Katzenhaus Books

Here is one (updated) explanation of why I wrote this book. Yes, it dates me, but, hey, I admit I'm old. What's important here is the whole idea of change--how rapidly it can occur, and how differently we must respond to new ideas.

In 1981, I had finished typing my master’s thesis. I had used an electric typewriter, but had still struggled with the need to produce three letter-perfect carbon copies. Do you remember what a pain that was? No strikeovers allowed, and erasures needed to be invisible. All footnotes went at the bottom of the page, not the end, and, believe me, a thesis in medieval history has a lot of footnotes. We had an elaborate system of typing a list of all footnotes first, so that we could tell how many lines each one would take. Then, armed with the knowledge of how many lines were available within the margins of a page, we stopped every time a footnote number appeared in the text. We counted the separating line, the space before the note, and the number of lines in the note itself—then subtracted that number from the number of lines available for text. Type another footnote number on the same page? Stop and recalculate. When a fellow student told me about a new-fangled invention called a word processor that would allow text changes and copy making without erasers and carbon paper, it sounded like another impossible dream.

In 1985, I was ready to start working on my doctoral dissertation. My supportive and understanding husband bought me a brand new IBM desk computer. It had a memory of only 256K, used 5-inch floppy disks, and sported a black screen with glowing green letters, but it was beautiful. Out went the electric typewriter, in came the computer, and I never looked back. But within the university, and particularly in the English department, I heard discussions about the damage computers were going to do to research. “How will we know what an author really wrote,” scholars were asking, “if we can’t see the handwritten manuscripts and the changes the author made?”

In 1991, I was a full-fledged assistant professor of medieval history at a small liberal arts college. I was excited that year to be helping to sponsor a traveling exhibit of 10th and 11th century manuscripts from the Monastery of St. Gall. A friend and I were co-lecturing in a class on monasticism to go along with the exhibit. A student brought me a cartoon showing several monks standing around a copy machine, with a caption reading, “It’s a miracle.” The cartoon was an obvious takeoff on the current ad campaign being run by the Xerox company, but I kept it taped to the door of my office until the tape cracked and the edges of the paper curled up and started to flake away. Life seemed to be getting simpler all the time, and fewer and fewer of us were questioning what was being lost in the process. I certainly wasn’t.

Then it was the year 2000—the turn of a century—and people were worried about the consequences of changing from the 19s to the 20s. What would happen to all those printed checkbooks, invoices, order forms, and account statements with a blank space for the date that looked like this: _____________, 19___? There was near panic over the possibility that on January 1, 2000, computers would crash and lose all their records because they had not been programmed to handle the dates of the 21st century. We adapted, of course, but a bit of nostalgia began to creep in. One contest asked, “What was the most important invention of the past 1000 years?” The run away winner? Gutenberg’s printing press, which made books available to ordinary people.

But by 2012, we were witnessing the decline of bookstores, publishers, and paper-based publications of all sorts. Bookstore chains like Borders were closing, newspapers were folding (not meant as a pun!), magazines were shrinking, and electronic editions of books were outselling printed versions by a wide margin. Earlier that year, I attended a writers' conference, where authors were asking if it was worth it any longer to publish bound versions of our books. I confess, I didn’t know. I had a carton of unsold trade paper books sitting in my closet, while checks from Kindle kept rolling in every month.

I couldn’t claim to have a crystal ball to tell me what the future held for writers. I didn’t even know what it held for me as a writer. But for whatever the voice of experience is worth, this small book offered some suggestions on finding one's way through the thickets of the publishing world. I was only a small mouse among the hordes of new authors, but I had found a little piece of cheese, called an Amazon bestseller ranking, and II wanted to share some of the methods I used to get there. The chapters were, for the most part, culled from the blog posts I had left along the way. I was happy to scatter the crumbs of my experience and leave a trail that might help other writers find their path through the traps that lay ahead.

By the way, you won't find a food recipe among this week's blog posts. Mice don't cook. But you will find several "recipes" for producing your own best-selling book.

And be susre to pick up your free copy of the Kindle version of this book at:

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Mouse-Gets-Cheese-ebook/dp/B0076B1TE2

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