 Joining us this evening. Welcome back to our room. It's been, I think, a couple of years, I think. Yeah, I was here. It was just a lot of there, yes. Yeah, well, thank you. It's good to be here. And thank you all for coming out. And I would, and thank you. You're welcome. I just, yeah, sure. We actually wanted to do a little bit of a different, a little bit of a different format for this evening, too. We're going to talk about Bill's most recent book, but also as someone who has published now, this is the eighth book. Eight, yeah. Eighth book, and all the big books. We wanted to, we thought it might be an interesting thing also to share his experiences and advice, recommendations, questions. So you want to write a book? Absolutely. So we thought that might be a really kind of a fun thing to do on April evening. Well, thank you. With no further ado. Also, I did just want to welcome Orca. You're Orca. And thank you. And just they will be filming. So I guess if anybody has any questions or concerns, let you know. But otherwise, these guys are filming. Thanks. So welcome everybody. Thank you for turning out. I keep hearing that spring is coming. Just a tiny bit of background. I have lived in Vermont since 1947. But in all honesty, I was born in New York City. My father died before I was born in World War II. And my mother, after I was born, stayed in New York as long as she could stand it. And she couldn't stand it any longer. She got on the Montrealer, which was a steam train. And she got off in Waterbury, Vermont. And she took the Couture Jitney to Morrisville, rented a second story apartment. And two years later, married a handsome French-Canadian ski instructor named Emile Rene Couture. So I grew up in Morrisville with the name Schubert in the family of Couture. So I went by the name as a kid, Couture. And I have pretty much lived in Vermont most of the time, although I did have my father's family in New York. And my stepfather was really a wonderful, wonderful person. My grandmother was very concerned that I was being raised in the middle of nowhere in some farm community by a bunch of roofs. And that I wouldn't amount to anything. So to make a long story short, my stepfather was very diplomatic, made arrangements for me to go to New York once a year to visit and spend two weeks with my grandmother. And he would drive me down to the Waterbury station. And the train, which southbound was the Washingtonian, would stop for 17 minutes. He'd jump on with me. He'd find my birth. And he'd just say, bye. And he would give the porter the dollar, which was real money in those days. And the porter, all of whom in those days were black, would come, put me in my pajamas. Tuck me in. Bring me a ginger ale. Get me up the next morning when we were coming in on the elevated and down under Park Avenue. Get me dressed. Fold my thing up into the ceiling. And get me set on the bench with my little suitcase. And then when we pulled into Penn Station, he would walk me out and turn me over to my grandmother or one of her domestics. She lived in an 18-room apartment, not 71st in Park Avenue. And I would spend the next two weeks going to the Russian Tea Room and Metropolitan Opera, the old opera, and the museums. And I'd lie in bed at night sobbing, because I wanted to be home with my friends in Morrisville. But as I can't remember who said it, I think it was Nietzsche, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? So in retrospect, living in what was then a very schizophrenic world, I have a lot to be grateful for. But I have always adhered to my roots in Vermont. So I started writing seriously when I retired from business. I'd been writing informally all my life. And I started writing short stories. And my first book was in 2008, came out with what's called a hybrid publisher. And we'll talk about that later. It's called In the Moille Stories. And it's stories of people behaving badly and sometimes goodly in the Moille Academy. And it was funny when it first came out, I was invited over to Morrisville. And I was panicked, because I wasn't sure that I changed everybody's names quite enough. And we're in the congregational church in Morrisville, because there were too many people to fit in the library. And one very large woman got up and she looked at me and she said, Billy Couture, I know every damn person in that book, practically ran out of the church. And I didn't recognize her, she was my third grade teacher. So then I followed it up with a book that I had to write. It was very difficult. And I think I have a copy of it here, maybe I don't. It's a collection of short stories that has done really well over time. And it's called Fat People. I have struggled with food all my life. I've weighed as much as 490 pounds. And I just, I needed to write this book. And I wrote it, it's a collection of short stories. It's not about diets. It's not about anything that helps one lose weight. It is designed to tell stories that have people have a deeper understanding of what it is to have food both be your best friend and your worst enemy. And it still sells very well. Then I wrote my first novel, which takes place on like Willoughby, on a hill farm above Mt. Pisgah. And I remember the sequence. That's this one, it's called Panhead. Terrible title because nobody knows what a panhead is except me. It is a type of Harley-Davidson motorcycle engine. And it's not a motorcycle book. And then I did a book called Photographic Memory, which is close as I would ever dare get to an autobiography. And I always send copies of my books out to the family, including my two former wives, who I'm very close friends with. And I put a note in the front of the book, the woman in this is not you. And then I wrote Lila and Theron, which has done really well. It was published on an imprint of Simon and Schuster and is distributed by Simon and Schuster. It's actually the backstory. People's favorite short story in the Lamoille stories was one called Lila's Bucket. And everybody would ask me about it. And so I just wrote the backstory of Lila's Bucket and this has done very well. My newest book is called The Priest and it is not about pedophilia. I just have to say that. And I'll say a few words about it and we do a very short passage and then we'll just open it up and have a conversation together. I was raised a Catholic in a small French-Canadian community, Morrisville. And I knew the Mass. I was an altar boy when I was seven years old. I knew the Mass in French, Latin, and English. And I absolutely believed everything that Father Omer Dufault taught us and the nuns who came down from Quebec for Catechism on Saturday. And it's interesting because when I was 13, my grandmother called me up and she said, I'd been going to school and getting actually a really good education in Morrisville. They were almost entirely older women. They didn't care about my self-esteem. They didn't want to make me feel good. They wanted to know I was