)

More importantly, we’re working with a team. So rather than having to contact bookstores individually and beg them to stock our books, we can get them in front of PGW’s sales reps and in their catalogs, and have their sales reps hawking our books. And while the onboarding process was somewhat slow and deliberate (perhaps necessary, for both sides), the setup process has been pretty crisp and efficient. Before we signed an agreement, we had to tap our business development person on the shoulder (metaphorically and electronically) every so often to move the process along; now that everything’s signed, we have a dedicated account representative, and several sharp employees working behind the scenes to help us set up our titles, flesh out the metadata, and get all of our information flowing into every channel of the sales pipeline. Oftentimes now they’re tapping us on the shoulder, waiting for us to complete some task in the onboarding process, and when we do have questions or issues (figuring out how to get digital ARCs, making sure our name is listed on the overall list of presses, etc.), they’re addressed promptly and efficiently.

What kinds of sales will this lead to? It’s impossible to say, in the COVID-weakened world. But the revenue numbers PGW provided during the intake process that suggested we’d be able to grow our top-line revenues a fair amount, and wholesale sales for our recent fall titles suggest that may be happening. We are pitching our spring 2021 titles (Meiselman, The Pueblos, and Infinite Blues) to their sales reps this week; these will be the first books to get the full front-to-back full-cycle sales treatment. And if we can sell more books and keep costs more or less what they have been, we’ll be turning a much more decent profit. All of this is still a gamble, but it’s a fun gamble, and now we’ve got a seat at a bigger table. If we can make smart enough bets to stay there indefinitely, we’ll call that a win.

Oh! Bookstore folks, ordering information is as follows:

Distributed by Publishers Group West, An Ingram Brand

Submit orders to your sales representative or via IPS Cart on iPage

Order Phone: 866.400.5351 | Fax: 800.838.1149 | E-mail: ips@ingramcontent.com | IPS SAN: 6318630

SALES CHANNELS - PART VIII - THE MONEY SHOT

There’s a concept in journalism called a “peg.” Definitions vary, but it’s generally some fact or piece of information that makes a story newsworthy; often it’s an attempt to quantify something. (If you’re doing a story about, say, immigrant families being separated at the border, or firearm deaths in the U.S., you need to know whether 300 families are separated a year, or 3,000; whether 3,300 people die every year from firearms, or 33,000.) A peg is something to hang the story on, something to connect it to reality, something to let you know whether or not it’s a big deal.

We’re putting out our numbers for 2018 because writing and publishing are all too often disconnected from reality. Most people like to present themselves as a bigger deal than they really are. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to admit that that’s not the case. As of the end of February 2019, Tortoise has sold a grand total of 6,508 books since we started in early 2012. Unless you’re really really bad at math, or unless you think we’re somehow making $100 per book, it’s pretty easy to see that we’re not making a living doing this. (We’d love to be, and we’re continuing to explore ways of doing so, but we’re nowhere near the volume of the Big 5 yet; for some of their books, they probably give away as many ARCs—Advanced Review Copies, for those who don’t know—as we sell over the life of a book.) Granted, being small has its advantages: we’re nimble and can take chances bigger publishers can’t take, and we have to save ourselves for books we’re insanely passionate about, rather than just putting out something that’s a flavor-of-the-month, or something we only just kind of like. But we’d like to get a little bigger, so it helps to look at what we’re doing now, and how well it’s working.

So without further ado: the numbers.

There are a few different stories here, so we’ll take a quick walk through each channel, and see how each one compares with the stories we’ve told ourselves.

First off: Ingram. Even with all the returns headaches, it turns out they still net us more revenue than any other channel. Which leads us to a worthwhile point—if you want to make a lot of money, you usually have to have an arrangement that allows other people to make money, too. (Americans fetishize the individual accomplishment, the triumph of the individual ego in hand-to-hand combat with a hostile or indifferent world, and self-publishing preys on that paradigm—but it’s bullshit. Even if you can do absolutely everything yourself, your work is nothing if nobody reads it. And most people can’t do everything well. Besides, numbers-wise, it’s often better to have a small percentage of a huge number than to have a big percentage of a miniscule number.) So Ingram’s our biggest pipeline, even without a formal distribution deal. The indies who are a notch above us, sales-wise, DO have distribution deals; based on conversations with one indie publishing friend, their numbers aren’t always insanely high, but their lowest-selling titles still tend to move 500 units or so, which is nearer the high end of the scale for us. (So far, only our three top titles have sold more than that.) And their highest-selling title has sold about ten times as much as our bestseller. So we want to keep making money in a way that lets other people make money, because that seems best all around.

We knew before we started this exercise that Direct Sales give us much higher per-unit revenue than Ingram. And when we look at the end result for the year and see that we’re earning 2.7 times more per book sold, it’s tempting to just say, “Oh, let’s put all our energy into that, then.” BUT these numbers are just net numbers based on the books themselves—taking the revenue from direct book sales and subtracting the manufacturing and shipping costs of those books. When you factor in additional costs, the math really changes, and sometimes gets fuzzier; there are some sales made at places like Printer’s Row Lit Fest where we’re paying decent table fees, and we might be getting additional opportunities by being there (“The Goodies”), but still it’s quite possible we’re losing money. And time’s an expense, too; we had at 9 days in 2018 that were more or less devoted to direct sales. (Three days at AWP, Evanston Lit Fest, two days at Printers Row Lit Fest, the Indie Press Fest in September, and our two Bookstravaganza days in November.) When you divide $1069.90 by nine days, some of which also took table fees, you realize it’s not lucrative labor—especially since you have to pay royalties on the sales when it’s all said and done. This is an important channel; it’s great to have plenty of regular direct sales opportunities, and sometimes we make sales that directly lead to other opportunities. But we’re never going to get where we’d like to go on direct sales alone.

Createspace and KDP Paperback Sales are decent—not as big of a channel as the two above, but since it doesn’t take a lot of time, it’s well worth our while to set our books up here; if we’d set up everything on Ingram and never bothered with Amazon’s POD service, Ingram would have been the one putting the books up on Amazon. And if we’d let Ingram handle all the Amazon sales, we would have made less than $400 for those sales; instead, it was more than $800. Our indie bookstore friends aren’t nuts about Amazon, and we’d probably feel the same way if we were in their shoes—but we’re in our shoes. People are going to look for our books on Amazon, and when they find them, we’d like to earn as much as we can for them. If we ever do get a distribution deal, we may have to give this channel up—most distributors want to handle all online sales, including on Amazon—but in the meantime, we’ll take it.

It’s interesting to see that the Goodies ended up netting us almost as much as Amazon paperbacks. That was a bit of a surprise. Like it or not, it isn’t all about the books; you need to get your name out there, too, and make money when you can (as long as you’re not screwing anyone over in the process); if it’s between selling books somewhere versus selling books and earning a speaker’s honorarium that’s basically pure profit, well, we’ll take the honorarium too, thanks.

KDP Electronic Sales aren’t as lucrative as we might have thought. We may have high revenues for our average run-of-the-mill retail sales, BUT we end up moving so many units during the discounted sales that it pulls down the average a bit. Still, it’s not a bad channel. It’s nice to have the flexibility to do the cheap ebook promotions; we’ve definitely made sales we wouldn’t have otherwise made. And we’d love to grow this channel, possibly by having a BookBub deal for one of our titles. (If you haven’t signed up for BookBub, it’s well worth doing, unless you’re an absolute die-hard, take-no-prisoners, give-me-paper-books-or-give-me-death type of a person; you get one email every day with a handful of ebooks that are on sale for a buck or two, and some of the books are pretty cool. Some days you get some really amazing deals on books you were going to read eventually anyway; some days there are books you maybe wouldn’t have thought to get, but you realize they’ll be well worth your time.) We’re also going to start tracking this differently this year—so we can split out Kindle Unlimited page turns and see how worthwhile that channel really is.

We’ve split our website sales into author sales and commercial sales, because they’re really two different animals. For standard commercial sales, we’re typically mailing single copies from inventory and shipping them ourselves, but if an author wants to buy ten or fifteen or twenty books at their author discount to handle their own direct sales, or do extra promotional work, we’ll usually just put in a bulk order from KDP or Ingram. (It’s the nature of the book business that we have to give away a decent number of ARCs during the promotional phase, to blurbists and publications and what-not. Being a company of limited means, we have to set a budget for that; we’ll stretch that budget when we can, but if we can’t, we’ll use website sales as a way to help the authors get extra promotional copies out there.) Both are important parts of the business; and since we’ve done some big presales this year for She Said What? and Music to My Eyes, we already know commercial sales will be getting bigger.

Invoiced Sales are low on the totem pole, revenue-wise, but it turns out the margins aren’t bad. And we saw with Adult Teeth that this can be a good channel to help us avoid the large-order/large-return whiplash that sometimes happens with Ingram sales. We’ll probably try to keep this channel where it’s at in 2019—as a good alternative to Ingram that will help us build our relationships with local stores. They’re offering something that can’t be digitized or quantified or replicated online; there’s nothing that sells a book quite as effectively as hearing the excitement in another human’s voice when they talk about it, or seeing the light in their eyes when they pick it up.

Commercial website sales have been low, in part because we only really adopted a retail strategy late this year. These sales take a decent amount of work, but the margins are pretty solid. We’d hoped when we switched our strategy around that this would be a great way to get inventory for all of our titles down to reasonable levels, and that hasn’t necessarily been the case, but we’ve made a few sales this way, and we’ll keep it up. (Also, we already know this channel will look much different when the 2019 numbers are in—this channel is an excellent way to do presales, and we’ve started doing those for She Saud What? and Music to My Eyes. We’ve grossed over $2500 in January and February this way, and while the net will be a bit south of that, 80% of all the website orders we’ve ever done were in those two months, so our run through the 2018 numbers is already a bit outdated.)

Seven years of publishing has given us plenty of time to think about where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we’re going. It’s also given us a few opportunities to look around, to see what others are up to and to see if we measure up.

It’s easy to get jealous, especially when you’re not doing this full-time and you see people who are, or when you thought you’d be back at AWP but you’re not; it’s easy to see others and think you’d be happier in their shoes. And when we got started, that jealousy was probably more prevalent than we realized. Back then, we tended to think in evolutionary terms; the traditional publishers were the dinosaurs, the comet was coming (or had already struck), and we were going to rule the planet once they were gone. But this would make us rats, and we’re not rats.

Now, it’s far less of an us-versus-them mentality; the people in the traditional industry are, after all, a lot like us. We’ve hung out with them and done business with them; they’ve read our books, and blurbed them. We still think we can do a better job than traditional publishers in key areas such as attentiveness and responsiveness, and we’re convinced we can put out books that are as good or better than anything they’re selling. But Lord knows we’ve messed up here and there in those areas, so we’re a little more filled with empathy for everyone else in the industry now. Besides, it’s a big publishing ecosystem; we don’t need anyone else to fail for us to be able to thrive.

And the real competition is always with oneself anyway—it takes work to keep moving forward, to keep looking for opportunities to improve. Some of those results can’t be quantified—one often finds validation in other places, in the enthusiasm of a reader who’s coming back to buy something new, in the satisfaction of an author who comes back to publish a second book. But it is important to quantify things whenever reasonable. And the numbers continue to head in the right direction. Our revenues for 2018 are a little bigger than they were in 2017, and the 2017 numbers were bigger than 2016, and 2016 numbers were bigger than 2015—not by much, but by enough to make us feel like we’re getting somewhere. (Monthly revenues in early 2015 were usually low 3-digits; for the past few months they’ve more often been high-3 or low-4.) We’re tortoises, after all; we’re pretty well armored to survive the rough ecosystem, and more importantly we’re committed to slow and steady progress, to enjoying the effort, and seeing how far we can get.

SALES CHANNELS - PART VII - THE GOODIES

When we started putting together our sales channel numbers for 2018, we realized there was a whole classification of income we’d never really thought about systematically—money that comes in without book sales.

