For more E.M. Tippetts, visit her author site. Emily as writes science fiction and fantasy. Visit emilymah.com or follow her on Twitter.

I read the Amazon description of Paint Me True. Could you expand on it just a bit? Without giving out too many spoilers can you tell me a little more about Eliza and the scruffy video gamer?

Eliza is the last surviving daughter in a family cursed with the BRCA gene mutation, which makes the carriers susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. On top of this, the family’s had awful luck. Women don’t tend to see their fortieth birthdays and Eliza’s lost two sisters, two aunts, and a lot of cousins. Of all her female relatives on her mother’s side, only her Aunt Nora survives, so these two share a very close bond as survivors in a silent war. It’s Aunt Nora who suggested that Eliza follow her dreams and become an artist and who continues to give emotional support as Eliza struggles financially. At the opening of the book, Eliza is living rent free in her stepmother’s old house in Portland. She’s thirty years old, and about to age out of the singles ward. None of the daring life decisions she’s made have paid off. She’s broke, single, and there’s no end to either condition in sight.

Len, the scruffy nerd, works as a sysadmin at a law firm and likes to spend his free time playing video games. He’s had a crush on Eliza for a long time, but he’s aware of the fact that she’s only dating him because she has no other prospects. At the beginning of the book, he’s finally coming around to the idea that he doesn’t deserve to be treated this way. I assume most readers will identify with him in the first scene, as I think he is the most sympathetic character.

Your previous novel for the LDS Market has fairly strong Mormon elements, in fact it was about an LDS convert. How does Mormonism figure into Paint Me True?

All of the main characters are LDS, though not all are active. Eliza’s at an age (30) when she’s still considered young by American standards, but is verging on an old maid by Mormon standards, so she feels trapped in a netherworld. If she stays true to her faith, she’ll stand out as an unmarried woman in a family ward. If she leaves the faith, she’ll have to make her way in mainstream culture, and she doesn’t have the first clue how to do that. She’s never been on a date with a non-Mormon.

And as with all my LDS novels, there are prayers and revelations that let you know my character isn’t going it alone. It’s written from a religious person’s worldview.

Why did you decide to publish it as an ebook through Amazon Digital Services (ADS)? [Wm adds 1/23 at 11:10 am: the novel is also available on Smashwords and for the Nook at BN.com. I focused on Amazon because it tends to lead to the most sales, but don't forget those other platforms if you are thinking of self-publishing.]

My main goal in life and writing is to make it as a science fiction and fantasy writer, so if it makes sense, my LDS and romance books have been sort of a hobby, something else I did on the side for fun. The usual contracts offered by LDS publishers are not worth the hassle to me. They tend to be grabby, demanding way more rights than is good for either party, and in my experience these companies are used to working with people desperate to be published authors, and that isn’t me. As an attorney who’s worked with a lot of writers, I do know what a standard publishing contract from a national house looks like, and I’m not interested in settling for less in order to get published in such a small niche as the LDS market. The prospect of not ever getting published in LDS fiction doesn’t scare me.

When the indie publishing movement got underway, it looked like a lot of fun. I decided to join up with my romance pen name so that my science fiction and fantasy prospects wouldn’t be affected one way or the other. I also decided that I really needed to learn how to build a platform as a writer, as this is becoming more and more necessary, so again, I figured I’d try it out with my romance pen name so that if I failed miserably, the speculative fiction writer in me would escape unscathed.

Do you have any tips you could share for other authors who are interested in publishing through ADS?

Yes, I’d say first of all, examine why you’re doing this. If you have a huge stack of rejection letters, be open to the possibility that there is a good reason. Publishing is a business. You’ll succeed or fail based on the quality of your product and your marketing efforts. Secondly, I’d say be ready to work your tail off on marketing. Don’t expect to sell any copies if you don’t work for those sales. To put this in perspective: there are 8 million Kindle books on Amazon. When I sold my first copy, I was ranked somewhere in the 100,000 range, which means that I outranked 7.9 million other books by making one sale. When I say most Kindle books don’t go anywhere, I mean nearly all Kindle books don’t go anywhere. No one is going to trawl through all those titles to discover your genius, and someone who works harder will beat you, no matter how inferior their product. Last of all, I’d say enjoy it. Find what’s fun about it, because if you aren’t having fun, there’s little reason to bother. Even if you are ultimately a success, you’ll start out with months making little to no money and the very real prospect that It might not get better. I have a lot of fun designing the chapter headings and putting in graphics. I love being able to sell a book that looks pretty (to me, at least!) And I love seeing what kinds of outreach to fans move copies. It’s liberating to know that I can make some difference here.

What are you digging right now in terms of art? (Mormon-themed or not; fiction or not)

I read a lot of children’s books these days, and I love my Kindle Fire because I can display them in color and let my boys turn the pages.

What else you currently working on?

I’m writing another LDS novel, working title: Castles on the Sand. It’s starting to roll forward with its own momentum, but I’ve got some characters whom I really need to figure out. I’ll be spending the next few days daydreaming up a storm as I try to understand who they are and how they’re likely to behave in various circumstances — I need to understand that before I start trying to move the plot forwards.

And then I’m always working on a short story that I hope to sell to a good short fiction market. I’ve sold two stories to Analog and two to Black Gate and I’d like to maintain a relationship with both. That’s where, in the speculative fiction market, you’re likely to get noticed by editors and agents.

Thanks, Emily!

I’m going to give the long version of the answer first, which begins with Jorge Luis Borges. I love his short stories, and one of my favorites is “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In that story, the characters discuss the existence of a novel which is also a labyrinth; a novel which follows multiple “paths” and alternate realities at once. With this concept, Borges is considered the inventor of the hypertext novel, the concept behind such later innovations as “choose your own adventure.” Reading “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and another postmodern classic, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, as an undergrad, started me thinking about postmodern story structure and time and ultimately led to The Year of the Boar. My story is not nearly as complex or tradition-bending as Borges or Calvino, but that’s where it has its origins. The timeline of The Year of the Boar is based on the Chinese Zodiac, something I’ve been fascinated with since I was a child reading the placemats at my grandparents’ favorite Chinese restaurant. The concept of the years of the zodiac, and that restaurant, and my grandparents, actually, show up in the first chapter of the book. The rest of the book is structured by year – scenes take place first in 1957, then 1969, 1981, 2005 – all the year of the rooster. Part two of the book goes back in time to 1946 and begins a series of stories in the year of the dog. Part three begins with another backtrack in time, resolving storylines in the titular year of the boar.

The stories are (for the most part) actual stories that happened to myself, my family members, and people I met as a missionary in Japan. There are some fictionalized elements to build backstory, but the four main characters are all (real) women who are finding out about the LDS church and going through their conversion process, all in different times, countries and circumstances, but all parallel and intertwined.

