Because No One Asked For It Is Dead

This is the cover.

 

Because No One Asked For It is finished. I mailed off the last round of copies earlier this week. It’s nice to be done. I’m over it, next thing.

Of all the projects I’ve done recently, this one was the most involved. I had nothing to write for this project since it was a collection of previously written stuff. I went through all of my files and found 60 or 70 articles I thought represented what I most often write. From there I whittled them down, and then whittled them down a little more, and more still. I wanted it to be oppressively massive, but I didn’t want it to be too much money for people to buy.

Since each printed copy was almost twelve dollars to print and another six to mail, I was worried about losing too much money. In the end, printing and mailing cost over $650.00. Because of this worry about losing money, I was very diligent in collecting what I could. This meant that I had to post over and over again, and send multiple follow up messages to more than a handful of people. In some cases, folks just ignored me when I reminded them they said they wanted the book. (This annoys me beyond belief, just say you don’t want it!) For others it was the hounding that I found so taxing. Asking people over and over for money is no fun…no fun. When the overhead is much less, I’ll print a bunch and go on peoples’ word. If they don’t pay, I don’t care. Not in this case. I wanted to print as many as I could without losing too much money. In the end I didn’t lose money, but the project drug on for over a month because of that. 

I used these flyers to drum up some guilt purchases.

 

Intrusive thought. When I was putting this thing together, I thought about the difference between me doing the thing and it getting published, like actually published. First off, no one would have published this thing, there’s no reason. What is the book even about? Why would anyone care? I did it because I wanted to see it exist, which could seem silly. If the thing had been “officially” done, I figure it would have been easy to move more of them. I think people would have been impressed, but without that corporate stamp of approval, I’m just another diluted self-publishing guy. At least I didn’t write one of those sad end of life memoirs…no, I’ll start on that in my 50’s.

This project was something I was planning on doing for about a year. It got put to the side when I worked on my dad’s book. The idea was to have a nice volume of stuff.  A collection of things under one cover I selected as many wide ranging topics as I could and brought them together. There’s no way that any one person has read everything in the book, it just isn’t possible.

I was thankful that Eddie Garcia and John Held Jr. were so kind to write things for it. Gerald Bosch supplied a tone appropriate blurb. Although I was excited they leant their words, I wanted them to know that only a few copies would exist and I doubt most of those people would ever read them.

I ended up printing 41 copies. Most copies I dropped off to friends and family. Since I was leaning on them, I made sure to give them a lot of stuff they didn’t want. I added in a bunch of broadsides and even some framed collages. I especially liked leaving one copy at the end of someone’s dirt road because I was worried a colorful character might appear from the brambles and shoot me if I went down it. When I relayed this information, the recipient never responded. I guess they received what I left.

I had two printings. The first was 30 copies and the second round was 10 copies. When everything was said and done, I had even made a little money off the project. That money is already spent. A few weeks ago I finished a book of thematically linked broadsides I’m going to print. Those will be sent to the folks that bought the bigger, more expensive book. All I want to do is for some of the more expensive projects to break even, or at best pay for the others. In this case it worked out. The book was a success and I made another thing with the meager profits. 

Back cover.