We’ve titled this channel sort of satirically, based on a favorite scene in The Right Stuff. Betty Grissom is upset after her husband’s spaceflight; his capsule had ignominiously sunk, lost in the Atlantic Ocean, and he’d flown the second Mercury flight anyway, rather than the first, so instead of getting lunch at the White House with Jackie Kennedy, she and her husband have been “treated” to a meager little ceremony in Florida. But when they get back to their hotel room, he’s excited to see someone had filled their fridge with beer. To which Betsy says: “Is this the goodies?”

In other words, this is not a lucrative channel—not a pillar of the business, by any stretch. But it is a channel where money comes your way unexpectedly, based on your work in the other channels.

We listened to an excellent podcast episode (probably the JDO Show episode with Michael Seidlinger) where they talked about how your book is your business card. This does overstate the case quite a bit; for many of us, the books are the end, the whole point, the raison d’etre. But it raises an interesting point; your books are also representation of yourself, a point of entry into the book world.

To put it another way, we’ve heard it said that people generally figure out how to treat you by looking at how you treat you, and this extends to your books, too. If you go about this haphazardly, and put out sloppy work, and present yourself as a dilettante, people will ignore you, and they’ll be right to do so. But if you take your books seriously, and present them well, and make it a point to be as professional as anyone in the business, people will take you seriously. (This is even true if you’re manufacturing books via POD. We’ve met booksellers who were surprised to learn that we were using the same Ingram and KDP technology that any ol’ self-pubbed schmo uses. If you put enough work into the cover and the layout, the only people who will notice are the ones who know the tells. POD covers never have printing on the inside surface, and maybe lack some of the bells and whistles of traditionally printed books, like embossed lettering or mixed glossy and matte cover finish; they also always have an extraneous blank page with printing info on the last interior page.)

So even if you are publishing POD books without a formal distribution deal, take your books seriously. Then if you, say, sell books at a book fair, you may get invited to speak at a library or a school, and get a speaking fee for doing so. If you spend enough time putting out good books, you might be invited to teach a class, or sit on a panel at a writer’s conference. The money isn’t insane—we’ll get into that in the next post, the big reveal, the money shot—but it’s there, and it helps make the dream possible.

SALES CHANNELS - PART VI - WEBSITE SALES

We’ve probably made more mistakes with this side of the business than with any other sales channel.

When we set up Tortoise in 2012, we wanted to have a good solid website, steady and reliable, a place where people could find us and submit whenever the hell they felt like it. Granted, we knew very little about websites, and didn’t want to spend scads of time and money putting one up. Fortunately, someone suggested Squarespace. We were able to put up a decent and professional-looking site without spending the proverbial arm-and-a-leg. (Or even an arm, for that matter.) We could launch it and not think about it, pay our $10 a month, and have a solid and professional-looking presence.

Except you can’t ever really stop paying attention to anything in business. Squarespace has been amazing; we’re still using them, and they’ve been a solid foundation for this corner of the business. But the thing about business is: you have to keep doing stuff. You get new ideas, you develop old ideas, and you make mistakes that you need to correct. (And only the person who does nothing makes no mistakes, as good ol’ František Moravec used to say. Yes, that’s a book plug.)

In the beginning, we didn’t even really want to sell our own books on our site. It was all Amazon links. Our thinking was it would be easier and more convenient for everyone.

This was a mistake.

We like Amazon. In key ways, they’ve made this whole publishing journey possible. It’s nice having a reliable always-up storefront in every corner of the globe; it’s great any time any part of your business is that dependable. You can’t quite ignore them—we’ve learned it isn’t healthy to ignore any part of the business—but you don’t have to worry about them, either. They’re low-maintenance, and that’s nice.

But relying on Amazon completely for web sales, you miss out on some good opportunities. You can’t tailor your business to different types of customers—you lose the ability to make bulk sales to, say, a university that wants to use your books for a class, or a bookstore that doesn’t want to go through Ingram. But you can do all those things well if you’re managing at least some of your sales through your own website. (You can even handle sales by your own authors better—especially out-of-town authors. You can sell them copies of their books at a steep discount, but above cost; they can then sell books to their friends and family, and you don’t have to pester them to get money back for those sales, because you’ve already made money. With the right discount, it works out well all around—they make more money per book than you do, while you get paid up front and have less headache and hassle.)

So after a while, we put up two sales pages—one for retail sales, and one for wholesale. The retail page still linked to Amazon because, hey, we do still like selling books there. And the wholesale page offered our books at 60% of list price, which is a pretty standard bulk purchase rate for book sales. And then we got a little nervous. “What if we get a whole flood of one-off orders from retail customers who are buying books at 60% of list using the wholesale page? We’ll be shipping books out the door as fast as we get them, and we won’t make any money on those sales, because we’ll have to pay shipping on those orders.” And we didn’t want to take the time to figure out what our shipping costs would actually be for those orders. So we added on a $10-per-order handling fee, to dissuade one-off orders.

This was also a mistake.

We’ve heard it said that there are two basic ways to operate in the world: living in faith, or living in fear. We’ve also heard it said that you can’t do both at the same time. (“Faith” here doesn’t mean the capital-F religion-and-dogma sort of thing, but just sort of a general trust that things are going to work out for the best. It doesn’t mean you can stop paying attention; it doesn’t mean you can just kick your feet up in the La-Z-Boy and wait for the sales to come pouring in. But it does mean that you believe that if you put in time and effort and keep putting one foot in front of the other, things will work out for the best, more often than not. Whereas fear, in this sense, means thinking that things generally aren’t going to work out; it means you spend all your time focusing on what you don’t want, spending all your time and energy trying to avoid some negative thing, rather than create some positive thing.) And it seems to us now that having a low per-unit cost, but a high per-order charge that customers didn’t see until checkout, was more of a fear thing than a faith thing.

Besides, we don’t like any buying experience like that. We don’t like pricing that’s confusing or tricky or opaque, pricing where you think you’re getting a good deal and then realize later that you’re not. We tend to like pricing that lets us know up front what we’re getting, so we can make a simple decision. (Also, we’ve come to realize that the Golden Rule is underappreciated as a business model. If you give people the experience you’d want to have yourself, it’s a lot more satisfying than giving them a bad experience out of fear that they’re going to give you a bad experience. That goes for the books we write and publish; we’re trying to put out books we’d want to read. And it goes for web sales, and pretty much every other corner of the business.)

Plus, given the way the other sales channels work—particularly the Ingram channel—we do sometimes end up with returns on titles. So if we have twenty or so copies of a title on hand, more than we could hope to move at our next few book fairs, why not try to sell them online? The old pricing model was based in part on fear of losing money—but if you crunch the numbers, you realize it’s possible to make money selling books one at a time on your own site. You just have to price them close to retail, send them out media mail, and maybe buy mailers in bulk so you can get them cheaply rather than paying retail at the post office. (Shout out to Uline, our bulk mailer provider. This is a top-notch vendor—you get great mailers, you get them right away, you get them at a very reasonable price. We did some comparison shopping before making our first mailer bulk purchase, and there were slightly cheaper options, but the enthusiasm of Uline’s online customers led us to place our first order there, and it was the right decision. Their mailers are great, and their shipping is fast—blink three times and your order’s there, just about. Uline is another company you don’t need to worry about, and we’re looking forward to doing more business with them.)

Anyway, long story short, we got rid of the two separate sales pages (which also helped clean up the website a bit) and started pricing everything pretty close to retail. The customers who buy direct can then get a good deal—better than Amazon, especially for the books where we have extra inventory and we can afford to discount them a little—and we are still getting a good deal, because we’re still making decent money on those sales and/or moving returns inventory that would otherwise be sitting in our closet for years on end. And if we want to, we can still do bulk-rate sales to bookstores and universities and what-not, by issuing them discount codes.

Have we arrived at the final perfect answer? No. One of our old bosses in the corporate world used to say Information Technology work was like the Holy Grail: you’re on this quest, and you never quite get there; perfection always feels just beyond your grasp. There will always be changes and adjustments to be made with the website, as with every other corner of the business. We’ve started doing presales for a few titles, which is a lot more work than just shunting those customers off to Amazon, but also a solid way to drum up sales in advance of an official on-sale date. We’re also going to encourage local bookstores to place bulk orders through us, rather than through Ingram; they get a better deal, because they don’t have to deal with Ingram’s returns caps, and we get a better deal, because we can structure those sales to make a little more per book. With a little hard work and a positive vision, you realize it is possible to set things up on your website in a way that everybody wins—and that’s just fine with us.

SALES CHANNELS - PART V - INVOICED SALES

With Invoiced Sales, we aren’t the retailer; we’re providing books to a bookstore, who then makes the sales and collects the taxes and pays us 60% of list price.

First, we should talk a little about list price. It’s something we didn’t really understand when we got started, so we’ll offer some thoughts that might be useful to anyone who’s new. The cardinal rule of list price: it should be high enough to make money on every sale in every channel. And since Ingram has the highest printing costs and lowest royalties, you need to set your list price high enough that you’re making money (ideally at least a couple bucks) on every Ingram sale.

If you do that, you have the flexibility to price smartly and make decent money in every other channel as well. You can set the list price for a short novel at, say, $15.99, and sell it for $12 at book fairs and still make money—and then your customers that “showroom” you and step away to look at their phones will see that it’s cheaper in front of them than it is online, which gives them an incentive to buy it right away if they’re on the fence. (Another direct sales lesson we figured out over time.) And if they do buy it on Amazon, you’ll earn a buck or two more than you would have from an Ingram sale, assuming you’ve set it up through the KDP paperback platform.

And, of course, if you have a good working relationship with a bookstore, you can sell wholesale to them at 60% of list price. So for the $15.99 book, you’re getting $9.59 per copy—obviously less than the $12 you’d get at a book fair, BUT since you’re paying sales tax on the book fair sales (and if you’re not, you should be, you naughty bastard), and possibly table fees, and doing all that extra work, and since the bookstore is going to have your book out on the shelf while you’re off doing other stuff, that $9.59 is actually pretty decent. And if you’re selling, say North and Central, and getting copies printed via Amazon KDP, you’re paying $4.75 a copy after shipping, so you’re netting $4.84 per book, versus the $3.10 per copy in Ingram royalties you’d get if the store ordered through their distribution channels.

Of course, you might have to work for that extra money.

We talked about returns, and how disheartening those can be; we also talked about the lows of direct selling. This channel, too, has its lows—specifically, collections.

Indie booksellers can be wonderful magical places. Certainly we’ve had some great experiences selling in them, and we’ll get into those later. BUT we’ve also had some frustrations. Sometimes you have an event at a store, and you bring books, and the store rings them up through the register with the understanding that you invoice them later, and then maybe—and this is key—you make the mistake of not double-checking at the event how many books you’ve sold, and confirming with the owner how many you can invoice them for. (Because, if you’re lucky, they’ll want to keep a couple on the shelves, too.) Then after a month or so, you might drop them an email and say, “Hey, how many books can we invoice you for?” And you might hear back from them right away, but you might not. Then after a couple weeks or months, you realize you never got paid for those books, so you call the store, and politely ask to talk to the manager, and they may or may not take the call, or they may just tell their employee, “Oh! The numbers. We’ll email those.” And maybe they email, and maybe they don’t. Then maybe you go to an unrelated event at the store, an event for another author, and you really honestly try to have a good time, but you also make it a point to make eye contact here and there with the store owner—either pleading puppy-dog eyes, or a direct stare-into-the-soul I-know-what-you-did-last-summer sort of a thing, depending on your preference—so they know that you know that they still owe you money. And maybe you’ll buy a book or two at the store, because you do really truly want them to do well, and you want to be a good literary citizen, and you do always need more books anyway, but still of course you’re hoping this will somehow unlock the mojo necessary so that your numbers and your payment will be forthcoming. And maybe they’ll finally give you numbers. Or maybe they’ll stall you. Or maybe the numbers will be less than you think you sold at that long-ago-event, which may have been a few months ago now, so you’re stuck wondering: Are they gaslighting me? Am I being an asshole? What is even happening here? Long story short, it may take you a long time to collect, and you may not collect the full amount you think they owe you, and it may leave a bad taste in your mouth.

