Paperback Writer

I recently found out that if you have a great hardback edition of your book -- ie, a book people call "beautifully designed" as I do, paperback days may have to wait. Well, it's not truly the fault of the book design. The fact is,

THE ENTIRE
EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica October 2008: 323 pp.; 5.2 inches x
8.5 inches; 11 photographs.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1617-4



(800-755-1105)

while doing "great" in sales (particularly for a book with no marketing except for a few ads and a personally funded book tour) cannot go paper until we sell more hardback copies.

It's not like I'm not already trying. While the book came out over a year ago, I continue to give readings across the U.S. and abroad (try buying the book in Australia or New Zealand where I did much of my research -- ha-ha on that idea) and make cold calls to bookstores to see if they carry my book.

The main resistance to purchasing it by bookstores? Price. The book costs over $20. "We'll carry the paperback," they tell me. "Cheaper to stock. And for a traveller's book like yours. More portable."

I come home, vaguely defeated by this news. It's all so much to manage these days for us writers. Remember when making books was about assembling a bunch of pages, stapling them together, then calling it a day? Ha-ha on that idea, too.

My husband Ed, who closes large deals on fiber optic cables for a living, finds this paper-back edition log-jam appalling.

"Get me a copy of your contract! Who makes this decision?" he squawked from our orange couch, where he balanced a bowl of pistachios and a Stella Artois beer while reading the latest on hybrid Lexus sedans.

"Nebraska has the paperback rights," I sniff. "They say we have to sell more of what we have first. But they've been really good to me. It's just the book business right now. Tough."

And it's true. Nebraska is an excellent press and I love working with them. And these are weird, paradigm-shift times for all of us in publishing

So.

This leaves me with no other route than to try and sell as many copies of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica as I can. I mean, this is what we polar explorers do, isn't it? Take charge and keep going with good cheer, even in the face of adversity?

This is my first foray into direct marketing, and I can say as a writer who prefers to sit for long hours in wide-open, wild places, like Antarctica and New Zealand (read about it in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY) -- it sort of freaks me out in a way canoeing a rough river or sliding down an icy hillock do not.

But what are the options? Sit here in silence, writing away on my new project and give up trying to get more eyeballs on THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY? Wait til I see it in five years, dust-covered on the outdoor remainder table at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco, next to faded copies of How Not to Act Old?



Someone suggested I do a YouTube author video where we get creative and show both what the book's about and what I went through to get this book written -- how I travelled to Antarctica in 1988 for three months, then reported the news in other places around the world, then found I thought about Antarctica every day.

So I began my slow path back to The Ice, reading and researching the people who went before me, the treaty and legal conventions, and the state of the ice and wildlife. A deeply personal quest, first as a reporter then as a single mother with a Fulbright working out of Gateway Antarctica International Research Centre in Christchurch.

Fifteen years after first setting foot on Ross Island, near Robert Falcon Scott's famous hut, I wrote my book about my life in Antarctica and subsequent explorations into the "little known" stories of that continent's exploration.

Why do I think Antarctica matters so much, to stake my life on this project for more than a decade? Well, I think Antarctica offers us much to consider -- and I felt and feel we can only fully embrace all we have here on Earth via close inspection. I love how Antarctica contains more than 60 percent of the Earth's fresh water, how the ice is more than 20 million years old, how the ice covers 98 percent of the continent. I love how penguins have evolved as birds who swim rather than fly.

And I loved the chance to take a nice long chunk of time and turn all this over in my mind and into the thing call book, to slow down my thinking from the rapid-fire worlds of mothering and journalism, to allow the feel and reach of The Ice to inhabit the feel and reach of my creative work.

More on the path to making the book in the next post. In the meantime, any thoughts on ways to get the book to more people's eyeballs?

Let me know.