January 24, 2022: Are You Going to Write a Book? Part 1

I did. Once! Learned a lot!

Funny story:

During the Great Recession, I spent 19 months job hunting, and blogging about it, My blog would not have been subtitled Great Tips For Finding Your Dream Job. It was more: My Interview With A Guy Who Has a Porn-Distribution Warehouse. It was meant to be wry dispatches from a long hard slog.

My friend Gary told me I would need to meet 200 people in order to find my next job (he was right: 204 before I landed a part-time temp job, 211 before I landed a full-time job). I wrote about those people.  

Once the natural end came (a job!), I decided to convert the blog to a book, and send a copy to the people who had helped me on the job-hunt trail, as a thank-you.  Actually, my new boss-to-be was … intense, and he had me sign a contract that said if I created anything at all, ANYTHING, while I was working for him - if I so much as wrote a song that went platinum, though the job he hired me for was not songwriting, but website design - all the profits were HIS.

Nineteen months searching for a job. I was going to sign that contract.

So in the two weeks before that new job started, I got an ISBN and turned the blog into a book (free software is out there), and I stipulated that the job-hunting book predated my employment with Mr. Intensity, and it was my intellectual property, and any potential profits were mine own.

NOT THAT I THOUGHT the book would turn a profit! I self-published it, to give it as a gift to my kind helpers. I listed their names in an honor roll, in the back. But it belonged to me, not the new boss.

The unfortunate loss in blog-to-book conversion was all the photos accompanying the blog posts. They would have cost a fortune to reproduce, and I kept only two, front and back book covers. The rest had to go. The content held up okay without them. I can remember one photo I really hated to part with, a stark plant in the lobby of a place where I had an awful interview.  Worth a thousand words.

The story isn’t funny, you say? Hang in.

The Turn-Your-Blog-Into-A-Book software was free, and/but it had only cheap-looking fonts. I wanted a nicer font. It was my baby.

So I swore my way  through the formatting process, muttering NO, “CUSTOM,” and the program kept asking ARE YOU SURE?, and I was saying YES, GET ON WITH IT, and when my first copy arrived, it had a small rectangle of small print on each page, amid ample white space.

(This picture looks vaguely reasonable, but it wasn’t. It was a knee-slapper.)

SO. I threw myself upon my professional editor friend, Connie, and she took over, and she performed a number of magical fixes.

I put the book up on Lulu and on Amazon. I had that ISBN, so why not?  I bought author copies from Lulu (less expensive), sent them to friends, family and job hunt helpers. I had extras, and when I got invited to talk to job-hunt-support-groups, I gave those away as door prizes. (Whoa, wait, now it's on Barnes and Noble as an e-book. I don't recall that. What fresh format hell lurks there?)

Every now and then, some unknown person would buy a copy, which was a pleasant surprise. I believe I got two royalty checks, for maybe $24. The checks came with a note reminding me this was taxable income. (OF COURSE I reported it! I am not a Trump!) I fantasized that somewhere, a doting mother in law had bought a copy to bolster the spirits of her DIL who was trying so hard to find a job, and who needed a laugh, not a how-to tome. 

You know how some of your friends are just the very best encouragers in the whole world? They are people who find something positive to say, no matter what, who give you an award for “Best Use of Orange!” when you draw a stick figure?

That was my friend Bonnie. Bonnie actually DID give out awards for stuff like “Best Use of Orange!” when we had a big gathering of families with little kids, every summer. It was a highlight of the weekend, the Kid Art Contest, and Bonnie’s free-form awards. She died years ago.

You see where this is going, right?

Just a few months ago, Steve, Bonnie’s husband back in the day, stumbled upon an old lode of copies of my book, and he mailed them to me, in case I had a use for them. So Bonnie was my mystery customer. I should have guessed. (Yes, it's like when your aunt bribed her bridge club to go to your show! SAME STORY!)

And astonishingly, two of Bonnie's copies were the benighted itsy-bitsy print version! The one I thought had existed only in one single sample, only long enough for me to throw it away and ask Connie to take over. (Yes, I see the Bonnie/Connie thing. Can’t be helped.)

So this must mean (I've been watching Broadchurch, so maybe you could read the following revelation in a David Tennant Scottish accent:) that I called Bonnie when that botched sample arrived, and I told her about it, and she went out and BOUGHT TWO of it, despite its being botched. And then later, she bought a bunch of the readable version. And put them away. 

What’s not to love about that?

I was going to toss the two tiny-prints, but I think I will save one.

Also, for the record: THIS blog, the pandemic-years blog, is going to STAY a blog, because I like the photos. And because it's searchable! If you want to find the one I wrote about a hamster, just use the search box.