I am working on the production of my first book since
2003. Actually, I had put a preliminary
version ofo it online in just PDF files in the fall of 2011 (see this blog,
Oct. 1, 2011). It is to be called “Do
Ask Do Tell III: Speech is a Fundamental
Right, Being Listened To Is a Privilege”
I had thought then that I could simply leave the world of
non-fiction book publishing, put everything online, and move on to other
things: a novel (to be called “Angel’s Brother”), a non-fiction video, and some
screenplays.
By the early spring of 2012, just before I went to NYC for a
LGBT book fair, I started got get more calls from my on-demand publisher
(iUniverse) about trying to buy marketing packages and pump up sales of my old
books (particularly the second 2002 book, “Do Ask Do Tell II: When Liberty Is
Stressed”, written after 9/11, but less ambitious than the “epic” first book
that I first self-published with my own print run in 1997; that book went to
print-on-demand with iUniverse in late 2000 after the first printing was sold
out or depleted).
The basic problem with these appeals is that usually, old “public
policy” books don’t sell, because history quickly tends to outrun what the
author wrote. Some old fiction can have
that problem, particularly spy or thriller fiction, if it is grounded in
circumstances that no longer exist and wants the reader to take the protagonist’s
position seriously. That is in contrast
to true historical fiction, like “Gone with the Wind”; the best of this always
sells forever. That’s the stuff in
literature classes centuries later.
For each of my first three books (which include the pamphlet
“Our Fundamental Rights” (1998), the only work not with a DADT title), I
maintained the content with “footnote files”, which added notes keyed to
specific chapters and pages in the printed books.
In time, I would add “sidebar” files and separate essays,
and eventually migrate to blogging in 2006.
There were some other experiments (like with Java starter, and
eventually my web presence became diffuse and hard to pin down. That’s a topic for a different post. What matters here, right now, is the value of
publishing a new book in “finite form”, and being willing to play ball with the
commercial world on how well it does.
The idea of a book, or sequence of books (like a franchise),
with web supplements that are closely keyed to the books, makes it easier for
third parties to work with an author like me, because it is easier for them to
wrap their arms around (conceptually speaking) what I have done. It’s hard to do that with a sprawl of “autonomous”
blogs. To work with others and gain more
opportunities from media third parties (including “the movies”), I do need more
cohesion in my presence, again. I did
have that cohesion for a couple years from 1997 onto 2000 or so, after my first
book came out. That’s partly because
social media as we know it today didn’t exist yet, and it was easier to focus
on a smaller set of ways of delivering content. The Web 2.0+ world has made it
much harder for an author (like me, at least) to keep a presence coherent.
The new book is going to comprise five chapters, topical
rather than chronological. There will be
a prologue and epilogue. In some
topical areas, there is some overlap with the material in the other books,
particularly in some specific areas like the controversy over self-publishing,
and in the direction of the “fair and prosperous workplace”. The “story” narratives will mostly emphasize
history since 2002, but there is some more detailed coverage of a few events
that happened as far back as 1960.
The book, as described, is often rather abstract. I keep finding different entry points into
discussions of various ethical (and therefore social and political) problems,
so sometimes I find myself traveling in circles, rather like a train following
a very complicated model railroad track layout, covering almost the same
material from different vantage points and viewing angles.
Inevitably, after publication, more issues emerge. That’s
partly because history changes quickly (with legislation, litigation, court
opinions, and all kinds of incidents) and partly because in my own mind I tend
to develop new entry points into the same material and draw a certain focus to
these new points. So it will be appropriate
to have some core supplementary essays online (as there were for the 1997
book), and a (new) blog with footnotes keyed to the content of any of the books
(including supplementary core essays), with an “inverted list” (in relational
database terms) to the blog entries so that the reader can trace all the
content from the books.
I do think that for authors and artists today, a mixture of
various media (books, web blogs, social media, music, video) can be
effective. CNN just presented the work
of Marisha Pressl, “Night Film”, as an example of a multi-media project. I have just heard about it, and so I can’t “review”
it. But the feedback I seem to get from
the business world, especially book publishers, that it is morally and
practically important to be able to sell what you write in fixed, printed form.
That is still true even “as the world turns”.
In addition to the “non-fiction” book I’ve described, I’m
actually planning to include three fictional excerpts. They will comprise:
(1)
A Chapter of a 1969 unpublished novel “The
Proles”, which I wrote by hand in Army barracks at Fort Eustis, VA. This chapter gives an account, with
fictitious names (including for me) of my fourteen weeks in Army Basic Combat
Training at Fort Jackson SC early in 1968.
The history of that year is a backdrop.
And, yes, I did get recycled.
(2)
A fiction story, “Expedition” (1981), where I
investigate strip mining in Appalachia with a former graduate school roommate,
and make a surprising find
(3)
A new story, “The Ocelot the Way He Is”
(2013). At the time that his mother is
about to pass away in a hospice, a college-age “acquaintance” invites “Bill” to
a rural ashram, where Bill is shown an even more apocalyptic secret.
It’s possible that these three items might have to be
packaged as a second book, a kind of “DADT III-B”.
I’ll continue the discussion of the “web portion” of this “final
exam” on my main blog soon.
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