learning. And they were really clear about that. My grandmother said, you're going to Exeter. And I said, what's Exeter? So she explained it. My stepfather, God bless him, said, it's a great opportunity. You need to go. So I went and he drove me down with my steamer trunk and looked around at all this stuff and he said, I'm going back to Morrisville. And I was introduced to my roommate. And my roommate sort of looks at me. I was heavy and, you know, he sort of looks at me and he goes, what are you? And I said, I'm sorry, I don't understand. He said, well, like what race, what religion? And I said, oh, I'm a Catholic. And he looked kind of disappointed and steered his shoes. So to be polite, I said, well, what are you? And he said, oh, I'm a Jew. And I said, oh, what's a Jew? I'm 13 years old, Morrisville, Vermont. What kind of a name do you think Schubert is? German Jewish. My great uncle was offered stiglitz. You know, we were related to the, you know, the queens and the lobes. And I never knew. And I would jokingly, you know, when I finally figured it out, I would say, oh yeah, I'm from an anti-Semitic Jewish family. My proper term being assimilationist. And one final story on that, and I'll stop. My grandmother decided I needed to see the world. For some reason she took me to Bogota, Colombia. I was 12 years old. And I said, it was Sunday. And I was feeling badly because I couldn't go to church. And I said, Schubert, what religion are you? And she just looked panicked. And she said, well, I'm ethical culture. So I'm like, I'm tickin' through the white churches in Morrisville. Concordationalist, Methodist. No ethical culture. And I said, where's the ethical culture church? And she said, oh, it's on WQXR radio Saturday morning. At which point I was totally lost. And the ethical culture society I later learned, of course, was really the sort of philosophical and religious community of non-observant Jewish people in New York. Anyway. So this is, it's not about any specific priest. When I was 19, I read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. And in that is a story within a story called The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Ivan, who's the sort of cyber-idic anarchist brother, tells his brother, Aleosha, who is a monk, the story of The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, which is really an amazing and wonderful story. And I walked away from the Catholic Church and I never went back. But having said that, three of my closest friends in life have been three Catholic priests. And we retained those friendships until they died. Not one of them ever tried to get me back into the church. Our friendship was just about real love and appreciation of one another and intellectual curiosity. So I wrote this book not based on any one of them, but based on my very mixed relationship with Catholicism, which I still, you know, it still is deeply imbued in me. And I think it's fair to say I have a love-hate relationship with it. It gave me an ethical framework, which informs much of who I am today. But it also betrayed me in many ways, and of course the latest of which we're all sort of living through in a horrible way. But the book is not about that. The book is much more about the incredible difficulty a lot of boys are having in our culture today becoming men. Because gender roles are changing. And they're changing in many ways for the better, I believe. I mean everybody sees it differently. But it's very confusing. And I mean I'm sure there are people in the room who know, you know, males who are 35 and 40 years old and they're still boys. They've never become men. And I don't mean men in the macho sense. I mean men in the mature sense of who they are. And this book is really about that. It's about a young boy who's a Catholic, and when he sort of reaches the age of puberty, he's so appalled by what he sees and is afraid that at the age of 12 he decides to become a Catholic priest because he knows Catholics are celibate. And he won't have to confront all the complexities of what he's beginning to live through. And the book is really about his spiritual migration from that place to actually becoming a living, breathing human being. And I'll read you a couple of just very, very short segments. Say a few more words about it. Answer any questions about it. And then I will open it up and we can talk about whether or not you have a book lurking inside you or a memoir or would you sometimes dream about writing? And it's not always books. And it's not always written. It may be storytelling. So this chapter is called My Early Calling. I decided to become a priest when I was 12. What little I'd heard on the playground about sex and how babies were conceived terrified me. When I made up my child's mind to become a priest I'd been abusing myself for a year and confessing my sins weekly so I would not go to hell if I were to die suddenly. My first sensations of arousal began when I graduated from the infantile world of the bathtub to the privacy and maturity of a shower, sometime in fifth grade. The surprising sensations came from soaping myself all over and scrubbing, as my mother said, my dirty parts, as I had been taught. The unfocused sensation was pleasant and I often luxuriated in the shower until called out by a parent. Since I slept in the same room as my older brother, Rosaire, the shower was my only private place as a child. In Saturday Catechism, Sister Therese made clear to us that dying with sin of self-abuse on our soul meant an eternity of hellfire. To ensure our understanding of hell as the penalty for self-abuse, she asked, how many of you have ever burned your hand on a kitchen stove or a wood stove? We all raised our hands. Now imagine that pain all over your body for eternity and you will understand what hell will be like if you die with immortal sin on your soul. We were all terrified. When I was eight, the house three doors down from us caught fire in the middle of the night and burned at the ground. It was one of the first house fires in our neighborhood to be electrified, first houses in our neighborhood to be electrified, having been heated by a wood-fired furnace in the basement for 70 years. We assumed the novelty of electric wiring started the fire, and although it was never proven, the fireman worked through the night to keep the neighboring houses from catching fire as the house itself was too far gone to be saved. We heard that Selma Travers died in the fire. Although we only saw her at church, we knew her as a kindly lady who gave alms to the poor and spent summers knitting on her expansive front porch and offering passers-by a glass of her homemade lemonade. Her nephew Buford was in the fire brigade and ran into the burning house to try and save her, but died when the second floor collapsed. A boy at school described the charred remains he saw as he walked by the house the following day. His description brought further to life the