I wrote this book while I was living in Taiwan. I had a busy job teaching and writing research during the day, and at night I would come home to a tiny rented apartment where I lived alone. I’m not particularly fond of living alone, but it was a catalyst in this case to get me to finally write down the stories I’d been planning since returning from my mission four years prior. I wanted historical details to be correct, so I did a lot of careful research on anything that took place in the past. I have a stack of letters from my paternal grandmother to the missionary who baptized her (which he sent to my family after tracking us down years later) and I relied on those to build her character since she died long before I was born. I also read a great deal of Wikipedia, which may seem like shoddy research but is actually your best friend when you live in Taiwan and your Chinese is painfully inadequate. After completing my first draft, I had several readers help me with revisions, including my mother (who is the subject of a great deal of the book and, surprisingly, didn’t take much offense at my re-creations of her personal history) and a couple friends I have who are currently studying at Nanjing University and whose knowledge of Chinese history and customs is much deeper than mine.

That was the long version of the answer. The short version is: Chinese food.

It’s rather mainstream in terms of the types of stories Mormons are used to seeing from “Mormon authors.” It’s, at first examination, a missionary story, but I like to think of it actually as a conversion story. Its essence is the process of conversion and what that means in the context of history, family, and everyday life. I do hope that The Year of the Boar brings some fresh offerings to the missionary story genre, and among those would be the perspective of sister missionaries, the experience of women in the modern world, and also a realization of the realities of the gospel in Asia. This novel spends a great deal of time in China, a land that the average church member situates behind a cold and Godless bamboo curtain. But there are Chinese Mormons (a lot of them, actually) and the Gospel is going forward in China every way it can. I wanted to share that with the American LDS population.

This is not the first time you have written and self-published a novel. How was this experience compared to the last time?

Hopefully it produced a better book! My previous book, The Lotus Eaters, (still available here at cafepress) isn’t bad for something I wrote during NaNoWriMo during the last month of my undergrad and never really revised. But that’s about where its merits run out. While that was a good experience, and an important milestone for me in reflecting and capping off my years as an LDS student at a non-LDS state university, it taught me more about the writing process than it taught anyone else about any sort of the profound subtleties I thought I was writing about. There is a reason that book will always remain a print-on-demand self-published piece, but it was a good first step towards the kind of writing I want to be producing someday.

Interestingly enough, these two books are both largely autobiographical, which I thought was what added to their believability and artistic success. But with both books, the response I’ve gotten from readers has been that their favorite parts are the ones that are the most fictional. I’m not quite sure if that means anything more than perhaps the fact that my real life isn’t as interesting as I like to think it is, but one impact it has had is that it’s made me more confident in my ability to write good fiction. My current project, which may be a lot longer in coming than these two were because it’s a graphic novel and requiring a lot more time, is a turn-of-the-century Mormon-twinged story set in San Francisco’s Chinatown called Cordelia’s Seven Female Chinese Cousins. It contains elements of an aesthetic that I’ve decided really needs to exist: Chinese steampunk. It’s a lot “further out” than anything I’ve written before, but maybe this is a good thing.

It’s really all the same thing. I’m going to go even farther than that and say that a huge segment of our life that we always thought was mechanics and skills is actually, in fact, art, and that we need to be using artistic conventions much more than we currently do. More than a writer, illustrator or graphic designer, I consider myself a teacher. But teaching is art. I’m a Ph.D. student in education and a lot of my research there is convincing me more and more that teaching and learning are arts and not sciences that we need to be evaluating as such. It’s still a really radical thing in the education world today to talk about evaluating education not as if it were a social science but as if it were an art. I am a bit of a disciple of Elliot Eisner, an educational evaluator who suggests that we need to address education the same way we address art: by writing criticism. This resonates with me because I came out of art school: I learned to be a designer by sitting in a room with my peers and my professor with our work up on the wall and we created an environment of creative criticism that at first chafed and later exalted. The atmosphere of criticism creates vibrant, interactive artists (educators/writers) who can see the holistic, shifting niche their work needs to fill and then craft ever-improving works to fill it.

Today, particularly, as the commons of ideas has shifted from a publication infrastructure to the flexible medium of online communication, our education establishment and also our literary world have the capacity to become fields driven by connoisseurs and participatory artists and the art we produce is ever improved as it is “purified by the best critics.” Maybe the rather public nature of graphic design; one of the least sacred fields of art where your creations are constantly vulnerable to market pressures, unreasonable clients and public demand, has given me this view of the nature of art and creation. But really, it works out better this way and my works are 800 times better once I’ve posted them and run through the trial of fire that is internet commentary than when I’ve kept them tucked and polished in my safe-deposit box.

But Riess went further, suggesting that novelists who can’t get a contract with Deseret Book should self-publish instead of going with any of the other publishers in the LDS market. Really?

I’m happy to admit that most of the publishers in the LDS market aren’t as professional as they should be, and have a very limited reach. I’ll also admit that the results that the small LDS publishers can get for the author will likely not be as good as if the author’s novel was published by Deseret Book or by a national market publisher. But, shouldn’t the author also ask herself if self-publishing will be as successful as publishing with these small LDS publishers?

One of the first posts I wrote after I was asked to join AMV discussed the difficulties of self-publishing, even in the current POD-driven self-publishing world. Among other things, I pointed out that self-published titles don’t reach LDS bookstores the way that even titles published with the smaller LDS publishers do. And, many authors self-publishing their books simply don’t realize how difficult self-publishing can be.

I won’t cover again all that I wrote in that post. Instead, I want to highlight another reason for supporting independent LDS publishers, you might call it a political reason: If most LDS authors self-publish, then will the lack of strong LDS publishers and a more dynamic LDS market ever change?

At least theoretically, carefully selecting a small publisher who can reach the audience or who the author can help to reach the audience for his book should give an author as much or more success than self-publishing, even if it isn’t as lucrative. And, by strengthening the small publisher, an author not only helps him or herself, but also helps fellow authors who publish with that publisher.

In the long run (again, at least theoretically), stronger small publishers in the LDS market means competition for Deseret Book, and improved opportunities for authors. In this sense, by publishing with a small publisher the author can help herself. When a market has multiple publishers, the successful author can choose between them, and likely get a better deal and better distribution in the process. And the less successful author may actually get published by a strong publisher, instead of spending a lot of time and effort learning how to publish effectively.

The problem is that the hallmark of self-publishing is its instability and impermanence. Usually self-publishing doesn’t institutionalize its ability to produce and sell—i.e., publish—books. Successful institutions learn and apply what they learn to future tasks. Like it or not, self-publishing usually learns for a single or a handful of projects, and loses that knowledge once the project(s) are done or the author has moved on.

I don’t mean to suggest that authors should never self-publish. My view is that it depends a lot on the author’s abilities and resources. For some it is probably the best move. But, I do want to reiterate what I first said soon after joining AMV, that self-publishing is a difficult path to getting published (although admittedly the only path for far too many books).

And, I also want to emphasize that self-publishing usually does little to address the overall problem we face in the LDS market. [Its not really a problem for the national market, which is well developed.] If Deseret Book is really the only LDS publisher worth publishing with, then we are indeed in a difficult situation. But even so, the only way out of it is to develop strong independent LDS publishers. And someone will need to publish their books with those publishers in order to make them strong.

