Well, greetings on this late-autumn Chicago evening, as I sit on the red line here writing in my paper notebook, making my way across the city to go visit a friend. I'm still kinda taking it easy at this point, frankly, after finally getting my arts center's first-ever original book out on Monday, a "story cycle" called Repetition Patterns by a local author here named Ben Tanzer. As the book's sole editor, designer, PR agent, tour organizer and web programmer, I knew in advance that exactly one gajillion details would pile up in the week before release, and that I alone would have to deal with them all; and I actually managed to deal with all one gajillion of them, so am "rewarding" myself by taking a little time off from most of my usual daily life obligations (emailing, writing, etc, although sadly it's back to the usual grind come Monday). And as a matter of fact, as of this entry the book's official numbers for the first three days are in, frankly smaller numbers than I was hoping for but still not bad for the circumstances: without a promotional budget or any book reviews or any external help, for a book that's not available at Amazon or in bookstores, it's now had 220 people in 72 hours come by and check it out, 25 people download it, four of those people actually voluntarily pay for it, for total revenue so far of a whopping twenty bucks.

Now, would CCLaP have sold more than four copies in the first three days if it weren't offering a free version? Perhaps, but not likely, not based on the dozens of other basement-press eBook experiences I've heard about. Meanwhile, has CCLaP gotten the book itself into twenty more readers' hands than the usual eBook with no free version? Yes, very definitively it has. Will these people go on to mention it at their own blogs, write up critiques at Goodreads, essentially become free walking advertisements for the book? Why, it's already started happening, in fact. To tell the truth, actually, about the only number right now I'm sincerely disappointed by is the 220 total people who have checked out the book's online headquarters; given that Ben and I collectively got the word out to several thousand people, I was expecting a higher initial-visitor rate than that. But we've got plans to raise this number after the holidays; for example, we're putting together a "virtual book tour" for him over the last half of January, in which we set up in advance a daily schedule of "guest appearances" by Ben at other blogs, sometimes interviews and sometimes a guest essay, sometimes a prerecorded audio file and sometimes an excerpt from the book with new background notes. (By the way, if you'd like to be a part of such a virtual tour, just drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com.)

It would be easy to be disappointed by the amount of revenue the book has so far generated, I admit. But frankly, I went into this entire thing de-emphasizing as much as possible the topic of revenue as a qualifier of success; that's why I give out a free version, after all, is because I still believe eBooks to work better simply as promotional items than as professional products for sale, even if the electronic version is the only one that exists. In fact, especially if the book only exists electronically, since there are now officially one fucking million hacky subpar writers online these days, with officially one fucking million hacky subpar eBooks for sale, and with all of these authors for some reason thinking that big crowds are going to suddenly show up and automatically pay nine bucks for a badly-formatted PDF that no one in the publishing industry wanted in the first place, and that offering a free version is somehow going to fatally compromise that entire prospect. Back when I was a creative writer myself, I ended up having tens of thousands of people collectively download my books, precisely because they were free, precisely because people are so much more willing to take a chance on an unknown writer when their book is free; and in the meanwhile, several hundred of these people ended up donating close to three thousand dollars to me over the years because of these free books, which I guarantee you is a much better ROI ("return on investment") than 99 percent of these crappy eBooks with no free version, polluting the internet like some kind of information plague.

Not to mention, back when I first started up plans for CCLaP in 2004 (or three years before the current version opened), I realized very quickly that anything I did through it would ultimately have to be entirely self-motivated; because in all this time, I can still get barely anyone I know to believe I'm actually going to be able to pull CCLaP off (to the point of eventually acquiring a permanent physical space in the city, my ultimate goal), much less anyone to believe it enough to invest money in the plans. No no, CCLaP Publishing's goals are much more ephemeral and long-term in nature; merely to put out exquisitely great books, to develop a reputation as an extremely high-end limited-edition press, showcasing a series of more daring mid-sized projects by mid-career writers, ones with several other books already under their belt. This will help cement the overall quality of CCLaP and anything it puts its name on; this will get CCLaP bigger attention from the exact industry professionals and middle-class couples I'm seeking. And this will make people believe in CCLaP more, talk about CCLaP more, recommend CCLaP to others more; and then when the center is finally ready to take on some more high-profile, high-profit projects (like expensive "fine-art" paper-book runs, regular live events, getting local writers signed to bigger agencies and presses), lots of these middle-class couples and industry professionals will be ready to join the cause, and jump head-first into the projects because of CCLaP's previous reputation for quality. That's what I say, anyway -- Don't be stingy with the stuff that was barely going to generate any revenue anyway, like electronic books; better to use them promotionally for a greater and more profitable purpose, like generating bigger audiences during tours, building goodwill towards a bigger project in the future, etc.