horrors that we would experience if we were to die with a mortal sin on our soul. Rosaire, the brother, was nice to me, but I always thought he saw me as weak and unwilling to take life on. At about the same time, I began noticing girls at school and listening to the older boys on the playground talk about them in a way I didn't understand. I knew girls were different from boys as I had seen my mother change my baby sister's diapers. My parents only spoke of sex in the abstract, alluding to its purpose of making babies. It happened only between married couples. I could make no connection between the security warmth and pleasure I felt under a deluge of warm water behind the privacy of a shower curtain and the mothers in town laboring through the grocery store straining against the counterweight of a late pregnancy. Given the lectures I'd heard at home school and catechism on modesty and hygiene, the idea that nature's design enabled sex seemed unimaginable. The older playground boys, though, seemed to be experts on the subject and spoke graphically of their considerable experience. I was naive enough to believe what I heard, making the whole prospect of sex more terrifying and unnatural. I understood that priests could never marry or have children, and so chose that vocation when I was 12. Hardly the spiritual epiphany we read about in the lives of the saints. But more a flight from the childhood fears made vivid by sister Therese and catechism and the older boys on the playground. The solemnity and consistency of the Catholic Mass, its processions, vestments, evocative statues, commandments, sacraments, and feast days in which I was a regular acolyte, offered a reassuring alternative to the demands I would suffer as an adult expected to go forth and multiply. The story moves forward and has a very surprising ending. It's not what you would expect. I think it's fair to say that in many ways he becomes a whole person. And the battle, of course, that he's struggling with as he gets older is the battle between dogma, you know, hard doctrine, religious doctrine, and Christ's, you know, what Christ says, which is to go forth and love people and be kind. And that, of course, is very much what the church has been going through for centuries. Do we model the life of Christ? Do we love people who anger us? Do we do things that make people's lives better? Or do we memorize the rules and follow the rules exactly? It's a really complex issue and one that haunts the church to this day. I've just finished a new novel, which I won't go into a huge detail on, but it'll either make me or break me. I have no idea where it came from. It's really a novella and it is with critical readers now and it's going to the editor next week. And it's not a graphic novel, but it will have illustrations like the original does. I've rewritten Dante's Inferno 700 years later and my guide is not Virgil, my guide is Walt Whitman. And it is... it's very different. Hell is not what Dante made it out to be. And I read the Inferno when I was fairly young and it, of course, scared the daylights out of me. But what intrigued me in writing this and it took me a long time is what was sin 700 years ago. A lot of it is not sin today. You know, Harrison is not sin. You know, failure to believe is not sin. But we have a whole new concept of sin that is scaled and very different. Homicide, that shall not kill. You know, when Dante wrote, was people fighting each other with swords or poisoning. And now it's infinitely more complex. We have drones. I actually interviewed a sniper, a professional sniper. And he explained, you know, what he did. And I said, I asked him how many people he killed and he said seven. And I said, how did you feel when you saw them die? And he said, I never saw anyone die. And I said, really? He said, yeah, you don't understand. Snipers never see the result of their kill. There's always two people. He said, I would get the target perfectly aligned in my rifle sight. And when I knew I was there, I would close my eyes and pull the trigger and turn away. And my spotter would say yes or no. That's all I ever heard. He said, I never saw anyone die. And one of the things that really intrigued me in some other interviews is one of the things that was so attractive to the military about drone warfare is the intimacy of killing is a big part of PTSD. And although the military struggles with it and don't like to admit the scale of it, it's massive. I mean, they are just overwhelmed with the mental health issues around PTSD. And they felt, well, drone warfare will solve this. Drone pilots get PTSD. And the military never thought this would be the case. So, enough of that. That presumably will be out in the fall. And Jeff Danziger, the National Cartoonist, is going to do the illustrations for us. So, does anyone have any questions about this or any of the books or anything before we turn to the larger topic of whether there's a book looking in you? Any questions at all? Yes. Did you know that you were a writer when you were a kid? Did I know? That you were a writer when you were a kid. It's a wonderful question. The first time I decided I wanted to write was when I was in my early teens. And I wrote some poetry and I wrote some short stories. And then I just got immersed into raising a family and starting businesses. And I'd write occasionally. But it wasn't until I retired in 2008 that I really turned my attention to writing and made the time and the space, because it takes time. So, I've always been intrigued by writing. My father, who died before I was born, was a playwright. Nothing huge or fancy, but that was what he really wanted to do. And he wrote several plays. So you didn't do a book until you retired? I never did a book until I was retired. I had stuff published in literary magazines or college literary magazines, but no book. And the first book, The Moyle Stories, was picked up. One of the short stories in it ran in Vermont Life. And a hybrid publisher, and I'll explain this when we talk, called me up and said, it's a great story. If you've got more stories in you, would you like to do a book? And I went, yeah, that sounds good. So I wrote out the rest of the stories and submitted them, and they published it. And in fairness, they did everything they said they would do. They're not going to make you a famous writer, and they're not going to drive sales. But she did every single thing that she said she would do. And the book kept selling, and she was running out. So I said, look, can I reacquire the rights? And she said, sure. So I took it back and republished it under my own imprint. And all of my books, except Lila and Theron, I've self-published. So I've published with a hybrid publisher. I've published with a traditional publisher. And I've self-published. So I've done all three. And, you know, I mean, it has changed, I'll say a few words about publishing. Does anyone have any other questions about this