Zoe Murdock owns, with her husband, H.O.T. Press, which for years published tech manuals. When she decided to write fiction–the semi-autobiographical novel Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy–she just went ahead and published it herself. (personal website, twitter)

Moriah Jovan started B10 Mediaworx to publish her novel The Proviso. The novel is the first in a six-part series. The second volume, Stay, will be released around Thanksgiving. (blog, novels website, twitter)

Riley Noehren is the author of Gravity vs. the Girl. And, yes, she published it herself under the name Forty-Ninth Street Publishers. (blog, twitter)

Table of contents

On the seemingly larger number of LDS women than LDS men in indie publishing
The future roles of traditional/indie publishers and traditional/e distribution
How to get folks to your site
On editing for publication
On paying the bills
On selling out
What we can expect from them in the future
Back to work

Now let’s start by letting them introduce themselves:

Riley Noehren: I’m Riley Noehren. I entered the indie publishing arena because I wrote a novel and was either too lazy or too underconfident to find an agent and go the traditional publishing route. I did [try that route]. I believe I sent it to all of six agents and then gave up on it for a few months before I considered publishing myself. I was promptly rejected by four of the agents. Over a year later, I still haven’t heard from the other two. Perhaps it’s a long read?

Zoe Murdock: Back in the early 80’s when the personal computer arrived on the scene my husband and I started a technical documentation company to write tech manuals. We wrote books for some of the largest computer companies in the country and some in Asia. We created H.O.T. Press to publish some of our own technical books, books which we are still selling today as e-books. When I finished my novel, Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy, the timing was perfect. Warren Jeffs was on the FBI’s most Wanted List. Polygamist wives were appearing on Oprah and the other talk shows. I started sending queries to the top New York agents and, surprisingly, got a very positive response. Lot’s of requests for the whole manuscript. And no, I never thought I would publish it myself. I went through the agent process for more than 2 1/2 years, just because I was getting so many requests and positive feedback . . . but in the end no takers. Very frustrating. My book kept demanding my attention and it was driving me crazy. I had to get it out in the world so I could get on with my life. That’s when I decided to publish it through H.O.T. Press. I have a lot I can say about that whole process of looking for an agent/publisher.

Riley Noehren: Thank goodness the Polygamists kept your topic newsworthy while the agents were sitting on your manuscript.

Zoe Murdock: Yeah. I think my “keyword” helped a lot in that way, Riley. But it also kept me from getting my book out when the timing was best.

Moriah Jovan: I spent most of the 90s writing and submitting. I got a contract with one publisher, who very soon went out of business (weird situation), so that wasn’t published. A second manuscript got me an agent (who was not all that great). A third manuscript got me a second agent (who was young). A fourth manuscript got me a call on a Saturday morning from an editor who asked me to overnight it. By Tuesday, she called me back and said she didn’t like the ending. Number two manuscript got me a call from an editor who said that she had wanted to buy mine, but she had purchased one vaguely similar to mine two months before and, while mine was superior, she couldn’t justify another to her editorial board. At the same time, I had been in a critique group for 6 years (under the auspices of an RWA chapter), and the group was struggling internally. So under all those very close calls and critique group problems, I not only stopped submitting, I stopped writing. Anyway, in 1994 I wrote a short story for one of my senior creative writing classes, and at the same time, I was taking a 400-level course in Hamlet, and a whole bunch of ideas converged to give me this little scrap of an idea, but I didn’t know how to make it work. It kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. After I quit writing and submitting, I just put it on hold. For lots of reasons, in Aug 2007, I woke up one day and my whole plot problem was solved. I had to scrap most of what I’d written and most of the idea itself, but the kernel was there. I wrote 1200 manuscript pages in 2 months.

Zoe Murdock:  I heard the “I’m already working on a similar one” excuse, Moriah. From an editor. By the way, Riley, you’ve got to send out a lot more than 6 queries. Perserverance is the name of the game.

Riley Noehren: I know, Zoe! I just didn’t have it in me as I was so busy with work and other issues. I think everyone’s comments regarding agents are relevant to the indie publishing discussion, though. It’s important to note we all attempted to go the traditional publishing route first. That’s the state of indie publishing today–it’s everyone’s second choice. In the music and film industries, the term “indie” carries a certain credibility, a pride in not having “sold out” to the suits. I hope that someday indie publishers will be considered the same, but I believe we are at the bottom of a very large hill in that regard.

Zoe Murdock: Now that I’ve done it, I think there are definitely advantages to being in charge of the publication of your own book. I like the fact that the book will be available forever and that you can change things if you want to.

Moriah Jovan: I got about 100 rejections for that book and I knew I didn’t want to go through all that again. Years and years and years of pain and suffering. The landscape had changed so much, and then I saw the e-publishers in romance doing land-office business and that’s kind of when my snobbery about self-publishing start to change.

Zoe Murdock: Wow! 1200 pages in 2 months. I can type 100 wpm, but I think that must break my record.

Moriah Jovan: Zoe, it was there in my head, all laid out. I had to wiggle a few things around and track some of the business threads of the story, but otherwise, it was all there. I just transcribed it.

Riley Noehren: Transcribing it is one thing, but I can imagine editing 1200 pages was no walk in the park.

Moriah Jovan: And then I went back and fixed as many holes as I could.

Zoe Murdock: Riley, I think the publishing industry is changing dramatically, but we are still in the middle of things. The national publishers still have all the clout when it comes to getting reviews/ interviews withthe big media outlets. And as we all know, that is important at this point.

Moriah Jovan: Anyway, I had to get over my self-publishing vanity if I ever wanted anybody to read this and that was what I wanted. Because to me, submitting constantly in the hope that you will find validation with an agent or an editor is actually the vanity.

Riley Noehren: Moriah, I think getting over one’s “self-publishing vanity” is a step every self-published author takes at some point. And as Zoe said earlier, it’s usually fueled by a desire to put one’s project to rest, to just get it out there and move on. At least that was the case for me. Of course, the reality is that, as a self-publisher, you can never fully move on from a book. You have to constantly promote it, etc.

Moriah Jovan: I also had the booming example of the electronic presses in genre romance to look at and go, “Look, they did it. They made it work. People buy those books.”

Zoe Murdock: And Moriah, I do think a book can keep on you and on you until, finally, you just have to put it out in the world. You know you’ve written something and, afterall, writing is an act of communication. There’s no communication going on when the book is in a “drawer.”

Moriah Jovan: Yes, I totally agree to that. The act of writing isn’t complete until the writing is read. It’s a communion between writer and reader.

Zoe Murdock: Boy, ain’t that the truth, Riley. The book never lets you go. And the book is never finished. Every time you rework it you learn something new, which makes you want to rework it again.

Moriah Jovan: In my case, I knew my book was hopeless for Getting Published. There was no way anybody would read it if it was just on my hard drive. My husband pushed me to it, though.

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On the seemingly larger number of LDS women than LDS men in indie publishing

From Gravity vs. the Girl: “Men tolerate silence far better than women.”

