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.
Showing posts with label antarctica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antarctica. Show all posts
7/20/2010
6/28/2008
Field Notes: They Came Home to Lyttelton
In my journal for The Entire Earth and Sky, I wrote,
I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.
As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.
I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.
I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”
Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.
W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.
The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.
Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.
Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.
The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.
I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.
As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.
I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.
I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”
Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.
W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.
The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.
Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.
Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.
The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.
6/11/2008
10 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ANTARCTICA
What a great day for Antarctic news: The last supply ship in dumped off about 16,000 condoms to make it through the winter. Good on ya, mates, as my Kiwi colleagues say. The first part of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY is a "gazetteer" of Antarctic facts. And then there are facts strewn around the book. How about this one: 46,800 cans of beer are ordered each year for Scott Base, the New Zealand base in the Ross Sea. (Wine, you ask? 2,268 bottles.) At any rate, I plan to include fact lists each week over the austral winter, in honor of our colleagues toughing it out in the 24-hour darkness of the deep south. While some might call such lists random, there is also an argument that all of these ideas were carefully selected from the tens of millions floating around out there -- do you see the link?
1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."
1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."
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