This is not an indictment of all bookstore owners, or even most owners. Certainly we’ve had plenty who’ve always paid promptly, and some who’ve maybe only ever required one follow-up email, at most. And all of them, even the ones who’ve taken a while on some invoices, seem to be hard-working and decent and fun-to-talk-to people who honestly love books, and who are doing their damndest to eke out a living in a very difficult and crowded marketplace. BUT we do have our favorites, as well as one or two where we’d prefer it if they ordered through Ingram, because that extra $1.74 per book isn’t worth the hours and hours it takes to collect. (We’re not going to name names, both because it isn’t useful to air grievances in public, and because we’ve discovered, through comparing notes with other local indies, that the bookstore that pays us promptly might be the store that someone else has a problem with, and vice versa. Sometimes. Basically, there are three tiers—stores we’ve never heard anything bad about, stores we’ve personally never had a problem with, and stores that we have.) And certainly we’ve learned that we need to do our part, too—to make sure to tell people that the store has our books, and always always always try to get numbers at the event itself.

Still, this channel can be truly amazing. If you plan your local bookstore events well for a new title, and space the events out just a little—every two weeks or so—you can manage your inventory very smartly. If you have a great event, you can order a new batch of books in time for the next one, and if you have a disappointing event, at least you don’t have to put in a new wholesale order—you can take the books home with you. (“Now wait,” you might be saying. “How is that any different than having them order from Ingram and send the returns back? If they order ten and sell three, and you get seven books back as returns, what’s the difference between taking ten books to the venue, invoicing them for three, and taking seven home with you?” As we mentioned, the margins are still better when you invoice them yourselves—but the bigger issue is time, not money. The returns cycle on Ingram may take months to play out, and during that time, maybe you’ve ordered more books for book fairs and website sales, and maybe those sold, but maybe they didn’t, or maybe they sold and you bought a new batch because you didn’t know you had returns coming. Long story short, the returns cycle can leave you buried in inventory for a certain title, whereas handling your local bookstore sales via invoices and hand delivery can allow you to manage your inventory a little more smartly.) And invoiced sales can work out better for the bookstore, too. If they order through Ingram, they have restrictions on how many returns they can make—they can only return 10% of their total annual spend to Ingram, and they only get 50% back in return credit, so Ingram returns aren’t necessarily a great deal for them, either.

PLUS, when you do establish a good working relationship with a bookstore, and you start having regular events, you get something that can’t be replicated online—something like the high of direct sales, but more communal and magical. (We will name names here.) We had a launch party for Jeremy Wilson’s Adult Teeth at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square. It’s a lovely cozy store that’s always fun for book shopping, and the owner, Suzy Takacs, is really cool. She requested twenty books for the event, with the understanding that we’d bring home the extras and invoice them only for what was sold, but we ended up bringing five extra books, just in case. And lo and behold, the place was packed—Jeremy did an amazing reading, followed by a really fun Q&A with Billy Lombardo, and the store was filled with smiles and good cheer, and we sold all twenty-five books we had on hand, and everyone made money. (As we said before, it isn’t all about the money, but the money makes the other stuff possible, so you do at least have to try and get it right.) We had two more local events, one at 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, and another at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston (both lovely places to go book shopping as well, with awesome cool owners), and those events weren’t quite as successful, sales-wise—BUT both were warm lovely intimate evenings, and we did still make some sales, and we were able to put the leftover books to good use by selling them online. (More on that next week.)

Given the ease and the simplicity of the online portals for Amazon and Ingram, it may be tempting to avoid Invoiced Sales entirely. But in our opinion, that would be a mistake. A good book—a really good book—is something you want to talk about, excitedly, to others who’ve read it, or others who might. There’s an energy and an excitement in those conversations that can’t be digitized; you can get a facsimile of it with online reviews and eager tweets, but it just isn’t the same. All the other channels we’ve talked about certainly have their advantages—it’s nice to have the Ingram pipeline to connect with stores on the other side of the country, and it’s great to have Amazon’s global reach and technological innovation and prompt payment, and it’s wonderful to get into the world and meet customers face-to-face through direct sales. But you owe it to yourself to establish solid relationships with your local bookstores, and to get your books in their hands in a way that’s mutually beneficial, so your books will be part of the conversation.

Plus, bookstore sales and events give you the chance to get out in the world and talk books with other book people—local authors and what-not. You can hear about their books, and talk about your books; they may end up blurbing one of your upcoming books, or submitting to you. (Or, heck, they might just be awesome people to meet.) Your books don’t have to gather dust in your closet while you wait to plan your next sales event, and they don’t have to remain bright small icons on the undertrafficked corners of the infinite internet; with this channel, you can make sure that they’re on a shelf in the world, waiting to be discovered by people who really care about books.

SALES CHANNELS - PART IV - DIRECT SALES

Direct Sales—going out in public to make retail sales to end customers—give you some of the highest highs and the lowest lows in publishing. On the good days, you’re in a high-traffic area, selling books at a great margin to customers you never would have reached otherwise, making sales as fast as you can write them down, swept up in the surging adrenaline rush of conversation and money. On the bad days, maybe you’ve spent money on table fees only to end up at a small festival with little foot traffic, so it’s all vendors sniffing each other’s butts: you’re desperately trying to sell to them, and they’re desperately trying to sell to you. Or, even worse, you’re outside and the weather’s turned bad, and you’re worried about all your books being ruined—losing money when you’d thought you were going to be making it. Emotional extremes—that’s what this channels about.

We made our first direct sales at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest in 2012. Our founder (who is writing this post, and who accidentally dropped an “I” in the last post but will still continue referring to himself using the editorial “we,” no matter how absurd it gets) started Tortoise Books in no small part to launch his novel Resistance, so at the time, that was our only title. It was a pretty busy summer; we were getting married that month as well, and were expecting a baby soon thereafter; we’d also funded the project via Kickstarter and sprung for a decent-sized print run of both hardcover and softcover books, so the months leading up to Lit Fest were a blur of wedding invitations and ultrasound pictures and book shipments. (Project video here, if you’re curious…we’re told it’s kind of funny.)

The fest itself offered two days of bookselling, Saturday and Sunday; we lived in a condo overlooking Polk Street, the foot of the festival, and were literally close enough to watch out the window as the festival tents went up that Friday. We’d spent $325 on the table, which was not one of the tented ones, so we’d been obsessively checking the weather; it ended up being blisteringly hot, but (fortunately for the sake of the books) free of rain, and all we had to do to get set up was borrow a cart from the building and roll our boxes of books a few hundred feet out the service entrance to our table.

Everything did not go perfectly. We hadn’t physically inspected all of the books in our shipment, and it turned out there was a printing defect in a few of them; when the first customers started perusing, there were pages coming out in their hands. (Needless to say, this was tremendously embarrassing.) And we were new enough to the direct selling thing that we didn’t yet have any of the necessary accoutrements; we may or may not have had a rudimentary table covering (memories on that point are hazy, but it was probably a repurposed piece of white cloth curtain), and we certainly didn’t have a credit card reader, or any of those folding book stand things like you see at the bookstore. So we were feeling somewhat anxious and idiotic as the first customers started inspecting the books and the first books started falling apart and we waited to make our first sale.

Still, we had done some things right—we’d spent some of our Kickstarter funds on baller print ads in in The Onion and the Lit Fest Literary Supplement (RESISTANCE: A WORLD WAR II NOVEL FOR EVERYONE WHO PREFERS THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV TO THE SISTERS KARDASHIAN), and we still had plenty of good books, more than enough to pull the defective ones off the table and replace them, so we did get customers coming by, taking a look at the book, saying “Huh, I heard of this,” and shelling out their hard-earned cash for a copy. (We, of course, couldn’t help thinking “You heard about this because we paid you lots of money to hear about it.”) So we sold a solid number of books—over $650 worth, when it was all said and done. Not nearly enough to turn a profit, given the table fees and advertising expenses, but enough to give us a taste of the addictive direct-sales rush, and get us thinking about how we could experience that again, hopefully while actually making money.

We didn’t sell at Lit Fest the next year—we didn’t have any new books, so it didn’t seem like it would be a worthwhile expense—but somewhere in 2013 we did do something far more important, and picked up Giano Cromley’s The Last Good Halloween for publication. It was an excellent book, and a perfect pick for our first project from an outside author. We were transforming from an editorial “we” to a literal one.

We had a lovely book launch for Giano—a magical little shindig at Uncharted Books in Logan Square, with food and drink and readings, and family members of his showing up out of the blue from the other side of the continent. (We were pretty humbled to see so many people putting in such great expense to show up; we—and I mean I—were tremendously grateful that it came together on our end.)

But our first real direct selling experience with Giano was far from auspicious, though—through no fault of his. The Chicago Book Expo was held that fall at St. Augustine College in Edgewater; it seemed like a great chance to dip our toes back in the direct selling waters. Unfortunately, the waters were frigid. That was the start of the epic winter of 2013-2014, and somehow in early November it was already bitterly cold. Foot traffic wasn’t great, and we were stuck in the back of the event space with two high-quality but otherwise very dissimilar books on the table, sharing the table with a man selling a book about the War of 1812, and perilously close to an amiable but possibly delusional gentleman who billed himself as “Greatest Poet Alive” and was hawking a collection called The Book of 24 Orgasms. (Come to think of it, “amiable but possibly delusional” could be applied to many people in the book business, ourselves included.)

There are people who tell you to buy books from the other vendors at these events, or trade them. Sometimes that’s good advice, and sometimes it isn’t. We possibly should have sprung for the War of 1812 book. We did not want to sell or trade to get The Book of 24 Orgasms.

We didn’t sell any books. We’d paid $50 for the table.

It was the type of experience to make you want to quit—if we were the type of people to quit.

It isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a positive vision of the future, and a crazed delusion. Or perhaps there’s no clear demarcation point. Perhaps what gradually separates one from the other is the ability to enlist others in the vision, to get them to see the same thing and work towards it. (If so, we owe Giano a tremendous debt for sticking with us through low moments like that when we, too, probably seemed a little delusional.) BUT it’s also necessary to keep comparing that vision with reality, to keep totaling up the numbers and doing the math and staring your wins and losses in the face. Persistence is important, but it must be mindful persistence, focused on the end goal, but also willing to look at different ways to get there, and figure out what is and isn’t working. As they say in Friday Night Lights: Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose! (That exclamation point seems a little aspirational when that motto’s applied to bookselling. But you get the idea.)

We won’t bore you with the details of every other direct selling opportunity since then. We did our best to learn from our mistakes—to buy a tablecloth and a bunch of those little book stand thingys, to get a Square account and start accepting credit and debit cards, to show up to every event with a cash bank of fives and ones to make change, to inspect every shipment of books upon arrival and return any unsaleable ones before the customers see them, to price our books in a way that incentivizes customers to buy right away while also giving us a decent margin. We’ve made it back to Lit Fest every year since (albeit usually by renting tent space from other vendors, so as do so economically), and we went to every subsequent Chicago Book Expo. (That fest also seemed to be learning and changing and growing; it moved downtown to Columbia College, and steadily became a better and better sales opportunity—before somehow, sadly, going MIA; there was no expo in 2018, reportedly because they lost the venue; we’d love to see it come back, because it did end up becoming a worthwhile event.) We had some events where we sold books almost as fast as we could write down the sales. (For the launch of Giano’s second book, What We Build Upon the Ruins, we did a joint event and launched Joe Peterson’s Gunmetal Blue at the same time; it was at a bar in Hyde Park, so we didn’t have to pay any table fees or give them a cut of our sales; we sold 42 books in a couple short hours, which was all of our inventory of one, and nearly all of our inventory of the other.) We had other events that weren’t much better, sales-wise, than that first Chicago Book Expo.