Riley Noehren: I wrote that?!

Moriah Jovan: I’m not sure you want my real answer to that.

Riley Noehren:  Well, it’s true, I’m just surprised I said it out loud.   Or put it in a book for that matter.   I agree with Moriah, these are murky waters.

Zoe Murdock: I don’t know why men don’t do it? I’m not sure they don’t.

Moriah Jovan: First of all, there’s just the general vanity of the validation of GETTING published. That happens to every writer everywhere.  Second of all, I find LDS men to be completely cultured to need things to be done by committee. I believe that LDS male writers who want to try to find this balance are not enough of outliers that they can let go of the committee mentality. I made an executive decision. That never happens at church.

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The future roles of traditional publishers vs indie publishers and traditional distribution vs e-distribution

Zoe Murdock: I think even mainstream publishers are going to go to POD. Why not? It will save printing and throwing away books they can’t sell. You can spend your money on publishing more books. Indie publishing fits right in with that. Everyone can publish their own book, but the proof will be in the pudding. Will anyone buy it? Will anyone even hear about it? It’s all about marketing. And that takes us away from writing.

Moriah Jovan: Traditional publishing popped Thanksgiving week last year. There is no going back.

Riley Noehren: I also think that, after years and years of existence, e-books are finally starting to take off.

Zoe Murdock: Yes, e-books are taking off because of all the new e-book readers. But we’ve been selling e-books for years. Probably 20-25 years. To be read on the computer. Technical books mostly, because techies are willing to do that.

Riley Noehren: Sure, Zoe. But I think the influence of mp3s for music and people watching movies on their computer has made the general public more receptive to not holding an actual book in their hands.

Moriah Jovan: I hate to rehash a whole bunch of things going on in genre romance right now, but it comes down to the fact that the ROI of writing a book and selling it is less than it is for self-publishing. I don’t have room to expound on that much here. The higher cost of POD is a lower cost of storage and shipping and waste.

Zoe Murdock: I don’t think POD books are higher cost, because of all the waste that comes when you publish in a traditional way.

Zoe Murdock: Yes, and I think the younger generations are growing up on computers and they will actually want their books on an e-book reader. But there are still a lot of older folks out there who want a book in their hands.

Moriah Jovan: Also, it’s a function of the bookstore discount, 55%. I can sell my book for $10 less on my site than it will sell to a bookstore.

Riley Noehren: POD and e-books are also a far greener method of publishing. That is going to have some clout in the future.

Zoe Murdock: Right, Riley. Green is good. And saves some on junkyard space.

Moriah Jovan: My philosophy is to give it to the customer any way s/he wants it.

Zoe Murdock: Yes, Moriah. But you’ve got to get folks to your site. How do you do that? That’s what I want to know. It’s a ton of work.

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How to get folks to your site

Moriah Jovan: Zoe, it is a ton of work. I blog. Not every day. I’m trying to now be consistent at every other day.

Moriah Jovan: I tweet. I love Twitter. Drives traffic like crazy.

Zoe Murdock: You are very good at that, Moriah. I like that you work in so many formats. I think Twitter is one of the most powerful ways to make contact. But it can get perseverative. Still, it’s great.

Riley Noehren: Zoe, I saw on your Amazon Author’s site that you have done quite a few book signings and interviews. (1) How have you arranged those, and (2) do you believe they have had a marked effect on your sales?

Zoe Murdock: Riley, I think the key to book signings are the interviews and articles that go with them. You can’t have one without the other and you’ve got to sign them up simultaneously. An event gets the bookstore interested and the bookstore gets the newspapers, etc., interested. The newspapers reach a larger audience and I think that’s the key to all the effort. [But] I think the real key to indie publishing or “direct publishing” is marketing. What else do you two do?

Moriah Jovan: We got an ad in BookPage. That didn’t do much. Other than blogging and tweeting, I don’t do much, really. I dont’ know what else to do.

Zoe Murdock: That’s an interesting thing about being in control of the publishing. You have immediate access to sales information. You know immediately what’s working and what’s not. But then there is also momentum. Things build over time.

Moriah Jovan: Yes! That’s another great thing about direct publishing. No shelf life. You don’t have a set amount of time (~90 days) to be on the shelf before it’s pulled.

Riley Noehren: I’m pretty new to the marketing game. Again, I originally published as a culmination of a project or hobby and have only recently decided to see how far I can push it. So far, almost all of my sales have been based on word-of-mouth. That is where being LDS comes in handy.

Zoe Murdock: How about other bloggers? I think that is the future, as bloggers, bookclub sites, review sites take over the role of the newspaper book pages that are rapidly falling. It’s up to you guys.

Moriah Jovan: You have time to establish your name, establish a backlist, and establish a reputation for quality.

Zoe Murdock: Or should I say, gals?

Moriah Jovan: From my background in genre romance, our marketing task is no harder than any traditionally published author’s. Actually, it’s easier. We don’t have to make sales numbers. We don’t have a shelf life (as I said). We don’t have to live in fear our contract will be canceled or our next book won’t be picked up.

Zoe Murdock: Yes, I’m having a lot of “word-of-mouth” sales too. Problem is they keep passing on the damn book. No sales there. But it’s okay, really. I love the fact that people are reading it and getting excited and passing it on.

Zoe Murdock: That’s right, Moriah. That is the great thing about indie publishing. Your book is out there forever

Riley Noehren: I agree with Zoe that established book review websites or blogs seem to be the new reference point for book-lovers.

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On editing for publication

Moriah Jovan: I think the hardest part about self-publishing was finding an editor. I had to hold my nose and jump a long way. I think she did a good job. I think it could have been better if I’d had the money to go through a second edit, but I didn’t.

Riley Noehren: I am a true self-publisher in that I edited myself. This was a mistake–in that it resulted in mistakes in the final product. And while, as you said, Moriah, you can always correct an e-book version, the print version cannot be corrected without purchasing a new ISBN and labeling it a second edition.

Zoe Murdock: I edited my own book – but it didn’t work too well because everytime I’d approach Torn by God, I’d start reading and rewriting. Couldn’t make my writing brain stop and let my editing brain take over. Well, I’m doing it now and will put up the fixes tomorrow.

Moriah Jovan: Riley, not true exactly. You can change up to 20% before you have to do that. And I refuse to edit myself. It never works and I don’t have enough faith in myself to ever be secure about it.

Zoe Murdock: I can fix my print version without a new ISBN. What I heard was as long as you don’t change more than 10%, you can keep the same ISBN. Is it 20%? I always edited our technical books and I think I have a pretty good eye for it – as long as that right brain/writer brain leaves me alone. Got to focus on one sentence at a time.

Riley Noehren: I agree. I have editing experience and am confident in my ability to edit others, but, as Zoe says, it is impossible to remove yourself from the content and focus on the technical stuff when you are both author and editor.

Moriah Jovan: However, Riley, a true self-publisher does farm out those chores he can’t or shouldn’t do himself. I have a company name and my own ISBNs and all that, plus I’ve published someone else now, so technically I’m a publisher.