book? When I was young, there were two polls in publishing. It was vanity publishing, and there was traditional publishing. And vanity publishing was, nobody wanted your book, nobody cared whether it was any good or bad. You just paid a few thousand bucks, and they'd put it out for you. They wouldn't market it. They would run classified ads this big in the matter, Saturday with you, saying this book was published, you know, so on and so on. It was a company called Vantage Press. And then there were the traditional publishers, and the great ones were Farrar Strauss and Giroux Knopf, who was the first cousin of my grandmother. Random House, excuse me, and they really wanted to find great literature. And they, I mean, Alfred Knopf used to travel all through Europe interviewing and looking at manuscripts from new writers. That whole system is pretty much gone now. Everybody is looking now for the next James Patterson, who, by the way, made sixty-five million dollars last year, and has two hundred people working for him writing these books. And it's been very generous with independent bookstores. He's been giving grants to independent bookstores. God bless him. But the publishers now are all looking for the next one percent. And the mid-list, which is their list of publishers, of writers that typically sell in the ten to sixty-seventy thousand range, which can be very profitable. They don't pay much attention to them. And the back-list is pretty much dead at this point. These are people who have done very well, sold anywhere from twenty to a hundred thousand books, and are putting out new books, but they're not going to sell in the hundreds of thousands or the millions. So the publishers are sort of fighting over that one percent. Now, having said that, there are some really good mid-list publishers. There's people like Chelsea Green. Let's see, I can never remember his name. The guy in Boston, who does the beautiful books. You know who I mean. I know exactly. Yeah, it'll come to one of us. Sabine. Pardon? Gadine. Yes, David Godin. And there's probably a dozen others. So there's a spectrum of publishing now that runs from street custom, you know, like making an Apple book of your family's pictures to pure vanity publishing, where people hold their nose and publish it, to hybrid publishers, with varying degrees of discrimination. There are some hybrid publishers who will publish anything you pay them to. There are others in a couple in Vermont like Greenwriters Press, who are very thoughtful. They're not going to take something they think is just not valuable, and it's not going to serve either the writer or the publisher. They're looking for good credible books that the traditional publishers and good credible books that the traditional industry is not going to take. And then there's the traditional publishers. So what used to be, you know, vanity and traditional, has fleshed out now, so there's a lot of options. The metaphor that I often use is like when I was a kid, there were nurses and doctors, and nothing in between. Now it's a whole spectrum. There are nurse practitioners, and there are times when I'd rather see a nurse practitioner than a doctor. So that's a good thing. And the good news is that anybody really now can publish. And the bad news is that everybody is. And the challenge, as I'm sure you cannot test, is the one thing that's still broken in the system is what the industry calls discovery. It's very difficult unless you come into a bookstore like this and look around. It's very difficult to find new things that you want. A lot of people use Amazon for discovery, and then they buy in their local bookstore. Unfortunately, the inverse is true. Chris Morrow, who you certainly know, he's a good friend, and we were having lunch once, and he said, Bill, what would you say if three to ten times a day I walked up to a customer in my store and asked him to leave? I said, what are you talking about? He said, Amazon has an app that you can download on your phone. So I can walk over, pull a book out, go through it, open it up, spread the binding, and spend a few minutes reading the front and go, wow, I'd like that book. And I take it out, and I scan the barcode, and Amazon ships it to me the next day for two or three dollars less. And so, Northshire bookstore becomes a showroom for Amazon. And, you know, I'm completely sympathetic. I mean, and he's very polite, he said, look, he doesn't throw people out of his store, he just says, you know, I really appreciate your coming in and looking around, but I can't afford to be a showroom for Amazon. If you want to buy from Amazon, that's fine, but you buy from Amazon. I have to pay to have these books on my shelf. And people run the gamut from feeling really embarrassed to, well, I have every right, you know. I mean, so it's a time of tremendous change in publishing, but it's created a lot of good opportunity. And one of the things that I find intriguing is that there are established authors who, in some of their books, elect to self-publish. They walk away from their traditional publisher, because it may be a higher risk thing they've written, or they may just want to try self-publishing, or they think it's going to be a tremendous success and you make much more money. I make more money in self-publishing than I do with Simon and Schuster. So, you know, it is a really interesting time, but you do have to be careful if you're thinking about writing. Now, let me just ask informally, I'm not going to hold you to it, are any of you thinking of writing in any form? It can be a short story for a literary magazine. It can be a novel. It can be a memoir. Are some of you, you are? Yeah, I know you are. You are. Good. Wonderful. And I would really encourage you to pursue it. Because one never knows. The thing, would it be helpful if I explain to you my process? I'm happy to do it. When a novel occurs to me and people write in two different ways, some people write very methodically, they outline, you know, let's say it's a fictional novel. I can't speak to non-fiction, because other than my VPR commentaries and op-ed pieces, I don't write non-fiction. I write fiction. Something occurs to me. One person will sit down and think it all the way through, right till the end. They'll outline it, they'll list all their characters, they'll describe their characters, they'll plot the narrative, they'll have it all figured out. I don't do that. And many authors don't. I just start writing. And the characters sometimes surprise me. You know, they just start forming on the page. And sometimes a plot twist will occur to me and I'll write it and I'm surprised. So I'm sort of what they call a discovery writer. And other people, as they say, are very methodical. There's no writer wrong. They both work fine. It just depends on who you are. So I write it once and I typically write in the morning and I can't write for more than two hours because I can't sit for more than two