
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