Riley Noehren: I also thought it was 10%.

Moriah Jovan: Hmm….I’ll look that up. I just meant typos and stuff.

Zoe Murdock: I’ve got help. My husband and I do that for each other, but I got too impatient to get Torn by God out. I pushed it out without checking to see if it had all it’s arms and legs. And we also have the ISBNs and have been a publisher for 20+ years. I guess that makes me a real publisher, too.

Moriah Jovan: I think the problem with my book was that I am too close to it emotionally. I find that work I am THAT emotionally attached to is not my best work. The second book thus far is proving to be better than the first (so people tell me) and it’s because I’m not as emotionally invested. So I think that affects editing.

Zoe Murdock: Ahh. I am always very attached emotionally on the first draft. Then I switch and look at it more objectively on the 2-10 drafts.

Zoe Murdock: I think that affects editing, too.

_______________________________________________________________________

On paying the bills

Riley Noehren: Well, I am a more-than-full-time lawyer. It makes finding time for writing hard, and I don’t see writing being able to pay off my student loans anytime soon. However, it provides a lot of material.

Zoe Murdock: I think being in the world does provide a lot of material, Riley. I acutally liked moving in and out of it. Stimulating.

Moriah Jovan: Riley, really? What kind of law do you practice?

Riley Noehren: I’m a litigator. Again, the biggest problem is finding the time and energy after my day job to either write or promote.

Zoe Murdock: I’ve more than paid back my expenses with sales. So that’s not a problem for Torn by God. And I guess it’s an investment like anything else. The big question is how many review copies can you afford to send out. If I sell two books for every review copy, it’s worth it.

Moriah Jovan: I’m self-employed with a day gig. Not going to tell you what because it depresses me, but it pays the bills and gives me the freedom and time I need to do this.

Zoe Murdock: I have the luxury of being able to write full-time. But I wrote fiction while I was running the tech-writing company too. Biggest problem is my butt gets sore.

Moriah Jovan: I’m paid really well for the time it takes me to do what I do and my job’s pretty secure. I *want* to be able to replace that with writing income, but I don’t hope for it, otherwise, my job would be unbearable.

Riley Noehren: But, not yet having read Moriah’s blog post, I would agree that self-publishing is NOT a viable career choice in and of itself. I kept my expenses on Gravity vs. the Girl really low (i.e., by not hiring an editor, etc., with some regret) and was therefore in the black with just a few sales.

Moriah Jovan: At this point in time, I look at writing and publishing as an investment for future residual income.

Zoe Murdock: You have to love writing, I think. To make it all worth it until the big bestseller hits.

Moriah Jovan: I have an unusual plan. I have six books in my series. I’m going to write those and then stop. Maybe.

Riley Noehren: I don’t have children. I am more than aware of the benefits this gives me in finding time/focus to write.

Moriah Jovan: But again, the awesome thing about direct publishing is…I can plan out my publishing life. I don’t have to depend on anybody else to do it for me.

Riley Noehren: I agree, Moriah. Self-publishing means your writing/publishing schedule can be designed to accommodate the demands of the rest of your life, rather than the other way around.

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On selling out

Moriah Jovan: Honestly, the best thing about DIY is the total independence you have.

Zoe Murdock: Yes, but I’d still like my next novel to be picked by a national publisher. Want to learn all about that. I’ve had non-fiction books published, but not fiction.

Moriah Jovan: I go back and forth on that. Would I or wouldn’t I? I don’t know. Right now I’m happy where I’m at, as long as I keep my eye on the bigger picture.

Zoe Murdock: I’d like to compare the two processes directly. My husband and I teach an advanced writing workshop–have done for the past 10 years–and I’d like to be able to tell them about that side of things.

_______________________________________________________________________

What we can expect from them in the future

Zoe Murdock: I think my next novel will be more mainstream. Not so much of a hybrid. Torn by God is a Mormon/mainstream hybrid, a fiction/memoir hybrid, and a adult/YA hybrid. Now what book shelf are you gonna put a book like that on?

Moriah Jovan: Mine is two-pronged. I have the 6-year plan for my own series. Then I have my plan to find other work I like and publish it.

Riley Noehren: Oh, I’m so behind these two (as usual). Right now I have two simple goals: (1) continue to promote Gravity vs. the Girl, and (2) get to work on that second novel. I’m not going to worry until it’s finished whether I want to self-publish again or attempt traditional publishing. As everyone has said, the love of writing has to be the most important thing or there’s no point in doing it.

Zoe Murdock: I’m working on a novel about Alzheimer’s as a state of enlightment. Lot’s of humor. Love this book. I’m about a third of the way through the first draft (althought the first 17 chapters have been reworked about 10 times. I keep having to go back through the whole thing to get back to it after promoting Torn by God.

Moriah Jovan: In book #2, I stepped away from the Mormonism a whole lot, but kept it and made it significant to the characters. Book #3 is going to be an allegory of the Atonement, with the myth of Mary Magdalene and Jesus being married.

Zoe Murdock: Interesting, Moriah. My next novel also have a bit of Mormonism in it, but it is only part of back story. Not central.

Moriah Jovan: Book #4 is just a swashbuckler pirate historical romance, Revolutionary War era, so obviously no church references. Book #5 is a post-apocalyptic story and turns the church’s history of polygamy on its head with law-mandated polyandry. And Book #6 is an epistolary novel set in the Vietnam era, and Mormonism is central.

Zoe Murdock: Ahh . . . You’re going to work with the polygamy “keyword.” Got some interesting stuff coming down the pipeline, Moriah. What’s your next one going to be about, Riley?

Riley Noehren: I’ve got ideas for a couple of novels and am not sure which one I’m going to run with for the next one. But with me, you can rest assured it will be about a quirky woman with some sanity issues. I don’t write LDS-themed stuff and have yet to write about an LDS character, but I’m not opposed to the idea in the future.

Zoe Murdock: Well, I do think, non-LDS makes it more marketable to the mainstream.

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Back to work

Zoe Murdock: Is that it, then?

Riley Noehren: I’ve got nothing else, I’m afraid.

Moriah Jovan: Awesome. See ya!

Zoe Murdock: See you all on Twitter.

[Theric's note: I used brackets where I added words, but I did not mark where I left words out or rearranged.]

After working as a tech writer for several years, Zoe Murdock turned to fiction, specifically to her Mormon roots. The result is her indie-press-published semi-autobiographical novel Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy.

Zoe has been very patient as I’ve taken several months to put this interview together and then publish it (the novel came out in January) so I hope AMV readers will take the time to read the full thing  — it’s very interesting. And, although I’ve only read the first 10 pages or so of the novel, I can say that it’s well-written. This is a quality self-published work. I don’t believe the novel has received much attention in the world of Mormon letters so far, but if any readers have heard of it or have links to mentions it that aren’t up on Zoe’s website so far, toss us a link or a reference in the comments. I’m very interested in hearing about the reception of this work in the Mormon community (Zoe talks a bit about what she has experienced so far below).