hours. So when I come up in the morning to start writing again I read what I read the day before. And I may spend the first hour editing and cleaning that up, taking out adverbs, taking out adjectives, finding better verbs, eliminating extraneous language. And then I write ahead for another hour, hour and a half. So I may only write a thousand to two thousand words a day. Then when it's all done I go back and reread it. I do that again. So I go through it at least twice. Then I go out to critical readers who sometimes are friends, but sometimes they're people I don't even know. And I pay them a modest amount. $100. And they are not literary editors. They're not copy editors. They're readers. What I want them to do is to read the manuscript and sit down with me for half an hour or 40 minutes and tell me what worked and what didn't. And it's incredibly valuable. And who I pick depends on what I've written. In this novel, The Priest I picked a Catholic priest who I did not know. And in the course of our discussion I found out he was gay and he was out. And he'd been persecuted by the church for years. He'd been sent to mental institutions and then he was finally accepted by the church as a gay out priest. And what he said which I thought was quite wonderful is he said, what the church hasn't figured out is you can be gay and celibate. Just because you're gay doesn't mean you're abusing people. And he was incredibly helpful. And he liked the book. He was most helpful technically. I would say something and he'd say, oh you said a surplus and you meant an alb referring to vestments or I made a comment in here about in the wedding service you shall obey your husband and a couple of other things and he said, you know, you were right about all these before the camera worked because one of the big papal changes in the church. And he said, you either have to change these or you have to back the data before that papal encyclical where they made these changes. So that kind of technical stuff is really important because if a reader is reading along and they go, that doesn't sound right you've distracted them from the story. And that's why editing is so important. The other thing I would say I talk to a lot of young writers and you know, I can tell immediately whether they have a chance at being successful not by what they read but by their attitude. If somebody says would you read my manuscript you know, you're going to love it and you know, I want you to blurb it and they go on and on and on and I say what if I don't like it at all what if I think it's terrible oh no, you're going to love it there's nothing more to say because the writer has already made the decision about the quality of their book and the question that you have to ask yourself is am I writing for myself or am I writing to be heard and understood so that process of a critical reader becomes really important and I don't pick people who are my friends who are going to say oh Bill got it read the book, I loved it that's not what I want I want somebody to sit down and say you know I think the story overall is really good but this character just never gelled for me you need to make something more of this character or you know, there's this plot twist here and you know, I didn't believe it I want that feedback so the critical reader thing is probably one of the most one of the most valuable things I do and then the new book which is called The Allego is now out with five critical readers then when I get all their feedback I interview them and I look for the trends I look for the consistencies in what the five people have said and I write those down and then I go back and I rewrite the book and then it goes to a literary editor and I have for my first five books I was using a woman in New York Hope Matheson who is a professional editor she's Peter Matheson's Peter Matheson's niece the guy who wrote at Play in the Fields of the Lord and he's dead now and she was terrific and she was really good because most of the editing she did was non-fiction and so this was fiction so she would be even more critical and then I would bring the manuscript and it would then go to a copy editor which is the person who reads the whole manuscript and does everything from fixing commas semicolons you know everything to scratching out unnecessary adverbs or adjectives to circling a paragraph and saying this is mush, rewrite it you know what I mean but they're the people who have to remove all the technical flaws and that too is important because they're distractions if I misspell something or if there's a discontinuity you know if I say somebody is blonde in chapter three and four months later they're brunette you know the reader goes what's that about and that's the thing you don't want to have happen you want people to just submerge themselves in the narrative and the sense of place and never be pulled out so then after that's done I have a finished manuscript and if it's going to a publisher it then goes off to the publisher if it is if I'm doing it myself it goes to a designer and I've used three different designers over the years and they've all been pretty terrific and their job is to design what's called the cover wrap which is the back the spine and the front if you look carefully at a book you'll see that this, this and this are one graphic then what's called the text block which is everything from the first page to the last is the second piece and you need those two files, digital files one thing that a lot of people self-publishing often forget is the indicia page and sometimes it's called the copyright page but you're not going to be taken seriously unless you do this correctly, you need an ISPIN number you don't need but it's helpful to have a library of congress number you need, I can't remember what they call it but it's what librarians use for filing pardon do a decimal system it's very much, it's the modern cataloging data it's the cataloging data exactly, yeah and the copyright information I put my bibliography in there the list of my other books with their ISPIN number so if somebody comes into a store and says what else has Bill Schubert written the bookstore owner can find it with the ISPIN number publishing information distribution information and the credits front cover and title page art design literary editor copy editor and then but some people just forget this and this, if you're going to be taken seriously, it's important to do it in 20 minutes to do this it's not rocket science and you also need to get the barcode which you can just get online you can buy a bunch of ISPIN numbers for your own publishing company and you can use them and assign them as you want and then they will send you a barcode as a file so that becomes important and what I tell my designer is your job is to design the cover and the chat and the text and to send it to Ingram which is who I use and to get a proof copy approve the proof copy and get approval