But—and this is important—we learned to keep our eyes open for opportunities, even when an event didn’t go as expected. The event where you drive twenty miles to sell books in a basement may ALSO be the event where you meet a bookseller who sets up another direct sales opportunity for you; the literary festival where you don’t sell any books may ALSO be the one where you meet an author who becomes a new best friend (as was the case at that first Chicago Book Expo, where we first met Ben Tanzer, who, in addition to writing some great books, is also one of the a most exuberant, delightful, and all-around-fun-to-talk-to people we know); the fest where you don’t sell many books may ALSO be the one where you make a sale to a super-enthusiastic customer who not only tracks you down at a subsequent fest to tell you how much he loved your book, but also arranges two paid speaking opportunities for you to talk about the book and make further sales.

It's our oft-stated belief that indie publishing can be as hip and respectable as indie rock. Certainly there are other publishers leading the way in that regards, ones that we admire and try to emulate. (We met Rob Spillman of Tin House Press a couple years back and asked him for advice on running an indie. He advised persistence, and also said: “People do judge you by the company you keep. So be mindful of that.” And that is something we pay attention to—trying to hobnob with, and learn from, people outside our orbit who are writing and publishing great books, while keeping a respectful and friendly distance from the lovably delusional oddballs.) But it’s also worth looking at our heroes in the indie rock world, people like, say, The National, who spent their share of time playing to miniscule or nonexistent crowds. You hear stories about bands like that in their come-up phase playing to a crowd of ten people as if it were ten thousand, and you realize, inasmuch as possible, you need to keep up that level of enthusiasm. It’s a fun game, and like any game, you want to win as often as possible—but you’d get bored if you won all the time. Plus, it’s not entirely in your control how many people show up, or how many of them are willing to spend money; the customer who talks to you for fifteen minutes may turn away without making a purchase, while the one who chats for two minutes may buy $70 worth of books. If you’re making your happiness contingent on reaching a certain dollar amount in sales, you’ll probably be disappointed; if you try instead to enjoy the game, and greet everyone you meet with enthusiasm, you’ll be amazed at how much fun this channel can be.

SALES CHANNELS - PART III - KDP ELECTRONIC SALES

Confession time: we don’t entirely understand the hate electronic books get. It doesn’t all feel rational; many of the arguments boil down to emotion-based appeals to nostalgia, to the smell and feel of paper. There are some studies that suggest that some information is retained better when reading a physical book—but if you do a little digging, it seems the only clear and measurable advantage to reading from a physical paper book is a better memory of the exact sequence of events in the book. For instance, the researcher in this article EXPECTED, based on an earlier study, that ebook readers would perform worse on tasks related to empathy, transportation, immersion, and narrative coherence, but they actually found that “performance was largely similar.” And ebooks certainly have their advantages, particularly in ease of purchase and portability.

We don’t want to get bogged down in these arguments, though; it should be up to the customer how to read. If someone enjoys reading paper books more than electronic ones, or vice versa, that’s their business. Our business is to give them a way to buy our books in whatever format they prefer, and some do prefer ebooks.

There’s a lot to like about selling electronically. This is the channel with the greatest pricing flexibility—if you take a 70% royalty from Amazon, you can price your titles between $.99 and $9.99, and change the pricing any time you feel like it; you can also take a 35% royalty and price the book even higher. (We’ve kept our ebooks exclusive to Amazon because they’ve it worthwhile; unlike other ebook retailers and channels, they’re always building out the marketplace. In the dozen years since the Kindle’s introduction, they’ve continuously improved their e-readers. They’ve also introduced the Kindle Unlimited platform—basically Netflix for books—and continuously improved that as well. When it comes to ebooks, they’re clearly in it to win it, and we have no particular need or desire to sell elsewhere.) This is an area where we feel like we have a solid competitive advantage over traditional publishers, many of whom are pricing their ebooks rather expensively—often only a buck or so less than the physical version. Because Amazon is right about this—traditional publishers are often ripping off their customers with their ebook pricing. After all, if ebooks and physical books aren’t the same, why price them so similarly? Why not cut customers a break on something where you don’t have to physically manufacture or distribute each unit sold?

One other advantage to this channel: Amazon allows you to do countdown deals and limited-time giveaways. If you want to try and juice the sales for a particular title without permanently discounting it, you can drop pricing for a couple days, promote it a little on social media, and pick up a few sales you might not have made otherwise. (We’ve had some successes this way; for our top two titles by number of units sold, over 80% of the sales—not giveaways, but sales—were on Kindle, and many of those came during discounts.) You can also make it completely free for a limited time, although experience suggests that this doesn’t necessarily lead to greater sales once the giveaway ends. (The last giveaway we did, in late December, was for Public Loneliness, part of a disconnected series of space books; we gave away 71 ebooks over the space of three days, but sales for that and other titles in the series only increased very slightly in the month or so since.)

This platform also lets you make your titles available on Kindle Unlimited. KU titles are downloaded but not purchased; Amazon initially tried to compensate authors and publishers a set amount per download, but some authors started gaming the system by dividing up titles into shorter works and trying to earn more money that way. So Amazon started basing their Kindle Unlimited comps on KENP—Kindle Edition Normalized Pagecount, a number that assumes “pages” of approximately 200 words. Amazon divides up a global fund and allocates it to each KDP book based on the number of pages that have been read. Is it a perfect system? No—as with all things Amazon, there are cottage industries that have sprung up around gaming the system. (Almost as soon as Amazon switched to the KENP model, reports started surfacing of click farms and page-turning bots geared towards increasing your KENP, tricking Amazon’s algorithms, and raising your ranking; in the shady corners of the internet, you can find shady people who will take money to do just about anything. Not something we’d try, of course, but it is, allegedly, an option.) It’s difficult to gauge intent online, to sort out the wheat from the chaff—just as social media networks attracted their share of bots and bad actors, Amazon has summoned some disreputable characters from the digital void. But Amazon’s always tweaking their algorithms to try and take these things into account, to figure out what page turns are from “legitimate” readers engrossed in a book, and which ones are from automated operators making money by gaming the system; one gets the sense that, in this endeavor, Amazon’s as fair as it’s possible to be.

Still, when it comes down to dollars and cents, is it worth it to participate in Kindle Unlimited? Without getting into the total numbers (which we’ll do in the last blog post), looking only at the sums for individual titles, it is still a bit of a loss if someone reads our books on KU rather than purchasing them on Kindle. BUT that loss is a little less if it’s a longer title. (We tend to price our ebooks on the high middle of the KDP range—usually $5.99 or $6.99 for full-length novels and story collections. That way, we can be decently cheaper than the Big Five while still giving ourselves some good margins. For a publisher whose ebooks are normally cheaper, KU may actually be better than a KDP purchase.) And a full KU read may result in more royalties than a sale elsewhere, although this does depend on the book’s page count and list price.

A couple examples: For Island of Clouds, a full read of the book gives a KENP of 574. Our royalties for September show a KENP of 575. (Hopefully representing at least one KU reader totally engrossed in the book and reading it to completion, rather than 575 people picking it up, reading a single page, and setting it down in disgust.) For that full “read,” we earned $2.81, whereas for a purchase, we earn $4.82. BUT when we compare that with, say, the royalty for a single paperback sale on Ingram, we earn more on KU—each Ingram paperback sale only yields $2.25 in royalties. (As with many of our paperbacks, we felt the need to keep Island of Clouds under $20. But it’s a relatively long book, with higher per-unit costs than many other titles, so that squeezes our margins a bit.) So Amazon’s subscription-model compensation for this book actually pays more than a purchase elsewhere.

North and Central, however, has a KENP of only 262. Our September royalties show a total KENP of 262, which is presumably a full read of the book, because Bob Hartley is an awesome author and it is an amazing read. We earned $1.28 for that read, versus $4.82 for each sale. And every Ingram sale yields $3.10 in royalties. (North and Central is a little under half the length of Island of Clouds—47,132 words versus 104,207—but more than half the cost, so print charges are lower.) For this title, a full KU read probably results in lower royalties than a full read in any other channel.

Still, there’s a decent chance that a Kindle Unlimited user wouldn’t have purchased the book in a physical bookstore, and there’s a fair chance an indie bookstore shopper isn’t going to look and see if something’s available on Kindle Unlimited. Would we prefer to earn more per copy? Obviously. BUT a certain portion of the buying public is happier with the all-you-can-eat subscription model than with the buy-one-of-each-thing model, and as long as we’re making money from those people, we’re happy to get our ebooks in their hands.

One hopes Amazon will continue to improve KDP and KU; one particularly hopes they start to look intently at which KDP books are usually read in full, versus which ones earn only a few page views. Assuming they have good ways for filtering out page turns by bots and bad actors, they could do something that’s never been possible in the history of publishing—they could get hard data for which books in a given category are most often read to completion, and put out rankings that will help those books bubble up to the top of the turbulent and infinitely vast digital marketplace. (There is something odd and slightly off-putting about watching people read—which, in a sense, is what Amazon’s doing here. Sometimes when I think of KENP, I think of that scene in Funny Farm where Chevy Chase gives his wife a manuscript as an anniversary present and then tries to watch her read and react to it. BUT there is also something intriguing about bringing that sort of feedback loop into the publishing industry; the optimist in me says it’s giving authors and publishers something that, say, musicians have always had when they perform live—the ability to read the room, to know when people are paying attention or walking out.) The traditional industry sometimes seems like their best idea is to monetize nostalgia; they’d rather plaster stores with posters for books that have been out for fifty years than push something new. And this attitude trickles over into their attitude towards ebooks; one gets the sense it’s something they’re doing reluctantly and halfheartedly, something they’ve been forced to do, not something they are eager to do. Whereas Amazon is innovating, working to expand and constantly refine the ebook marketplace. Instead of trying to sell you Slaughterhouse-Five every time you walk into a store, they’re busy building something new. It’s a marketplace we’d like to win in, too.

SALES CHANNELS - PART II - AMAZON CREATESPACE AND KDP PAPERBACK

We’re going to make a controversial statement here, one that may offend our indie bookstore friends: Amazon is not the devil. They’re actually—gasp—worthy of emulation, in some key ways.

Granted, there are contentious questions about working conditions in their distribution centers. (Depending on your sources, those are either downright Dickensian, or not all that different from many other jobs requiring a similar skillset.) But leaving all that, and focusing instead on their role in the independent publishing marketplace, there is a lot to like about Amazon.

First off, they pay well. If you set your books up in paperback on the KDP platform (which has replaced Createspace as Amazon’s preferred POD platform), you’ll make more from your Amazon sales than you will if you just set it up on Ingram. (For every copy of, say, North and Central that we sell via Ingram, we get $3.10, whereas selling a copy via Amazon earns us $5.86.)

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, they pay on time. Relentlessly on time, all the time. We have never, in seven years of publishing, had to go ask Amazon: “Where’s our money?” If you make a sale on Amazon in, say, May, you know that two months later (on July 29th if it’s a weekday, or the next Monday if the 29th is on a weekend), you will have money in your bank account, with no effort whatsoever on your part. (In their defense, Ingram pays reliably, too—BUT it takes an extra couple months for royalties to hit your account. And because of the whole returns thing, you may be expecting money from a certain title in a certain month, and then you don’t get the money, and you’re like, “HMMM,” and then you go to Ingram, and sure enough, you got a big chunk of returns from some other title that wiped out all of your profits, which is not uncommon, since every one return wipes out the profits from three or four sales. So—sell a net of three books for a title, make no profit, UNLESS you get the return and sell it on your own. Which, if you’re drowning in inventory, you might not do for a while.)