For more about Zoe and to purchase the novel, visit her website: zoemurdock.com

What was the genesis of “Torn by God” and for those who haven’t heard about it yet, what is the novel about? Why is it of interest to the Mormon letters community?

I’ve been writing about my life for years, frequently slipping back through time to my childhood and that small Mormon town in Utah where I grew up with my parents and ten siblings. Even when I’d attempt to write about the present, something would pull me back to a particularly troubling time when my parents were going through a crisis, a time when there was always sadness in my mother’s eyes. My mother died young, and I always blamed my father for her death without really knowing why. After exploring that period in my writing, I came to realize my mother’s sadness went back to when my father got involved with polygamy. I remembered her saying, “If there’s polygamy in heaven, I don’t want to go there.” I’d often find her crying in the bathroom with a towel over her head.

Even though we were good members of the LDS Church, my father got interested in polygamy. My parents were always very closed-mouthed about it around us kids so I knew very little of what actually took place. It was a family secret, and looking back it felt almost like a family myth. However, I did know that my father’s best friend, who he spent a lot of time with, became a polygamist. He took a second wife, and he was excommunicated for it. Later, I found a note in my mother’s journal saying how dirty she felt after being around that man. That’s all she wrote, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. Then, after my father died, I read his notebook. It was full of questions about polygamy and questions about what he was required to do in order to become a God. It was haunting to see how obsessed he was, and it made me realize I had to try to learn more about what happened back then. I began writing about it, taking myself back to when I was twelve years old. I imagined myself standing outside of their closed doors, listening. I tried to remember everything I’d heard as a child, attempting to understand what the words meant in the context of my father’s obsession with polygamy. My novel, “Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy” is what came of that journey back in time.

It is a story that I hope will be of value to many people, regardless of their religious orientation. Maybe it will help them take a similar journey back in time, to try to understand where their beliefs come from. I found out that even though I didn’t know it, the voices of my parents, my Primary and Sunday School teachers, the Bishop, and even the scriptures, were still whispering in my mind even though I hadn’t attended church for many years. I was surprised to find that those voices made me afraid, afraid that God would punish me for what I was discovering and writing down. Sometimes I had to work through that fear before I could continue writing.

Now that the earth has stopped shaking and I don’t feel that fear anymore, I find I am glad to have been born and raised Mormon. After all, much of who I am came from that Mormon environment.

As I take my book out into the world, people sometimes ask me hard and angry questions about Mormons, especially about Mormons’ involvement with polygamy. I find myself standing in the middle, trying to build a bridge of understanding, trying to tell them we are all much the same, that we all have beliefs and a set of moral codes we received when we were children. Those beliefs help us make life’s decisions, help us make sense of the unknown. It’s when we start to believe we have the one and only truth, that the problems arise. We begin to wonder how opposing truths can coexist with our truth. It can make us feel threatened and feel a need to insulate ourselves, or strike out at those who disagree with us.

Lately, I have been giving a great deal of thought to the fragility of faith. I’ve been wondering how the persecution and even killing that all too often comes with the defense of faith will ever end. I’ve come to believe that we all have to accept that truth is a relative thing, and that we need not totally reject the beliefs of others in order to hold onto our own beliefs.

In terms of why this book would be of interest to the Mormon letters community, I’ve read that there are many who would like to see Mormon literature extend beyond a Mormon readership and traditional Mormon subjects. In order for this to happen, we may need to deal with the difficult questions first, as that is what readers outside the faith are most interested in. Once they understand that Mormons are willing to confront those troubling issues, I believe they will become interested in Mormon-themed literature that deals with broader subjects.

Some members of the Mormon letters community were a little put off or puzzled by Coke Newell’s autobiographical novel “On the Road to Heaven” because of the mix of autobiography and fiction. How would you characterize “Torn by God?” What was the most difficult part about tackling this story and why do it via fiction?

I wrote my story as fiction because there was no way to for me to know explicit details of what happened back then. Many of the events took place behind closed doors, or away from home. Therefore, as I wrote, I was not looking for truth in the details; I was focused on discovering the philosophical and psychological truths that lay behind the events. I wrote from the point of view of a child because that was my perspective at the time, the only perspective I had to go on. Somewhere along the way, I realized that the truth of what happened between my parents was best seen through the helpless innocence and naivety of a child.

Several of my ten siblings have told me that when they read “Torn by God” it felt very real to them, even though they were not in the story. The first-person narrator, Beth, has only one little brother. That’s because I was trying to understand my parent’s situation and it would have been very distracting and difficult to include characters that were representative of all of my brothers and sisters. However, I did set the story in my real hometown, and most of the events actually happened there at one time or another, even though they may not have happened at that time or in the same context.

Related the previous question — how has writing the novel affected how you view your father, other members of your family, the community you grew up in and your own relationship to Mormonism?

I went through many levels of emotion as I wrote the story and often found myself crying for my mother, and for my father. My father’s obsession to know God and to find out what God wanted of him often affected my family in troublesome ways, not only during the time he flirted with polygamy, but throughout our lives. Writing “Torn by God” helped me understand that he was very susceptible to the old stories of revelation and spiritual evolution, stories he had heard all his life. I also learned that he was born just twenty-seven years after the Church rescinded polygamy, and that his grandfather was a polygamist and that he was the one who hid Brigham Young in City Creek Canyon when the militia was coming to arrest the saints who were practicing polygamy. It occurred to me that my father was living in a kind of in-between world of Church doctrine, which I believe caused a dissonance in his mind that was difficult for him to resolve. Despite what he did, I now have great compassion and respect for him. He was a complex man who desperately wanted to know God, personally. He always believed that was possible, and towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and didn’t know who I was or even who he was, he was still looking for that personal communication with God.

Most of all, I feel great sympathy for my mother. She kept her sadness very much to herself. I wish I had been older and wiser so that I could have been her friend. She desperately needed at friend at that difficult time. My frustration with this shows up in my story as Beth looks on, wishing she could help her mother, but at age twelve she is not really in a position to do very much.

My feelings about where I grew up have never changed. I loved that little town, with the creek and the crows and the long lazy summer days of wandering the trails through the sagebrush. I have nothing but fondness for that place, even though it no longer exists. (It has disappeared into a suburban maze of fancy houses, to the point that I can barely find my way around anymore; but it will always live on in my mind.)

What has been the reception to the novel so far from non-Mormons, LDS and/or those in the fundamentalist Mormon community? Has anything surprised you?

I had just finished the final draft of my novel when the media was full of stories about Warren Jeffs and the FLDS, which of course meant there were also many stories about Mormons. Then Mitt Romney ran for president and a new round of publicity about Mormons began. Now, when I do readings from my book, audiences who have heard all the stories in the news are full of pent-up questions, not only about “polygamists,” but about the fundamentalist’s relationship to the LDS Church.