So in those terms, I'm incredibly happy; Repetition Patterns turned out exactly how I had pictured it in my head, and I had been holding myself up to fairly ridiculously high standards in my head. And I have to admit, although I don't think it appropriate to talk about at CCLaP itself, a big part of why I'm so satisfied with it is because it was my very first highly successful experience as an editor; one where I changed a lot of stuff (like I've done before in editing jobs), gave some stories an entirely different flavor (like I've also done on past jobs), but this time with the author actually liking the process and results, instead of damning and cursing me at the end of it all (like has happened most times in the past). And in fact, this gets into the whole subject of how I hope to be eventually regarded among artists, as my new role as the owner of an arts center and a full-time administrator: namely, as a former artist himself, one with an artistic sensibility, who is qualified for a job with a major press, but turns down the opportunity in order to have a more personal, nurturing relationship with the writers he edits and publishes. This is a huge problem within mainstream publishing these days, for those who don't know; now that all the major presses are owned by giant corporate conglomerates, they've turned them all into the same high-profit, high-turnover ventures as their television holdings and record-label holdings and DVD-manufacturer holdings. But the fact is that the publishing industry throughout history has always been a low-profit venture, done more for the love of the arts than to make a gajillion dollars; and this has caused a huge problem in these corporate times, with it now being the marketers and PR specialists and national retail liaisons at these places who make the decisions over what's to be published, and a business model that now places a poisonous emphasis on getting just a few explosive dumbed-down bestsellers out per year, and virtually ignoring every single other book they put out.

That's not why editors become editors; editors become editors because they want to have a very old-skool effect on the arts. They want to be the "Modernist Hero" definition of an editor -- the person who plucks an artist from obscurity, guides and shapes and molds them, helps them understand things about their writing they didn't understand themselves, buy them drinks and slip them rent money when they need it the most. Editors become editors because they want to influence and contribute to the national conversation on the arts, not be a follower of what's already being said; they want to set the actual tone of the conversation, not just ceaselessly pour through demographic spreadsheets and worry about whether some mouth-breathing "Joe The Plumber" redneck is going to like it. And this is causing bigger and bigger problems at these major presses, because you suddenly have a whole generation of people like me who are highly qualified for these editor jobs, but won't touch them with a ten-foot pole because of knowing how impotent editors have become at these places, that virtually any decision you make now can be instantly vetoed simply by some schmuck in a tasteful business-casual outfit at the end of a conference table quietly muttering, "That'll never sell." And that leads to ever-worse and ever-worse editors at these major presses, and a bigger and bigger takeover of artistic decisions by people with business degrees; and that leads to more and more smart authors abandoning these major presses, and flocking to the exact independent micro-businesses these maverick editors are starting up on their own or with friends; and that leads to more and more crap from these major presses, more and more and more and more; and that leads to massive losses, massive layoffs, bankruptcies, and eventual shutdowns of all these corporate places.

Great arts administrators understand that you will never get anywhere simply by playing catch-up to the national cultural mood, like all these corporate-influenced major presses now endlessly do; the great ones understand that it's their mature, informed, intuitive choices that set the national cultural mood, that help determine that mood. It's not me giving the audience what they want; it's me telling them what they want, based on taking the pulse of the country that moment and then extrapolating a couple of steps ahead. And this too is part of the job of a truly effective arts administrator, and why the job is actually a lot trickier to master than it may seem at first; they need to not only be technically proficient at making artistic projects better and better, but also be a bit of a fortune-teller, to partly guess what the audience is going to want and partly tell them what they want. And that's why I don't worry so much these days about exactly how much money one of my projects or another is making, why I find it more important right now to actually get my projects into the hands of others, even if that means literally giving them away for free. Money always eventually comes to talented people who work hard and have a little luck -- that's the very freaking definition of capitalism, after all, a fact proven so many times in the US now that we can safely accept it as a truism. The important part of the arts is to always boldly forge ahead, albeit with wisdom and education and an intuitive understanding of societal wants and fears; and that's how you become a great book editor and successful publisher, not by putting the suits with advertising degrees and laptops full of spreadsheets in charge of creative decisions.

Anyway, if you haven't gotten a chance yet, I do hope you'll have a moment soon to stop by the book's online headquarters, download a copy and have a read. As you can tell, I'm pretty proud of the book, and proud to have my name associated with it; I hope you'll like the reading experience just as much.