We digress. The payment aspect of Amazon’s operations is as reliable as an atomic clock. It is a shining inspiration, a standard we aspire to ourselves—we never want an author to come to us asking “Where’s my money?”

Amazon also lets you update your titles free of charge—and I can’t overemphasize how nice this is for a publisher. You can review printed copies and make tweaks to your files free of charge before publishing. (If you order advance copies through Ingram and you catch some issue on the physical version that you missed online, you have to pay a change fee.) Also, there are, believe it or not, a few of our titles that sell relatively steadily, titles where we haven’t had many returns and we always need to order more copies to keep them in stock on our end so we can do book fair and website sales. (We’ll talk more about those channels later.) Sometimes we’ve gotten great new blurbs or awards for those titles, and we’ve wanted to update the covers to help the books sell well. And since KDP lets us do that—and charges less per book as well—we do virtually all of our post-publication reorders through KDP, rather than IngramSpark.

Amazon’s web interface is also generally better than Ingram’s. The pages are clean and reliable; the reports are simple and clear and easy to generate. And it’s very very easy to upload your titles and make them available for sale—almost too easy. The site is clearly biased towards publishing “now.” There are three relatively straightforward pages to fill out—Paperback Details, Paperback Content, Paperback Rights & Pricing—and the button at the bottom of the last page says “Publish Your Paperback Book.” Once you push that button, assuming there aren’t any issues with your files (title not visible on the cover, graphics in the barcode area, etc.), your book will be up for sale on Amazon; the site says in 72 hours, but it’ll usually be quicker than that.

The problem with that? For one, it’s hard to do the type of pre-pub work that’s necessary to get your book to sell well, because you can’t order production-quality copies of the book prior to publication. (As mentioned in the post on IngramSpark, we USED to be able to order such copies via Amazon’s Createspace portal, but when Amazon shifted its paperback POD production to the KDP platform, it started putting a big gray Not for Resale banner on all proof copies. Which of course doesn’t prevent us from ordering production-quality pre-pub copies—it just means we usually end up ordering them through Ingram, as soon as we’ve ordered a small batch through Createspace to make sure everything looks good.) And if you have done any solid pre-pub work—getting blurbs, reviews, etc.—those won’t appear on your product page unless you also set up an Amazon AuthorCentral page. And since those pages are author-focused, not publisher-focused, it’s hard to manage your product pages as a publisher. If you’ve set the book up on Ingram already, the data will flow through to Amazon and create the product page for the paperback book with all the blurbs. Otherwise, you need to ask the author to set up their AuthorCentral page and manage their own product pages. (OR you can create an email account on each author’s behalf, then use those email accounts to set up an AuthorCentral page for each author, and manage your product pages that way. Which, frankly, is a headache.)

Also, Amazon’s pretty committed to allowing other sellers to sell copies of your books—even in situations when the book is brand new and there’s no conceivable way that anyone could have legitimately obtained a used copy already. If you sell on Amazon, you’ll see that a book is available from other sellers virtually as soon as it’s set up. Obviously it’s Amazon’s right to decide what they want to do on the product pages, but it’s hard to figure out how that sort of selling is even possible on that timeframe, unless the sellers actually can’t fulfill those orders, or unless they’re somehow in cahoots with Amazon. (This is an area that, frankly, we don’t know much about—we’d love an explanation from someone who does.)

Lastly, Amazon’s committed to allowing sponsored product advertising on your product pages. It’s one of those things everyone has to live with. (Even traditionally published authors and classics have sponsored products on their pages.) Still, it is moderately annoying—you really don’t have any control over the types of books that show up here, so you can put a lot of work into targeting a certain type of reader (blurbs from respectable blurbists and news outlets, well-designed covers, etc.) and have that vibe totally undercut by a couple rows of ads for self-published drivel that may be completely unrelated to what you’re selling. (Bob Hartley’s North and Central, for instance, is a literary crime novel about a blue-collar bar in Chicago, but contains two full rows of sponsored links for books about ghosts and vampire rapists, and one about an armed time-traveler—a book called Schröedinger’s Gat.) Again, traditionally published authors and even classic books have this issue as well, but the sponsored products on their page seem to at least have a mix of reputable and disreputable books.

Long story short, you can set up to sell paperbacks on Amazon very easily using their POD portal, and you can do so in the confidence that you’ll be paid better and more quickly than by going through Ingram. (Or, presumably, other distributors.) And their portal tends to be much better for ordering new books once your title’s been published. But one way or another, you’ll need to do the work to make sure the product pages are as professional as possible—and even then, you’re fighting an uphill battle, because Amazon forces you to associate with riffraff.

SALES CHANNELS - PART I - INGRAMSPARK

We’ve been meaning for a while now to use our low-quantity-but-hopefully-high-quality blog to post about sales channels.

We actually got started on this post late last year, and started pontificating for a bit on the pluses and minuses of various ways of getting books into readers’ hands. But then we realized we were missing something important: actual numbers.

Yes, it’s true. We’re pretty rigorous about doing a monthly profit and loss statement for the business at the close of every month, and calculating and paying all royalties due, so we always have a pretty solid idea of WHICH books are selling, but we’ve been lax about classifying all of our sales so we can figure out HOW those books are selling. Which, frankly, is kind of dumb—it’s easy to tell yourself stories about what works and what doesn’t, especially for something as emotionally charged as selling books you’ve poured your heart and soul into, but until you actually crunch the numbers, you just don’t know whether or not those stories are true.

Until now. As part of our year-end financial process—which is fairly involved, since we have to pay state sales tax for the year, and issue 1099s for our authors, and provide various contractors and associates their payment totals—we’ve gone through our revenues and figured out, for all of 2018, just how every dollar flowed into the mighty Tortoise bank account. And so, in the interest of the transparency which is so often lacking in the book business, we’re going to post about each channel. We have a lot to say about each one, so we’ll do one post a week, and tell “the story” for that channel, and then we’ll post the numbers—which, in some ways, contradict the stories we’ve told ourselves. And we’ll post the overall lesson we’ve learned from all of this exercise. (Which, we think, is a good lesson.)

(“Now, hold on,” you might be saying. “Tortoise is a hip cool indie press, and money is uncool. It’s all about the writing, right?” Well, yes, and no. It’s easy to get into this business thinking money is beneath you, unimportant, not worth your attention—and there’s no surer way to get yourself into deep financial doo-doo. Because then magical thinking sets in, and with it, a gambler’s mentality. You start to think a given project will just make money because it’s amazing, and once the world realizes how amazing it is, the dollars will just start rolling in, enough to make everyone happy, enough that you can stop worrying about the nitty gritty stuff like monthly financials, and start planning cool vacations to Paraguay or Bhutan or some other place you’ve only seen on Anthony Bourdain. And then, when that project disappoints you financially, and you have less money to launch the next project, you may end up doubling down, thinking the new project is even more amazing, and maybe you’ll go into debt to finance it, and eventually you’ll end up homeless and penniless, living in a van down by the river. ANYWAY, yes, money is beneath you, but the floor is beneath you, too. And you need a stable reliable floor to do most things in life. So think of money that way, as something you have to get right to make everything else possible.)

ANYWHO, we are going to post about each channel in turn, one a week, in the following order:

IngramSpark

Createspace and KDP Paper Sales

KDP Electronic Sales

Direct Sales

Invoiced Sales

Website Sales

The Goodies (We’ll explain later.)

We’ll be as honest as possible without hurting anyone. (As someone told our founder once: “Honesty without compassion is brutality.”) And hopefully we’ll all learn a little something about how to do a better job of getting great books from amazing authors to awesome readers. And so, without further ado:

IngramSpark

For those of you new to the business, or to this side of it, IngramSpark is a print-on-demand service. Rather than, say, estimating that a book will sell 1,000 copies (the general size of an economical print run using more traditional methods, although that’s not necessarily the case nowadays), you can upload a cover and an interior .pdf to Ingram; once the files pass technical validation, Ingram—which is also a major book distributor for independent bookstores—can then print copies whenever a store orders a book. There’s a lot to be said for this approach; since you don’t need to sell a set number of books, you don’t need to chase fickle trends and publish books about subjects with a built-in following, like sparkly vampires or Jersey Shore castmembers. (Sorry, it’s too easy to hate on these things. We’ll try to be more positive.)

ANYWAY, using Ingram’s online portal, it’s relatively easy to upload files and make your books available for sale. Bookstores can then order the books at terms that are reasonable to them. (A 55% discount off the cover price, and returnable, which means bookstores can send copies back within 90 days for a refund.) And it’s necessary to at least try to do well in bookstores—a physical book is advertising for itself, so having one on a shelf (or, God willing, a display table) gives you a level of visibility and a chance for random discovery that can’t be easily replicated online.

Even without crunching the yearly numbers, it’s possible to say a few things about IngramSpark, financially. Unless you’re setting up your titles with your eyes closed, you’ll see that revenue per unit sold is decently low, lower than if you upload the same exact files to Amazon’s print-on-demand platforms. (The posted technical specs for the two services are slightly different, BUT they are tied together behind the scenes, and they even use the same printers to fulfill orders. More on that later.) BUT if you do a decent amount of publicity and promotion, you’ll sell into more bookstores than you will if you just use Amazon’s POD service, even its “Extended Distribution” option.

Ingram also allows you to order production-quality copies of your book before it’s on sale to the general public—which is essential if you want to do proper pre-publication work. (We USED to be able to do this through Amazon’s CreateSpace, although it was a bit of a hassle—we could order production-quality pre-pub copies through their portal, tweak the files as necessary to get everything right [or just pretend to tweak them, and then re-upload the same files], and order more copies; we could then use those for promotional work, and sell any extras at book fairs. But Amazon now slaps a big NOT FOR RESALE banner on these copies. Which, of course, doesn’t stop us from doing what we used to do—it just means we place more pre-pub orders on Ingram.)

And once you get blurbs and reviews, you can manage them on the Ingram portal—one of the few areas where their portal’s clearly superior to Amazon’s. All you have to do is copy and paste the relevant review quotes, and they’ll flow on through to your various online product pages.

Of course, this channel isn’t all sunshine and smiles. As we mentioned before, if you want any decent bookstore penetration, your books have to be return-eligible. Which sucks, sometimes. A store can order, say, ten copies for an author event, and only sell three, and ship the rest back to Ingram, who then sends them back to you. On the plus side, the books usually come back in decent shape, and you can sell them elsewhere—directly through your website, at fairs, etc. Still, there are few things more disheartening in this business than when you already have decent inventory for a title (for a suitcase press, 10 copies or so), and then you get, say, 17 copies of a book shipped back to you, and all of the sudden you are running out of closet space to store all the books, so you’re stacking up carboard boxes next to the bed, and your wife is yelling at you, and you know even if you discount it, it will take a LOOOOOONG time to sell them all. And of course, you have to pay for those copies. And since the printing charge for a POD book might be three or four times the royalties you earn from sales of that book, it doesn’t take a lot of returns to wipe out a lot of royalties. Returns are, regrettably, a fact of life for book publishers; we do our best to structure our author agreements to take them into account and give ourselves a chance to recoup those losses. But it’s still a kick in the nuts when someone sends your books back to you, and takes money away from you to boot.