Mormons who have read my book often tell me that they get so involved in the story they read it all in one sitting. It seems to affect many Mormon readers deeply. I hope some of these people will come forward and describe their experience of reading the book. It would help me understand what they are getting from it. Ex-Mormons, or at least those who say they are no longer attending church, are sometimes troubled by the story. That surprises me. Maybe my child narrator causes them to relive the innocence and vulnerability of their childhood, a vulnerability they are now trying to escape. Even so, some of these readers have come back to talk with me and it has led to some wonderful discussions about faith and the rejection of faith.

Non-Mormons mostly have a lot of questions. They have heard all the stories in the media about Mormons and fundamentalists and they want to know how much of it is true. They want to know how many Mormons still practice polygamy. Even after all the disclaimers by the LDS Church, many non-Mormons still associate Mormonism with polygamy. It is easy for me to set them straight about that, but the Church’s historical connection to polygamy is much more difficult to explain.

So far, I don’t know of any fundamentalists who have read my novel. The “bad guy” in the novel is a fundamentalist so I doubt they would feel I have represented them fairly. I do have some uneasiness about that representation, but as I wrote the story, I came to understand the tremendous power a man who is in the position of speaking for God has. The fundamentalist antagonist in my story uses his self-claimed relationship with God for his own purposes. These days, there are many instances of this type of abuse of power and the issue concerns me greatly. Any man or woman who speaks for God should consider their position very carefully and “first do no harm.” I believe restricting the mind and free will of a person is definitely doing them harm.

Are you currently working on another book?

I am about a third of the way through the first draft of a novel about Alzheimer’s as a state of enlightenment. It is another book based on my father’s life. It also takes place in Utah. My father built a house in the desert near Hurricane, Utah, and in the book the character modeled on him picks up a variety of very interesting hitchhikers as he drives down there from Salt Lake City. Surprisingly, it is a story with a good deal of humor in it.

What works of art do you draw inspiration from or find especially interesting and/or entertaining? Any authors that you particularly like?

I am drawn to any art that shows a unique and intriguing perception. I love Van Gogh, Picasso, the pointillist painters, Edward Hooper, and University of Utah art professor Tony Smith who is a friend and one of my favorite artists.

I love books that have a clear and original voice, that take me deep into the mind of a character, a culture, or a point of view. Some books I’ve recently read are Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton, Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, and Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates. Some of my favorite writers are Doris Lessing, Gabriel García Marquez, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, David Malouf, and Margaret Atwood.

I like the music of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Emmy Lou Harris, Sara McLaughlin, Joan Baez, Gillian Welsh, Bonnie Rait, and John Prine, and any of the story songs written by Doc Murdock, my soul mate forever. What these artists all have in common is that they offer a deep and passionate look into a unique perspective of human consciousness.

Thanks, Zoe!

11. The Sickness

Elder Hargrave’s homesickness was palpable every day he spent in the MTC. There was something precious about him writing letters home or carefully opening his family’s many packages to him. Hargrave taped a tiny portrait of his girlfriend inside the front cover of his “white bible,” the book of mission rules most elders carry in the left breast pockets of their white dress shirts. He looked at that picture so often that some missionaries must have thought he was contemplating key rules like “[y]ou and your companion are to sleep in the same bedroom, but not in the same bed.”

Between dinner in the MTC cafeteria and the Sunday-night fireside, we usually had a half hour to stroll from the grounds to the Provo temple. It was our last Sunday there. Hargrave and I stood on the corner waiting for the light to change so that we could proceed east toward the futuristic gold spire projecting from the temple’s massive white slab base. Hargrave kept checking his watch. He seemed nervous. I was enjoying the longer sight lines. Gazing south down 9th East, I could see well over a mile. The buildings on the MTC campus were staggered in a way that prevented long views. It felt safe there among those orange brick buildings—safe and confining, even suffocating sometimes.

Soon after we reached the fountain in front of the temple, Hargrave demanded that we turn back. I followed, reluctant to cut our last walk short. Back at the corner of the MTC entrance and 9th East, Hargrave stopped and checked his watch again.

“I need to wait here,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

I did not catch on quickly. I leaned against the brick wall at the corner and pulled my irregular verb conjugation card (laminated, color-coded) from my pocket. I worked on the different forms of perder, to lose.

I looked up. Hargrave’s head was inside the rolled-down passenger window of a white suburban stopped at the light. He nodded and smiled. He accepted a package. He sweetly kissed the girl who handed it to him. I recognized her from the front fold of his white bible. The light turned green, he pulled back, and the suburban drove away. I generally tried to be obedient to the mission rules. Yet the sight of Hargrave flaunting them—elaborately, prodigiously—somehow filled me with immense joy.

He tried to act like nothing had happened. He was grinning, and his eyes were all teared up. Among other missionaries returning from the temple grounds, we went back inside. Hargrave turned to look at me again and again. I think he was worried about how I would respond.

“I thought she lived in Snowflake,” I said.

“She does.”

“Just in the neighborhood?”

“My whole family was in that truck.”

“How many hours is it from Snowflake?”

“Nine. Maybe ten. They’ve been on the road all day.”

Silence.

“They’re on their way back,” he said. “My dad’s got to work in the morning.”

* *

Thanksgiving in the MTC had not been entirely awful. There was plenty of food, and we watched church movies instead of going to the regular classes.

I did not exactly celebrate one year later. We taught two discussions that morning. A second discussion to a family that declined to be baptized. We are baptized already, they said. The usual talk comparing and contrasting Catholic and Mormon baptisms ensued. We left with a standing invitation to attend mass with them.

Then we taught a first discussion to their neighbor, Franklin. He was working on his bicycle when we approached. He said he would listen if we didn’t mind him adjusting some things. He got us plastic chairs, and we taught as he tinkered with his chain. It went well. He had grease on his hands, so we set the book on his window seal. He promised to have us inside when we came back. Franklin was eventually baptized.

Almoço that day was at Dona Silva’s. We appreciated every bite that people fed us. Dona Silva was poor, but that was not the issue. Poor people managed to give us tasty food all the time. Not Dona Silva. We were approaching her house.

“I hope she didn’t dry out the turkey,” Golightly said. “I prefer a moist bird.”

I knew it was November, and I knew it was Thursday. But other than my weekly planner (the folded piece of blue cardstock in my left breast pocket), I hadn’t looked at a calendar in months.

“I hope she made banana cream pie,” Golightly said. “Pumpkin is more traditional, of course. But I don’t think they have any pumpkins around here.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“I could even go for some cranberry sauce,” he said.

“I am going to kill you,” I said.

“Please,” Golightly said. “Try to have an attitude of gratitude.”

Dona Silva served what she called soup. My bowl consisted of lukewarm grey liquid, two lonely noodles, and a lump of gristle. The noodles instantly disintegrated on my tongue. I flipped the gristle out the window to Dona Silva’s emaciated dog when she wasn’t looking. I sipped a few drops of grey liquid from my spoon each time I raised it to my mouth. I was going for the appearance of hearty eating. We declined seconds. We gave silent thanks when she did not offer dessert.

The rest of the day was not exactly productive from a strict missionary-work standpoint. We were knocking doors. In between houses, we talked about Thanksgiving family traditions.