from Ingram that your files match their manufacturing spec so I don't have to do anything that's the deal with my designer so they will call me up and say I've gotten approval from Ingram here's a press proof what do you think and then we're go costs by choice because it's a lot if I came up to you and said listen I've just written a 300 page book I'd love to have you read the whole thing and sit down with me for an hour or two and talk to me about what you found or blurb it or whatever I've asked you for 25 30 hours of your life that's a lot so depending on who it is I will pay somewhere between 100 or 200 dollars which is still a good deal to get that kind of good critical feedback so I might have five or six or eight hundred bucks in critical readers the literary editor is typically five to six hundred bucks and a copy editor does really a lot of work I bought that book from you I can't remember his name he's the copy editor for Redham house and it's a great book if you want to understand copy editing and they they get another five or seven hundred bucks they're typically by the hour the designer I pay depending on the complexity between a thousand and fifteen hundred and then I might have to pay on top of that a license fee for the art for example Lila and Theron I didn't have to pay for any of this because Simon and Schuster did but this is a Richard Brown photograph and Richard Brown like Peter Miller your own Peter Miller here in town is one of the iconic photographers and his photographs are on three of my books that's a Peter Miller photograph the Lamoille stories version two is and this is um and I pay him three hundred dollars for a one-time non-exclusive use as a cover with the understanding that if the book sells over five thousand I'll send him another two hundred dollars so if you add all that up it costs me about um twenty six hundred to thirty two hundred dollars to self-publish a book professionally so I get something that a bookstore owner is not going to be able to differentiate between whether I produced it or whether it was produced by Random House and that's important I mean I've had people send me books that look like they were done on a mimeograph machine and you know what does that say about how you feel about your work so um um and then um working with Ingram um I get between two eighty and three forty per book sold which is much better than I would get with a conventional publisher so to date all of my books except one have earned back whatever I've invested in them and some of them have earned a lot more I was lucky to cut a deal with Simon and Schuster so I paid the upfront cost so they didn't have any recovery I get seven dollars for every one of these themselves but unheard of in publishing so that's sort of a general picture of self-publishing I'd love to answer any questions you have I've gobbled up a tremendous amount of time but yes when you talk about your readers your first readers and sometimes you don't know them where are you finding them I did too we had a foreign exchange student from Moldova who lived with us for a year went for CVU her favorite class was creative writing at CVU and during the teacher visits I met her teacher really interesting guy and I said would you consider being a critical reader I'd love to so it's sort of serendipitous would you ask around you know people who are good readers and you might say who do you know who's doing a lot of reading you know and I always pick a young person one of the critical readers for my new book is a woman we're using as an intern for the Vermont Authors Project and she was absolutely thrilled to do it and I used our foreign exchange student as a critical reader for this and she was thrilled to do it she was 15 years old and spoke four languages what does that say and she was fluent in English she read the book she loved it in a manuscript form and she looks at me and she said and this had been through two copy editors the one I'd hired before I went to Simon & Schuster and then Simon & Schuster hired their own copy editor so it had been through two the manuscript but it hadn't been printed yet she said how long do you think a cat lives and I said you know 15, 12, 20 years she went uh huh she said well you better go back and look at your book I said Marcella what are you talking about she said you have a cat in the beginning named Maggs Maggs dies you go out to the barn you get another barn cat and you bring in and he's called Maggs too that same Maggs is in the book 40 years later and I'm like this from a 15 year old girl whose native language is Romanian so I always pick a young person as well other questions how many copies do you typically generate it's a great question because I don't do I don't generally do offset printing which is where you have to make a thousand or fifteen or twenty five hundred just because I know too many would-be writers who have a basement full of books um I use the LSI division of Ingram and I will typically order to fill the pipeline um anywhere from two to three hundred and that's basically what I think the initial bookstore orders will be plus the fifty to seventy five review copies I need and copies I'm going to send to the family so I kind of figure it out and I order them and they ship those to me and the way it works is it's really interesting they have an algorithm that determines the velocity of sale so this even though it's hardcover is the initial run was done offset because it's much cheaper and when the offset I think was twenty either fifteen hundred twenty five hundred when the initial offset was sold they then go on demand and that doesn't mean that there are no books in the warehouse and you order a book and they rush out and make one and ship it to you they have on the shelf five ten twenty five that's based on what they call the velocity of sale so if this book is let's say selling twenty five copies a month they're going to have twenty five on the shelf so they can ship immediately because Ingram's whole thing is you get your books in two days and so that's how they do it and most major publishers now their mid-list and their back-list is all on demand and it costs about twice as much as offset but you're saving a fortune on inventory I mean it's actually cheaper to pay more for a book and not have to carry inventory than it is otherwise so that's the answer do you know of a really good book that talks about or do you have one or would you like to write about get using your platform and using your marketing skills to generate demand that's the hard part it's a really good question if you take a book that you've written to an agent and you've even been able to get in the door because agents now are the guardian of the publishing industry the publisher will not even look at a manuscript unless it comes in through an agent and agents are very well defended but the first question they will ask you is exactly what you just said what's your platform