Also, Ingram charges setup fees, and revision fees. The setup fee—$49—is actually not awful, but only because they waive it if you order 50 copies within a few months of setup, and ship them all to the same address. (Since you’re probably going to need 50 copies anyway, you’re usually not stuck with that cost in the end unless you really want to be.) The revision fee—$25—is the more shortsighted fee, because it makes it harder to make sure the book looks good in print. (Since we’re usually setting up our books on both IngramSpark and Amazon’s KDP, we’ll print the proofs on KDP and verify them that way—the posted file specs are slightly different, BUT their systems are tied together behind the scenes, and they sometimes print from the same printers. So usually, despite their protests to the contrary, what looks good on one will look good on the other.) The revision fee also makes it harder to do the kind of favorable tweaks that help books sell once they’ve come out. If you set up your books well, and you get a few nice pre-pub blurbs from cool authors, you have a good product that’s ready for the marketplace. But if you then, say, get an even better blurb with the help of one of those initial copies—or if you win an award and want to put the medallion image on the front—you’re usually stuck deciding whether or not to pay a $25 fee to update the cover. And frankly, since you can order books with basically the same specs from Amazon’s KDP platform WITHOUT paying to update the files (and get the books printed at a slightly better cost), it usually makes more sense to just update it on KDP and order copies from them if you need more copies for book fairs and such. Then you can wait to update the Ingram version until Ingram does a free update promo, which they tend to do once a year or so. (At least two of our books are in this situation—WGN Radio’s Rick Kogan called North and Central “a terrific, terrific novel” on air, and we updated the cover on the KDP version to accommodate the blurb, but figured we’d wait to change the Ingram version so as to not wipe out a few months’ worth of profits for the title. So, too, for Joe Peterson’s Gunmetal Blue—Kirkus Review called him “One of the Windy City’s best-kept secrets,” and we’ve put that blurb on the cover of Amazon’s version, and ordered new copies that way.) So, more money for Amazon, less money for Ingram.

Still, if you’re a small indie looking to make a big name for yourself, you really have to go through Ingram. Even if you set up only on Amazon’s KDP platform, if you click the “Extended Distribution” option, THEY will be using Ingram to get your books out there. (That option is basically a white-label pipeline into the Ingram system; when you select that, Amazon sets the books up in Ingram, but WITHOUT the returnability and discount options the bookstores want, so you’re not going to move a lot of units that way—probably not any, because the bookstore’s not going to stock it, so unless you send a friend to go to your bookstore and have them special order it, you won’t make any “Extended Distribution” sales. And Amazon comps those sales at a lower royalty rate than the Amazon.com sales anyway, so there really isn’t any advantage, other than avoiding the setup fees.)

Plus, there are advantages to bookstore sales that you just don’t get elsewhere—basically, you want your book where book people can see it and talk about it, and while that doesn’t necessarily happen a lot at a bookstore, it still can happen. True, there are other ways to sell books at bookstores—placing books on consignment, or selling to the store directly, both of which we’ll discuss later—and there are times when those ways are best, BUT they also only tend to happen if you have a strong relationship with a bookstore. If you’ve done the right things to sell your books to strangers, like getting pre-publication reviews in trade publications, you want to be in a position to take advantage of that, and the best way to take advantage of that is by setting up on Ingram.

Illinoize, Arthur Meyer, and the Donald P. McMahon Project

In addition to the whole indie publishing thing, I dabble in music criticism. (Not music itself, of course, because I don’t have much talent beyond some so-so karaoke chops.) Generally I’ve stuck to Amazon reviews—which are easy to be snide about, even though they’re possibly the must consequential new writing form of the past few decades, in terms of influencing decisions, democratizing criticism, etc. But I’ve also had a few pieces published in Newcity, so I’m a professional of sorts. Also I was recently picked to write the album-of-the-week selection for a fun little email circle called the Donald P. McMahon Project, run by a guy named Arthur Meyer. The album I picked—Illinoize, a Sufjan Stevens/indie rap mashup—deserves to be a little more widely known, IMHO. (And I’ve been busy with Infinite Blues and slow to post new blog content lately.) Anyway, here goes:

It begins with dancing piano, the high familiar glistening sound of Sufjan Stevens on the keys. But then: a deep rap voice, Aesop Rock as a solid counterpoint to the airy ivory. By and large, this dynamic persists throughout the album: ballast for the balloon, the weight of the world and the lightness of flight. And I can’t get enough of it.

I’m a grown-ass man, forty now but with plenty of residual morals from the twelve-year-old Boy Scout I used to be; for much of my adulthood I was practically an RIAA posterboy, so averse to unpurchased music that I avoided mixtapes entirely. (The four years I spent at West Point certainly helped me along that path; my classmates and I were honor-code-bound to avoid anything that could be labeled theft, so while our civilian peers were gleefully burning CDs and then venturing out into the wild new terrain of Napster, I was stuck buying $17 CDs at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square.) I missed some of the landmarks of the genre, like Danger Mouse’s career-launching Grey Album. But fear of not hearing a noteworthy album softened my morals slightly over the years; it seemed silly to avoid taking something for free if it couldn’t be purchased anywhere, and if the artists themselves wanted people to check it out.

So eventually I set out on an exhaustive tour of the once-forbidden mixtape realm. I liked The Grey Album, but I also learned that Jay-Z had donor-fathered a ridiculous number of others; it seemed any DJ who got bored in the lab could take the a capella version of the Black Album, pour it in the test tube with some unwilling other partner, and release the resulting offspring into the world. (The Slack Album—Jay-Z vs. Pavement, The Black & Blue Album­—Jay-z vs. Weezer, and on and on ad nauseum. Too many to evaluate, but enough to make you tire of the concept and blasé about Danger Mouse’s genius. In fact, a quick Google search tells me there are far more of these orphan children than I’d remembered, way too many to ever get to know—although I will confess a certain curiosity about The Kenny Z Album—Jay-Z vs. Kenny G.) Wugazi’s 13 Chambers was more to my liking; the energy of the Wu-Tang Clan and the power of Fugazi came together like a one-two punch to the eardrums. But the mixtape I keep returning to, the one I can’t go more than a few months without hearing even after having it in my library for eight years, is Illinoize.

It’s an inspired, sly pairing—indie rock and indie rap—made all the more so by Tor’s willingness to cycle through different rappers and rap groups, some (like Outkast) more famous than Sufjan Stevens, and some (Brother Ali) less so. But every one’s impeccably chosen. And while many people beat their good ideas to death, Tor understands how often less is more; this collection clocks in at seven tracks and just a whisper over half an hour. There are certainly high points—for me, it’s tough to top the way the high piano falls into the vocals on “John Wayne Gacy Jr. / Specialize”, or the way the mournful horns make the vocals more melancholy on “The Tallest Man / I Like It”—but it all works wonderfully.

It made me curious enough to check out some of the rappers. (I love Outkast as much as, if not more than, the next guy, and as an indie-minded person I’m pretty much required to like Sufjan Stevens, but most of the other musicians here were new to me.) But it also still strikes me as better than the sum of its parts; I listen to this more than I listen to any of its components, certainly more than the Brother Ali album I picked up based on his amazing rap sample here, and more even than Outkast’s ATLiens or Stevens’ Illinois. (Granted, I don’t know if I like it quite as much as Aquemini or Stankonia, but that’s a damn high bar for any album to clear.) It might seem overwrought to say this, but even though Tor hails from Canada, he’s put together an album that feels like America itself at its Obama-era best: a coexistence of cultures, black and white feeding into and riffing off of one another, and more interesting in their interplay than either one is alone.

I still like to buy music, but I’m weird about it; I love this album enough to be more than a little curious about Tor’s other output, but I also love it so much that I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed by his original compositions. I know enough about the music business (and entertainment in general) to see how financially merciless it can be to anyone who’s not in the stratospheric top tier with Jay-Z and the like. One loose social-media-level friend of mine played and toured with an artist who had multiple albums that earned lofty high-sevens and low-eights from Pitchfork, and glowing New York Times writeups. That friend now has an MBA after his name on LinkedIn, and since he’s apparently retired to financially greener pastures, I can only assume Tor isn’t raking it in, either. (Which I can totally relate to, given that I write every day and have published a few books but still have to pay the bills with a nine-to-five—this is commiseration, not condemnation.) So I should buy something from Tor, given how happy he’s made me with something I got for free. Yes, I should. Yes, I should.

TORTOISE, BY THE NUMBERS

It is Saturday night after AWP18, and we are starting this blog post in a darkened aircraft ascending through clouds, with Tampa and memories fading behind.

By “we,” I mean I. (Jerry.) Or as the Dude said in The Big Lebowski, “You know, the royal ‘we,’ the editorial…” But it’s always been my vision that Tortoise would be a “we,” not one of those Nine-Inch-Nails-is-Trent-Reznor things, and for this, our first AWP, we also had Carlo Matos and Christine Sneed in physical attendance, plus many other tortoises attending in spirit. (And/or via Twitter.) And we are wrapping our tortoise heads around issues of quality and quantity, topics always near and dear to our tortoise hearts.

Publishing professionally (which we believe we’re doing) requires a diligent focus on the numbers, an attempt to quantify a great many things. We prepare monthly profit/loss statements for the business, we tally income and expenses, we pay authors and associates. And while the numbers are important, the business is about far more than the numbers—it’s about the feeling we get when we sell to a new customer, when we sign a new author, when we hear someone talking excitedly about something we’ve published. (And it must be said, it’s about knowing we’re treating everyone as fairly as possible. It’s not worth it to sell a million books if you’re not paying your authors what you owe them, or giving all you can for them—if you have to hide from them when you see them. There is no profit in gaining the whole world at the expense of your soul; nor is there a profit in selling enough to make a living if you have to treat people like shit to do so.) You cannot quantify quality, and all of these things exist in an analog plane, far above the world of numbers.

Is AWP worth it? The raw numbers would suggest not—after paying for a $650 table, we made $442 in sales, which of course does not factor into account travel expenses, parking fees, etc., etc., let alone the cost of the books themselves. (We also paid a bit of a stupidity tax by overloading our good ol’ suitcase-press checked-bag-full-o-books to the point that it tipped the scales at 66 pounds, necessitating a $100 heavy bag fee.) And yet there are things about the experience you cannot quantify—some at least not until year-end financials, and some possibly forever. What’s the value of speaking face-to-face with the president of Consortium Books (a distributor we’d frankly love to work with) when all your books are laid out on the table in front of you? Can you put a dollar sign on George Saunders’ excellent keynote address? How about rekindling an acquaintance with Bonnie Jo Campbell and chatting about gun violence and American politics? And what is it worth to sing karaoke in a private Asian-style booth with Midwestern Gothic’s Rob Russell and a host of other delightful people? (Reader, you should already know this experience is valuable beyond measure.)

We also crossed a sales milestone the first day of the fair and sold our 5000th book! (If you’re curious about a breakdown by title…well, we’ve never done this before, but here you go, dear reader. We trust you.)

Resistance, 2012: 1543 copies (221 physical, 1322 electronic. Launched back in the salad days of KDP discounts, which probably helped.)

Ninety-Seven to Three, 2013: 7 copies (7 electronic. Poetry is a tough racket.)

The Last Good Halloween, 2013: 377 copies (272 physical, 105 electronic. Not bad for our first outside author.)

Zero Phase, 2013: 688 copies (94 physical, 594 electronic. Space people like ebooks.)

Project Genesis, 2014: 15 copies (15 electronic. Again, poetry. Although, to be fair, we've never released a physical version.)

Public Loneliness, 2014: 318 copies (115 physical, 203 electronic.)

The Dark Will End The Dark, 2015: 172 copies (148 physical, 24 electronic.)

In Lieu of Flowers, 2015: 91 copies (89 physical, 2 electronic.)

The Fugue, 2016: 291 copies (235 physical, 56 electronic. Not bad for a second edition. And--as is the case with a few of our books--we've made money on it.)

The Pleasure You Suffer, 2016: 42 copies (38 physical, 4 electronic.)

Staggerwing, 2016: 242 copies (207 physical, 35 electronic.)

Island of Clouds, 2017: 140 copies (59 physical, 81 electronic. High returns, unfortunately, but the people who read it seem to REALLY love it.)

North and Central, 2017: 447 copies (329 physical, 118 electronic. Who said crime doesn't pay?)

Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock, 2017: 66 copies (63 physical, 3 electronic.)

Old Open, 2017: 171 copies (139 physical, 32 electronic. Getting some traction on Ingram, which is nice.)