Golightly’s family spent the holiday at his grandparents’ farm. He explained the ingenious seating arrangement that somehow got forty-plus people seated in his grandparents’ modest home. He loved the noise and heat of so many people. The conversations shouted from table to table. The laughter. The repeated rising and sitting to permit constant movement between chairs and buffet table.

He gave me a short history of the annual family football game played on the front lawn. He told me how, several years ago, the game was won on a trick play that involved one of his uncles running around the back of the house and appearing—completely alone—between the apple trees that marked off the opposing end zone. His uncles argued bitterly about the legality of the play for a half hour. Now new trick plays have to be cooked every year. His last Thanksgiving at home, Golightly got one of his aunts to distract the opposing defense by announcing that they were all out of pie.

When the weather was good, Golightly’s grandpa hitched up one of his teams. He had Clydesdales. And six albino white Shetland ponies. Packed with grandchildren, the wagon slowly toured the rural Weber County streets surrounding the farm. Certain aunts usually came along, and they got the grandchildren singing Christmas carols as they went. Cold air and a pungent earthy smell (silage and chimney smoke and horse manure) burned in their noses.

I told Golightly about Thanksgiving at my grandma and grandpa’s house. It was a formal affair. Some families apparently have a separate kid’s table. My grandparents had a separate room for kids to eat in. The food was delicious and endless, but we had to stay in our seats. We had to wait for my grandma to replenish our plates one by one. After the feast, the grown-ups talked and played cards upstairs. The children were sent to the basement. We played ping pong and pool for hours. We watched football and movies.

We did covert operations (grandma would have killed us if she knew) in the sub basement storage room. We found old wooden skis and tennis rackets. And maybe twenty different fishing poles. Sword fights ensued. We dressed up in dusty old clothes. We found pictures of our parents as children. Even our grandparents as children. There were pictures of many others we did not know: vaguely familiar faces on brittle brown and cream paper.

One year we discovered a machine that had a strap you fastened behind your back. Its purpose was a mystery to us. You flipped a switch and—after a low groan—it shook you silly. We called it the “shaky-shaky.” It made my cousin Sam throw up a remarkable amount of green peas suspended in a matrix of liquid turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, yams, cranberries, and pumpkin pie.

Golightly and I were thoroughly miserable by the end of the day. We got to the point of half-renouncing our families, their full bellies, and glad hearts. How dare they rejoice without us?

I woke up the next day hung over from our homesickness binge. I didn’t want to do anything, and I was dreading the coming month of Christmas memories and longing. Eleven months was an impossibly long time. I worked out a compromise—I didn’t get up and get dressed. I did my morning study laying there in bed. As I read, the blender howled in the kitchen. Golightly was making his daily banana shake. Drinking it, he came into the bedroom.

“Morning Barker,” he said.

I grunted.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I just looked at my calendar.”

“That is funny,” I said.

“Right. Well—” he paused. “Thanksgiving is next week.”

“No it isn’t,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

I closed my bible and slammed it onto the broken chair I used as a bedside table. I got up and got ready for another day of work.

I’ve talked a bit here about how difficult it can be for self-publishers and many of the challenges that small publishers face in getting books known in the market. Despite these difficulties, technology has made some aspects much easier, especially since the development of print-on-demand technology 15 years ago or more.

About 10 years ago this promising development was married to the heart of US book distribution when Lightning Source (LSI) began operating. A sister company of giant book wholesaler Ingram Book, LSI offers not only the ability to print books one by one, it also connects those books to the national book distribution network, so books show up in online bookstores like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and a host of other online stores. They also become available to brick & mortar stores, although only rarely do bookstores order them.

For most small publishers, Amazon.com has become a kind of linch pin to this system of selling books. Amazon now counts for more than 10% of booksales, and a huge portion of online sales. Some consultants, such as my online friend Aaron Shepard, even suggest a strategy of Aiming at Amazon.

Now, however, Amazon is threatening to pull the rug out from under these publishers.

Starting about a month ago, Amazon quietly began contacting LSI’s print-on-demand customers and threatening to turn-off the button that enables customers to purchase books from Amazon unless they started using Amazon’s inhouse print-on-demand printer, Book Surge. As you might imagine, many publishers felt betrayed and manipulated at this move.

Apparently Amazon’s new policy is that all publishers wishing to sell through Amazon must use Book Surge for the copies that Amazon sells of any title printed with print-on-demand. In essence, this means that eventually Amazon won’t knowingly purchase books directly from any of the print-on-demand printers.

While the debate over whether or not Amazon’s move is legal (some claim that it violates anti-trust laws) rages and publishers try to figure out what to do about this, the effect on Mormon publishers and authors isn’t clear.

Most authors and self-publishers (those that use vanity print-on-demand companies like Lulu, PublishAmerica, Xlibris, iUniverse, etc. despite my advice to avoid these services) will not be affected, unless their publisher refuses to give in. Authors in that case will be caught in the middle, and their books won’t be available from Amazon! [PublishAmerica has issued a statement that it will not give in. I don't know what the other companies in this category will do.]

From what I can tell, Mormon publishers will probably need to use both Lightning Source and Book Surge — the first to get the broader, world-wide distribution it allows; the second to get into Amazon.com. And they will have to pay setup fees for each title on each print-on-demand service.

However, it is interesting to note that neither will get books into LDS Bookstores! LDS Bookstores generally don’t purchase from Lightning Sources’ sister company, wholesaler Ingram Book Company, where LSI’s books are available. Instead they purchase directly from LDS publishers and distributors.

But that doesn’t mean that publishers trying to reach the Mormon market can avoid Amazon and other online retailers. Because LDS Bookstores don’t reach the whole market, a significant portion appears to buy from Amazon and other online retailers.

Unfortunately leaving any one of these sales channels out (LSI, Amazon and LDS Bookstores) could limit sales of a publisher’s book, depending on the kind of book and probably other factors. For larger publishers, this isn’t such a large problem because large publishers generally don’t use print-on-demand, and usually have access to normal distribution channels.

Fortunately, small publishers probably have a while to figure out what to do — Amazon seems to be concentrating on the largest users of print-on-demand first, and letting the small publishers enjoy the status quo for the moment. My own situation is a little easier because I already use both services. But doing so is more expensive, it takes additional time to format books (the two companies have different specifications) and it is a little harder to track what is happening with a title.

But I still feel a little strong-armed by Amazon’s move, in spite of the fact that I was already using their service. And I can’t help wondering what this may mean for the future. If Amazon has the power to make a move like this and force small publishers to accept it, what moves will they make in the future?

If you are interested in more information about this move, and the protests against it, I suggest the following links:

• Stop the BookSurge Monopoly petition
• Writers Weekly Amazon BookSurge Information Clearinghouse Page – probably the most complete set of links to news stories and opinion about the Amazon policy.
• ASJA, PMA and Authors Guild Push for Anti-trust Suit Against Amazon/BookSurge
• Amazon’s official response to complaint [Critics claim that since BookSurge doesn't have printing facilities in the majority of Amazon's distribution centers, Amazon's explanation doesn't make sense.]