and my answer is this my platform is I'm a public radio commentator up to a quarter of a million people hear my commentaries which are every couple of weeks they're not literary they're political in most cases some of them are cultural I have 1600 people who have opted in to get my commentaries which I also use to notify of new book releases of those 1600 about 45% actually open it it's one thing to send out 2000 emails that's actually a good proposal it's like crazy good yes and MailChimp will report they'll say we sent out 1800 and 900 people opened it so that's a piece of it the other piece of it is coming and talking with people in bookstores libraries and book clubs and the other piece of it which I just I hate I actually pay a woman $100 a month to do my social media she's a wizard and she gets raw material from me and she manages my Facebook page the embarrassing thing is is I've got something like 2000 people who look at me on Facebook and some of them are kids I went to school with and people I know and they say oh so good how are you they were answering it you know I have incredible ethical problems with Facebook they're getting hammered in Europe as they should and we're not hammering them so much over here because we don't hammer business very much but I don't know when I first tried to look at Facebook and I would see you know somebody say oh I had a good bell movement this morning and they're like do I care do I really care but for some people their platform is a blog for you know it's different for different people but that is the first question a publisher because they want to know how you're going to sell the book because they're not going to but when you're doing it for yourself what are you making what's an average an average sale level how many books do you sell in a year how many books do I sell it really depends on the title and how much work I put into it my biggest selling book is about 8,000 and my least selling book is just under a thousand which is enough to make the money back so you know it's not like and I don't have delusions of grandeur I'm not going to you know but you're going out and finding 8,000 people to buy your book so I was just wondering what that process is for you yeah it's basically what I said I mean when Laila and Theron came out I kept a database of 55 events that I was doing around New England which ran from Bridgeside to you know the other 20 Vermont stores from New Hampshire Massachusetts stores libraries just every chance I get and of course you know I want Jane Lindholm to interview me and and actually one of the best things I did was Bill Sears show on WDEV you know Bill's very conservative and we're good friends and I'm very liberal and I'm sort of his token liberal and he absolutely fell in love with Laila and Theron just loved the book and he said come on let's talk about it so we talked for an hour about this book and you know all those things make a difference but it's hard work and the one thing I will tell you is even the traditional publishers unless you're a Catherine Patterson or a Chris Bojelian they're not going to do anything to sell your book they'll feed the pipeline they don't pay for a book tour they want to know what you're doing to sell their book so it's you know you're very much on your own you've got public access media taking your absolutely I mean all these things matter is that hard to do to get do you actually is there a time thing will you keep me just keep me honest so we actually here at the bookstore have Orca they've voluntarily they actually reached out to us for a couple of different events we were doing this spring to come in but Orca often comes in we host Extenquo Storytelling a couple of times a year and some other events and so that was how we originally got to know the folks of Orca and so they've come out to other events that we have so so that's great but it's also just a lot of what you're saying really resonates because as a business we're always trying to be very creative and how we get the word out of we're having an event tonight or hey just coming to my store so being able to work with authors and public access is great for us too so it's interesting to hear about and there are radio station and TV stations who are looking for content and there's not a lot of them and there's almost no papers that do book reviews anymore very very few but it costs you very little for a book so I will typically send out 75 or 80 books to Jane Lindholm to some of the different radio stations and we'll get some interviews and there was one other thing I was going to say about that oh I've done something which I think is really unique I'm not sure I just did it I've been doing audio books and I've been using a producer in Shelburne who's really wonderful and I do some of the reading and other people depends on the book and what I did is I took ten short stories it's a total of ten stories maybe seven of them are short stories and three of them are extracts that stand alone I had my web person build a web page that says, read me a story and you go there and it's really beautifully designed and there are ten of my stories and you can just click on one on your cell phone or your computer or your tablet and the story will be read to you professionally they're not long I think the longest one might be 18-20 minutes but it's a way for somebody to discover and sample your work that's not just putting the print on your website my website is shubart.com it's real simple it's my last name and you click on read me a story they're all there and I'm getting amazingly good feedback so if somebody reads a short story from the memorial stories or fat people or a lava and theran they can just click on the title and then the book comes up and then the book sends you to the independent bookstores so one caveat, if you're thinking don't for God's sakes do anything with create space and pardon don't do it because you will alienate every bookseller I mean Mike DeSando who owns is it four or five bookstores now if you bring him in your book and you say oh I want you to carry my book he's going to open it up and it's going to say created by create space at Amazon and he's just simply going to say nope, not going to carry your book and I am really sympathetic to that the dilemma that writers face is if you go to my website it lists all of Vermont's bookstores it has them all there it says you can buy my book at any of these independent Vermont bookstores and then it says you can buy it online at IndieBound which is the organization for the bookstores and it says the last thing is Amazon because the reality is you can make an ethical decision that you're not going to send anyone to Amazon but frankly if you're trying to sell books it's impractical because there are people who buy my books in England and they buy them from Amazon although any bookstore in England can order my book from England so other questions, yes how do you