What We Build Upon the Ruins, 2017: 161 copies (152 physical, 9 electronic.)

The Quitters, 2017: 41 copies (36 physical, 5 electronic.)

Gunmetal Blue, 2017: 199 copies (190 physical, 9 electronic. Also doing well on Ingram, even though it's only been out since December. It helps that Kirkus called Joe Peterson "one of the Windy City's best-kept secrets.") 

The Virginity of Famous Men, 2018: 50 copies  (All physical, because that's what we have the rights to.)

(Note the list is ordered by date, not number—we absolutely do not want to imply that these books should be ranked by numbers sold. Every one has its own unique charms; like children, you love them all in unique ways.)

So, yes, 5,000 books. And given that our profit margin is around two hundred dollars a book, we’ve actually been earning a pretty comfortable living over the past five years doing this publishing thing. (I kid, I kid. Wait, wrong voice. We kid, we kid.) Book publishing is a tremendously humbling business. Sales feel capricious and arbitrary, and the economics are simply not that great for the average traditionally published author, even the ones that have had the kind of successes (New York Times reviews, major chain sales, advances with commas in them) that make the rest of us salivate. (As one author friend tells her writing students: Unless you see an author’s books on sale at the drugstore or the airport, they’re probably doing something else to make a living.) And while we do our best to treat people better than the traditional publishers—to read submissions without charging a fee, and respond as quickly as possible with personalized feedback, and edit respectfully, and pay promptly—we have certainly fallen short of the mark here and there, at least on the reading-and-responding side. But we keep moving, tortoiseing damn near every day (minus breaks for Sundays and vacations), trusting we’ll win the race in the end.

What, then, constitutes victory? Is it numbers sold? For some, perhaps—although there are plenty of bestsellers that fall by the wayside in subsequent years. (This list of the bestselling books from 1913 to 2013, for instance, includes plenty of familiar titles, but more than a few books like Green Light that aren’t even available for sale any more.) Is it awards? We’ve won some, and Lord knows we’d love to win some more, but a trip through the list of, say, Pulitzer winners (or Academy-Award-winning films, or what have you) certainly reveals plenty of wait-that-other-one-should-have-won picks, and why-wasn’t-this-one-even-nominated moments. (Coincidentally we—and here I mean I—went to Columbia University, and had professors who sat on the Pulitzer committee. They certainly seemed very dedicated to a fair and honest prize process, but they also knew that not all prize winners were created equal; one professor, for instance, described Neil Sheehan’s excellent A Bright Shining Lie as “one of those rare books that enhances the Pulitzers, rather than the other way around.” Not that we wouldn’t absolutely shit ourselves if one of us won a Pulitzer, but you get the idea.)

In the music world, it’s been said of the Velvet Underground that they didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one started a band. Was Lou Reed unsuccessful in 1970, when he was living in his parents’ house and working as a typist in his father’s accounting firm for $40 a week—after having already launched four of the most influential albums in music history? Was he unsuccessful when he released Transformer? We’d love to have it all—sales, prizes, and the enduring legacy of a much-discussed body of work—and we’d love to give it all to our authors, but sales and prizes aren’t entirely in our control; all we can do is put out quality books, and tell people about them, and trust that the rest will come in time. So success, perhaps, is to keep reaching readers, and keep learning and growing.

And on that level, AWP certainly was a success. We recently acquired paperback rights to Christine Sneed’s excellent short story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men, and we were able to sell it in public for the first time there; we also sold books by Alex Higley and Carlo Matos and Joe Peterson and Giano Cromley and Gint Aras and Alice Kaltman—not all of our roster, unfortunately, but certainly a healthy chunk. On the first day of the conference, we sold our 5,000th book to a young guy named Allen; on the third day, he reached out on Twitter to let us know he’d already finished (and thoroughly enjoyed) Zero Phase. We learned a few lessons that will come in handy for the next AWP—ship your bags if they’re going to be overweight, sign up early if you want a busy table space, make sure to visit Electric Literature and all the other people you love on Twitter, don’t freak out if second-day sales are slow because third-day is the big sales day, etc. And we made enough money to keep chugging along and doing the next things we need to do to get the next books out there.

I wish I could say I was finishing this blog post in some lofty literary office space; I’m actually writing it the way I write most things, with my laptop balanced precariously on my knees, aboard a morning CTA train headed for my 9-to-5 non-publishing day job. But we at Tortoise are thinking ahead, to Printers Row Lit Fest, and the Chicago Book Expo, and AWP19, and we’re looking forward to all of it.

GUNS AND GUNMETAL BLUE (AND JOE PETERSON, TOO.)

July 4, 2017

I met a local author named Joe Peterson a few years ago at an author event here in Chicago. I remember feeling slightly put off; he gave off a vibe like he felt like he was an underappreciated local genius. Then I read his book Wanted: Elevator Man and realized he was, in fact, an underappreciated local genius.

Since then, Joe and I have become great friends, and we’ve had many wonderful conversations about writing and publishing. I did some advance reading for his great collection Twilight of the Idiots; I solicited a submission from him for a story anthology.

About a year ago, we met up for lunch, and he told me about the manuscript that would become Gunmetal Blue. He said it was about gun violence, and he told me about his personal connection to the topic, and I knew I wanted to be involved.

¤

22 years ago, I arrived at West Point for R-day for the Class of 1999. It was, for most of us, an anxious day, as hazy apprehension about hazing and training materialized into sweaty reality—yelling upperclassmen, uncomfortable uniforms, strange new rituals of drill and ceremony. I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into. Just about the only thing I looked forward to was the weapons training, and the chance to fire an M-16 for the first time.

I’d grown up a bit of a gun nut. When we lived in Florida I got a rifle for my 10th birthday, and somewhere in there my dad purchased a 9mm pistol for my mom for self-defense, and we spent many Saturday afternoon out at the range amidst the palmettos and scrub pines, pumping round after round into paper targets. But for a true gun aficionado, all of these things are vaguely unsatisfying compared to the prospect of actually shooting true military hardware.

One of the things that impressed—and still impresses—me about the Army was the culture of respect and accountability and safety when it comes to firearms. We didn’t get to handle them for several weeks after R-day; there were many unpleasant days of shoe-shining and brass-polishing and close-order drill and room inspection in the meantime, many orders given and received between the first day the military issued me a uniform and the first day they handed me a rifle.

During my four years as a cadet, the number of days I spent at the range shooting live ammunition were relatively infrequent, but I took many opportunities to increase them—once Beast Barracks was over and the academic year had started, I spent some Saturdays at the range with the Infantry Tactics Club; during my last three years, I competed in the Sandhurst military skills competition, in no small part because it had a marksmanship component.

I was medically discharged from the Army after graduation (narcolepsy, if you’re curious), and unexpectedly found myself living with my parents back in the Chicago suburbs, but I kept up my gun enthusiasm for some time; I’d purchased a class pistol, a Colt .45, and I’d go shooting at the range with my brother and one of my drinking buddies. Soon afterwards, I moved to New York City for grad school; I was a pretty proud conservative, and I took a certain perverse pleasure in going to the bar, getting carded, and seeing the bouncer’s eyes widen when I’d pull out my Illinois Firearm Owner’s ID in lieu of a Driver’s License.

It took some years for my attachment to guns to fade; in some ways, Chicago itself was responsible. When I moved back after grad school, it wasn’t legal for residents to own handguns. I thought about defying the law, and even flirted with the idea of becoming an NRA test case, the Rosa Parks who stood up to what I believed were unjustly oppressive laws. (Yes. That does sound ridiculous to me now.) In the end, all of that seemed like too much hassle, so my guns remained in the suburbs at my parents’ house, and my trips to the range got fewer and farther between.

It was just as well, for I went through some dark times personally in the early 2000s—some blackout drinking, where I’d make it home with only a frame or two of imagery about the trip home from the bars, and a LOT of brownout drinking, where I’d remember where I’d been and who I’d seen and how I’d made it back home, but I’d have to reconstruct the details of the night with help from friends. There were plenty of good times in there, but the bad ones were really bad—some relationships that turned ugly and angry, and one incident where I got physically violent with a woman I loved. But all that negativity usually turned inward rather than outward, and it manifested itself in some very dark thoughts. In retrospect, I’m pretty glad I didn’t have easy access to a handgun in those years.

I eventually quit drinking, and started taking steps to stay sober. Among other things—meetings with other alcoholics, spiritual work, etc.—I did a lot of reading. In his Confessions, St. Augustine says to God, “…by my own sin Thou didst justly punish me. For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment.” This statement seemed to perfectly fit my experience with alcoholism; I’d certainly loved alcohol over and above almost everything else in my life. (It was part of the reason I moved downtown, and therefore one of the things that separated from my guns; I moved downtown because it seemed like in the suburbs I ‘had’ to drink and drive, but in a city with abundant public transportation and many taxis, that wouldn’t be the case.) In a sense, I’d viewed alcohol as a god. It was an idol I looked to to solve my problems—to relieve my stress at the end of the workweek, to get me talking to women, to ease my feelings of alienation and angst. And it seemed clear in retrospect that alcohol had been its own punishment: using it to numb the pain only increased the pain, and left me with some ungodly hangovers, too.

It wasn’t until after the Newtown massacre that I started to see guns in similar terms—as something that many Americans have loved inordinately, to the point that they’ve become their own punishment. I wrote an op-ed about my own gun experiences for the Chicago Tribune, and I started to read a lot more on the topic, and it didn’t take much digging to find stories where the addiction model seemed to fit. Take that of Chris Kyle, a brave man who perhaps saw guns as the answer to too many questions, and ended up shot to death by a man he’d enlisted for “gun therapy.” Or the case of Philando Castile—a man who bought a gun for self-defense, behaved responsibly with it, but was shot to death by a panicked cop who made a snap decision he wouldn’t have needed to make in a country where guns are less prevalent. Or that of Curtis Reeves, the retired Tampa police captain who shot a fellow theatergoer to death in a confrontation over texting during the movie previews and then sought the protection of the state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws. And the hallmarks of addiction are there, too, in the national conversation about guns—in the voices of the gun addicts who deny or shift blame any time any tragedy happens which can be directly attributed to our nation’s lax gun laws, the voices which claim that the media is engaged in some sort of conspiracy to suppress “good” gun stories (homes defended, mass shootings prevented, etc.) and play up the bad ones. For an addict lives in such a state of denial that they refuse to believe the problem is a problem—in fact, they believe the problem is a solution. They will throw out major facts that don’t fit their narrative, and play up minor facts that do support it, until they are again comfortable that nothing’s going to interfere with their addictive behavior.

I’m writing this letter over the Fourth of July weekend. I made a family trip down to Kankakee to visit relatives, many of whom are longtime responsible gun owners. I have many classmates from the military whom I’d trust with 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000 guns. I’m well aware that, for many people who live in the country, 911 response times are well into the double-digit minutes, and if anyone did break into their home, they would probably want to use a firearm for self-defense. I fully understand that guns are an integral part of our nation’s origin story, and that the right to own them is constitutionally protected. I’m not suggesting that anyone should pry any guns out of anyone’s fingers, cold and dead or otherwise.

But it would be nice to work towards laws and policies that are as healthy for city-dwellers as they are for people who live in the country, laws that pay as much attention to the “well-regulated militia” part of the Second Amendment as they pay to the “keep and bear arms” part—laws that put additional pressure on those who make and sell guns, to ensure that they’re only selling to responsible individuals, and to make it easier to sue them when they don’t. (When the government was allowed to study these things, back in the late ‘90s, they found that something like 2% of gun stores were responsible for the guns used in 50% of gun homicides.) When I was an active alcoholic, I remember going to an all-you-can-drink event at a bar, asking for a shot, and being told I’d have to pay for it. I got upset; I thought I’d paid for the right to drink anything in that bar, in whatever form I wanted, but the bartender explained to me that it was against the law to serve shots for free at an all-you-can-drink event. I remember thinking (before I proceeded to get brownout drunk) that it was a stupid law—and then realizing, years later, that yeah, it probably made sense. Nowadays I’m glad we don’t have alcoholics in charge of writing laws about alcohol; I’m hopeful for the day when we don’t have gun addicts in charge of our gun laws.

