For the longest time, publishing something was mostly impossible for most people. The Great Publishing Houses – which sounds like something from Dune – are giant machines, with carefully calculated formulas to know just how many books they need to sell to make a profit. It’s no different than selling cereal: Many of the boxes of cereal on grocery store shelves won’t be sold, and they were never meant to be sold, and the manufacturers are okay with that, because they’ve calculated the amount that they do need to actually sell in order to stay profitable while figuring in just how much can be discarded.
It used to be the same with books. Publishers would create a print run of a certain number of copies, sending out so many of them to bookstores across the country. Some would be sold – enough, hopefully, to cover costs – while many copies would just sit there, unsold, forever. Then, after a certain amount of time, they would be removed – either destroyed, or “remaindered”, to be sold at rock-bottom prices in bargain bins.
It’s an investment by the publishers to go to the trouble and expense to create all of those physical books, hoping to make their money back on enough of them to justify the waste of the others. That’s why they’re so restrictive about what they publish: They must meet the razor-thin edge of profit. But that makes the path to being published a very narrow needle’s eye.
Several years ago, the paradigm began to shift. Online sales began to disrupt the physical bookstore model. And as people ordered online, some publishers figured out that they didn’t have to have back rooms and warehouses jammed full of physical books sitting around waiting for a physical customer to enter a store or a dealer’s room, examine it, and possibly buy it. Instead, when an online order arrived, the manufacturing of the book could commence right then, only as needed, and not months or years earlier.
This print-on-demand idea had been around for a while. (When I was going back to school for my second degree in civil engineering, the campus print shop did the same thing for certain locally produced text-books, printing them as they were purchased on fancy copying machines.) Publishers and authors began to take advantage of technological advances to produce their own books – straight from author to reader, happily eliminating the giant publishing middlemen.
Steve Emecz of MX Publishing brilliantly took advantage of this, building his business and allowing authors who would have never had a chance otherwise – like me – to create and connect.
But there are certain legitimate complaints.
In the olden days, the giant publishers slow-walked books through the process, so that it sometimes took literally years for a book to actually be published. Authors could actually die before ever seeing their work excreted at the far end of the giant publisher’s process. The print-on-demand process, by comparison, is nearly immediate. As part of the large publishers’ slow walk, there were battalions of editors who went through books forwards, backwards, and upside down. With the new technology, where a file can be loaded with the book manufacturer with very little effort and time spent, there is clearly less editing… and mistakes slip through.
Some readers continue to expect flawless and perfect works, as if legions of editors were behind the curtain as in days of old, still involved in the process. For this type of reader/consumer, the new format of publishing will always be pain they just can’t ease. That’s why, with this set of my stories, I want to apologize up front to those who will find typos – because in spite of every effort, there will be some typos.
In my own case, I love to write and edit, and I spend a sizeable amount of time doing both, but I also have a very busy and rich life doing other things. I spend time with my family, and I work more-than-full time as a civil engineer, fitting in these Sherlockian writing and editing projects during lunch hours, evenings, and weekends. It’s a high wire act with no safety net. I’m the writer and sole editor of the stories in this collection. My wife, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and two Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Library Science, and with a first job as a copy editor, used to go through my stories and catch what I missed – because you never ever see your own mistakes – but she works way more than full time at her own job, and she just doesn’t have any extra time to spare for playing uncredited editor on these projects. So they’re all on me.
It’s the same with the anthologies that I edit – any mistake that slips through in the end is my fault, because there are no other editors. When assembling a Holmes anthology, I receive the stories, format them to the “house style”, print them on 8½ x 11-inch paper, edit and revise, go back and forth with emails to the author – sometimes a lot of emails – and then plug them into a giant Word document for more editing and revision. But from the time I get the story until I send the final file to the publisher, there isn’t anyone else to edit, and no time to work one into the process. It’s the new publishing paradigm.
As a print-on-demand publisher, MX does not have squadrons of editors. The business consists of three part-time people who also have busy lives elsewhere – so the editing effort largely falls on the contributors. Some readers and consumers out there in the world absolutely despise this – apparently forgetting about all those self-produced Holmes stories and volumes from decades ago with awkward self-published formatting and loads of errors that are now prized as collector’s items.
These critics should recall that every one of these new volumes by various authors – even those that have typographic and formatting errors – are the very best efforts that can be produced by very sincere people who don’t have professional full-time editors to help, and who would never ever have had the opportunity to publish otherwise, and because of these authors, there is thankfully more Sherlockian content in the world.
I’m personally mortified when errors slip through – ironically, there will probably be errors in this essay – and I apologize now, but without a regiment of editors looking over my shoulder, this is as good as it gets. Real life is more important than writing and editing, and only so much time can be spent preparing these books before they are released into the wild. I hope that you can look past any errors, small or huge, and simply enjoy these stories, and appreciate the effort involved, and the sincere desire to add to The Great Holmes Tapestry.
And in spite of any errors here, there are more Sherlock Holmes stories than there were before, and that’s a good thing.
David Marcum