make it go from in here to a book because I can tell like I've been telling really good stories but I don't know how to get them down in print it's a really good question and I'm going to tell you something that's really important to figure out some people are writers and some people are storytellers and there's a difference and it's not a difference of imagination whether you tell the story or whether you write it if it's a great story it's a great story the only difference is the medium and the craft the technology writing is a skill and you can study it and you can learn it and you can get better and better at it the thing I recommend more than anything is one of the best ways which I'm sure you do and we learn 70% by example and 30% by being taught so reading is really important but the next most important thing is don't sit around and say I have writer's block I'm going to say there's no such thing as writer's block and there's 20 authors that would just shoot me in the forehead if they heard me say that get into the discipline of sitting down whenever your time is whether it's at night, afternoon or morning and just write for one hour let it flow look at what you've written and you'll have a sense if it works share it with other people there are writing groups now all over a month and share your work and get feedback is to sit down and write and it's not perfect I wrote one novel that I put tons of work into and I gave it out to critical readers and they came back to me and they said this novel doesn't work and I knew why I created this story but I was so enraged it was about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry I was so enraged in the pharmaceutical industry that I was just preaching all the time and I lost my characters the most important thing is just do it and if you don't feel like doing it sit down at a keyboard and do it anyway I don't know what else to say other questions I don't have a question but I just as a bookstore owner and as a person who loves to read books, books everything there have been so many times that over the years that somebody will come in and say I'm an author I'd like to you know, me to carry my book and it is so a lot of times it's like great but it's exciting for us too to have somebody come in and to share that with us and there have been many times that we just received a couple of months ago a book from a woman who came into my store I'd only been open for two weeks and this is like almost ten years ago now we'd only been open for two weeks and we struck up a great conversation a friendship she's come back a couple of times over the years because she has friends in the area to pop in and she sent us her Advanced Readers copy of her book that's coming out next month and we've all read it and we're like oh my god this is amazing that's a friendship that went back ten years almost so it's just you know a really good point and I'm going to say something you're too polite to say and that is you can't you can't create a book and walk into a bookstore and say you have to carry my book it's terrific and by the way I'd like a window and you know just start with 50 copies and when those sold call me out and can you pay me now I mean yeah I'm sure you hear this the reality is the bookstore is your partner and you have to treat them like a partner and you have to understand at least the rudiments of how difficult their business is they have to buy hundreds of books and pay for them and let them sit on a shelf until somebody buys them there is it's a consignment business so they can return them if they don't sell but it costs money to maintain inventory and there are bookstores that have a very and this is one of the things that the Vermont authors project is working on is helping authors understand how a bookstore works and there are bookstores that have a consignment policy which is oh you have a new book terrific well we have no idea how it's going to sell you give me two copies I'll put them on the shelf and I'm not going to pay you for them if they sell I have your email address I'll pay you for those two and you bring me two more and if they sell fast maybe I'll take four but that's that's understanding your business partner and you know I hear stories from bookstore owners people coming oh just start with 50 and here's an invoice you know I mean what so that's really important I'm really glad you raised that other thoughts questions what's the Vermont authors project about it's been going for about three years and it's not heavily public yet but it will be more so it's really a partnership it's interesting there's there are 250 credible writers in Vermont I'm not talking about just people cranking out something I'm talking about people who have published credible books of all kinds and there are 250 libraries about 30 of which welcome authors it changes all the time but there's actually about 22 independent bookstores those numbers are the highest per capita numbers in the United States I mean Vermont is a literary state people read they buy books they use libraries there are a lot of bookstores I mean book clubs so we got very intrigued with the idea of supporting local authors and we partnered with the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing and we're actually putting the Vermont authors and all the independent bookstores up on the Vermont Tourism and Marketing site we're writing about Vermont authors in their publications and we did a beautiful thing I actually have the artwork in the car at the welcome areas at the welcome area in Guilford we had an entire wall it said learn about Vermont through the eyes of a Vermont writer and we had profiled you know some really typical Vermont writers like Archer Mayer and you know just people who are really quite well known but who really write about Vermont and then there was a card independent bookstores in Vermont their addresses, their websites and it was kind of an experiment and we had to replace the author cards and the bookstore cards every few days Wow tourists were just gobbling them up so I just met a couple of us three of us including our intern from UVM met with the Tourism and Marketing Council and had a really wonderful meeting they are very anxious to promote Vermont bookstores Vermont authors so it's it'll become more public as we get further along other questions observations and you know don't think just about storytelling think about memoir I just told a course down in Middlebury about memoir writing and it was packed and one of the assignments was everybody had to write a one page memoir and I have to tell you I was thunderstruck by what some people had you know what they wrote and read and turned in so you know I mean books are there's cookbooks there's travel books there's personal experience memoir there's literary fiction so you need to just think what's in your heart in your head and let it out anything else you've been wonderful thank you so much