In the meantime, though, I’m happy just to contribute a different voice and a different perspective to the national discussion. The gun addicts tell us “an armed society is a polite society.” They are quick to point out countries like Switzerland where this seems to be the case, while ignoring the many many many more places where it isn’t. (Somalia in the 90s, say, or Iraq in the 00s, or Northern Ireland in the 70s, or Sicily in the 80s, or even our own Wild West, which—the gun addicts will never tell you—had a murder rate approximately ten times as great as present-day Chicago.) They are quick to badmouth Chicago, while ignoring the fact that the city’s murder rate (as opposed to raw number of murders) is below, say, Gary and Indianapolis in gun-friendly Indiana. They used to complain that Chicago was too violent because of our strict gun laws—but now that gun laws have changed in the wake of D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, and the murder rate hasn’t gone down, they are busy looking for other gun solutions to our gun problems. The voices of the gun addicts should not be the only ones heard on this topic, even though they are often the loudest.

¤

Getting back to Joe Peterson.

Joe and I live at opposite ends of Chicago. Ours is a city divided, half Manhattan and half Detroit. There are prosperous neighborhoods where one is likely to never hear a shot fired in anger; there are others where it’s a regular occurrence, where the responsible course of action is probably to sell one’s home and move somewhere where you’ll never hear gunshots in the night, or find spent 9mm casings in front of your building, or step over a murder victim’s blood on your way to work. (All of which have happened to me.) It’s a disempowering feeling, in part because so much of it is due to lax gun laws in other states—an estimated 60% of guns used in Chicago crimes were originally sold outside Illinois—and in part because carrying a gun oneself wouldn’t make any difference, as it’s not violence directed towards you. It’s the type of violence that the leaves the average law-abiding individual physically unharmed, while steadily undermining their community, hollowing it out through the steady outflow of internal refugees to the well-policed safe spaces of the suburbs. This type of violence depopulates vast swaths of city until the only people left are the ones comfortable with lawlessness, or actively engaged in it—or simply too poor to flee.

When Joe sent me this manuscript, it read—like many of his works—like a dreamy urban fable, a fanciful tale of male gun fantasies gone horribly wrong. A lot of his gun-related scenes were wrong, too; I knew we’d have to tweak them quite a bit just to make them remotely plausible. To help him rewrite things, I offered to end my longtime gun hiatus and take him to the range. For it is a full sensory experience, covering everything but taste—the look of a proper sight picture, the feeling of trigger-finger pressure chemically converted to the quick kick of recoil, the muffled-but-loud sound of each round, the smell of gun oil and the whiff of spent gunpowder, and the sight, at last, of lead-shredded paper targets. (That’s part of the allure, I think—part of the reason the gun addicts are so reluctant to look elsewhere for their happiness. It’s a fun activity that stimulates the senses.) It seemed best to have Joe experience it, so as to write about it convincingly.

Joe never took me up on the offer. I did a bunch of editing, and I tried to keep things semi-realistic while still retaining the dreamy qualities of Joe’s writing. Still, we never made it out to the range. Knowing his personal history, I understand why.

But you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Postscript:

Although Gunmetal Blue won’t officially be up for sale until December, we got a few production copies ready in time for the Chicago Book Expo on October 1. Interest was very high; we sold all of those books, and even one of the advance reader copies we’d brought along to give away to prospective reviewers. I went to bed content that we’d done something good; I woke horrified by yet another worst mass shooting in American history, a title that’s been claimed and reclaimed far too many times in the last decade.

The awful thing about shootings like this isn’t just that they happen—it’s that they’re the only time when there’s even a semblance of a conversation about possibly making the smallest and most incremental changes to our nation’s gun laws. We are not the only nation to grapple with violence; we are not the one with the worst murder rate—but we are the main source of firearms for the nations that ARE, the countries to the south of us that are riven by drug violence and American guns. (87% of the weapons seized by Mexican authorities originated in the United States, for instance, according to one survey by the U.S. GAO.) And we are the one where a substantial portion of the population acts like events like this are as inevitable as the weather. So all I can ask is: What kind of freedom is this, America?

But in my outrage and disgust, I can at least take comfort in putting another voice out there, a serious story that somehow manages to be whimsical as well. Gun addicts rightly point out that much of the entertainment put out by the so-called Hollywood liberal elites still glorifies gun violence. And they have a point; there is indeed an air of hypocrisy in someone like Matt Damon decrying guns while also fetishizing them in lucrative franchises like the Bourne movies.

This book is something else entirely, something that, for all its whimsy and unreality, still captures some essential truths about life on the gun range, about the fantasies of romantic violence that fuel so many people to spend millions at the range—all these middle-aged civilians fantasizing about being the next Chris Kyle, or stopping the next Omar Mateen. I do hope you’ll give it a read.

NOVEMBER BOOKS

We’re thrilled to finally announce the publication dates for three awesome books—all of which will also be available at the Chicago Book Expo this Sunday! (And at the Heartland Fall Forum in Lombard on October 13th.)

First, from Canadian author Steve Passey, is Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock, an inimitable collection about beautiful losers plumbing the depths of the Great Recession. I always want to call it “literary sleaze,” because there’s an element of that to it—bullet wounds and nudie bars and El Caminos and such—but there’s also so much more, a set of flawed-but-intriguing people stumbling through their unforgettable lives. The book will be officially available November 1, but you can get it here.

Next comes Old Open, a tremendously entertaining absurdist road novel about an aging Phoenix widower who discovers his neighbor is an expert on a mysterious UFO phenomenon. It’s been earning comparisons to Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo, but as is the case with all awesome authors, there’s also something inimitable and unique about Alex Higley’s work. This book’s an absolute delight to read; we’re officially launching it on November 7th, but it’s available for preorder as well.

Last—but far from least—we’re thrilled to have Giano Cromley back for another round with his excellent collection What We Build Upon the Ruins. This elegant but hard-hitting set features a devastating triptych of stories about a family that’s been pierced by tragedy; it’s memorable and touching and honest and true, an unforgettable series about being blindsided by tragedy, and struggling to rebuild in the face of great sorrow. It officially launches on November 14th, but along with the other books, you can get it at Book Expo, or preorder it online here.

More announcements to come!

NORTH AND CENTRAL - BOB HARTLEY

It’s been a busy month for Tortoise Books, but amidst all the hoopla, we wanted to officially (and somewhat belatedly) announce the publication of Bob Hartley’s North and Central!

This book’s a beautifully bleak literary crime novel set in a bar on Chicago’s West Side during the winter of ’78-’79, one of the most notoriously bitter seasons in Chicago history. The characters are caught up in the cold cynicism of corruption and cronyism—and yet there’s a warmth to this work, the beautiful amber glow of alcohol and nostalgia. False feelings, perhaps, but ones that feel real enough in the moment.

I grew up watching Cheers and wanting the life they sang about in that all-too-perfect theme song; I craved that place where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. In my 20s, I found a neighborhood bar that seemed to fit the bill. I made some true friendships, had a few fun flings, and even fell into one of the great loves of my life, but even on those nights when I did know everybody’s name and they were all glad I came, I was starting to feel antsy and agitated and profoundly lonely, an ache so deep no quantity of $2.75 High Lifes could soothe it. (At least, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a workable number; I usually lost count around 14 or so.) So for me, at least, bar life proved to be a beautiful lie.

And that’s why I fell in love with this manuscript. As I never tire of telling people, it’s an anti-Cheers, a story about a place where everybody knows your nickname, and they’re tired of you coming around because you’re a degenerate. The character dynamics line up well with what I saw of dive bars—the false fronts and phony posturing. And yet behind every façade, there was, and is, something true and real, something ugly, perhaps, but all the more interesting for being authentic.

I’m trying to write the story behind the story for every new author, and this one is (I think) as cool as any. Another local publisher sent Bob my way, all the way back in July of 2015. I’d gotten into publishing in no small part because of my own frustrations with people not reading what I’d sent, and here came an object lesson in how we eventually become what we hate: I thanked Bob for submitting and promptly forgot to read his work. But he graciously wrote me a full six months after our initial email exchange to see where I was at with it. I was horrified that I’d forgotten about it, and even more so when I cracked it open to see what I’d been missing. It was instantly engrossing; it sounded like the kind of thing Bukowski and Springsteen would have written if they’d collaborated. For me, writing’s less about style and more about authentic emotion, and the opening action (a bar owner hammering dents into quarters) had me hooked; it pulled me in to a delightfully cynical world of crime and kickbacks and crooked cops, and it made me want to spend time in that world.

There were issues with the initial manuscript—I wasn’t nuts about the original title (The Ceiling Falls), and the ending of Bob’s first draft didn’t quite work for me. But oddly enough, that actually helped make for a more satisfying publishing experience. For Bob was more than willing to keep honing the manuscript, to work together and turn it into the best possible version of itself. I suggested a few ideas for a new ending, and Bob considered them, and then came up with an amazing ending of his own, one that lingered in my head long after I’d finished reading. He came up with a new and better title, naming it after the intersection where the bar in question sat in a way that evoked the Midwest in general. During the editing process, Bob let me rework some things and add a line of dialogue here and there; he was both gracious enough to allow me to make some changes when I had a good idea, and resolute enough to stick to his guns when I had a bad one.

Of course, finishing the manuscript is only the first finish line in a long series of races. Bob and I both worked to find cover images and source them. (Finding cool pictures is relatively easy—tracking down the rights owners and getting an economical price for a picture can be much harder.) I came up with a cover concept that worked, but I couldn’t quite execute it as well as necessary—our intern, Jaime Harris, did some great work to bridge the gap between a good idea and a great finished product. And Bob and I have both been busy with pre- and post-publication work; it’s not enough to have a perfect product if nobody knows it exists.

A month in, we’re tremendously happy with both the story and with how it’s being received. Our blurbists saw in the finished product what I’d seen as potential in the manuscript—a new Chicago classic, worthy to sit on the shelf with the other great books we’ve published, and with past classics like The Man with the Golden Arm and Studs Lonigan. Kudos to Bob on a job well done!

OLD OPEN - ALEX HIGLEY

We’re tickled pink to officially announce that we’ll be publishing Alex Higley’s Old Open this August!

This story centers on a widower in Arizona, a man living in an empty existential sun-baked suburb who realizes that his mysterious neighbor is an expert on a possible extraterrestrial phenomenon. An odd premise to read about in a query, perhaps—but any premise can be well-executed by the right author, and it turned out that Alex had the chops not only to pull it off, but to do so with panache. There are echoes of Don DeLillo and Radiohead—artists who eloquently speak to the loneliness and longing of modern life. And yet his work is more than the sum of its influences—there’s a heart and soul to it, a warm sensitivity to the plight of its protagonist, and to the quirks and foibles of the people he comes across along the way. What’s more, the book somehow manages to evoke these existential questions while also being laugh-out-loud funny. We’re grateful for the chance to publish it, and looking forward to sharing it with you!

Joseph G. Peterson

We're thrilled to announce that we'll be publishing Joseph G. Peterson's excellent Gunmetal Blue in November!

We (the royal we, you know, the editorial...) met Joe at Book Cellar's Local Authors Night way way back in 2014 or so, and we did the responsible good support-the-local-scene thing and checked out his book (albeit on Kindle), and we're glad we did, because he's a tremendous Chicago voice, a truly inimitable chronicler of the lovable ne'er-do-well. We've since read everything he's written, and picking favorites is tough, but for our money, the best of his published work is probably Wanted: Elevator Man. Still, there's a new contender waiting in the wings--and we get to coach this one along!

You should read his other stuff in the meantime. For real, though!