Sticking Your Hand Down the Memory Hole

A little story about publishing

Come with me! I have a little story to tell, about books and publishing and how, with help from smart and kind and industrious people, you can stick your hand right down the memory hole and rescue what is almost-lost and build new things too

That trailer is from a novella I wrote back in, oh, 2011 or so. At the time, my former sister-in-law had a small publishing company and published it. Cool! A friend was launching a book trailer biz and made the video for free. Also very cool. We put out two other books of mine, a short Kindle-only memoir called The Queens of Montague Street (which was excerpted as a NY Times "Lives" column), and a book of short stories called Transportation. All the titles were created on Amazon's CreateSpace - now called KDP - which meant the e-books lived forever, as did print, because it was print-on-demand.

This is kind of a lucky position, as you may not have institutional backing but you do have real transparency about creation, what's being bought, making sure bookstores don't stop carrying your book (which they almost certainly will) and publishers don't pulp what they cannot sell. Did you know most book do not sell more than 1000 copies? The big ones carry all the little ones, but I digress.

A few months ago I went to go buy my podcast partner Sarah Hepola a copy of The Queens of Montague Street. It showed as unavailable, which made no sense: how is an e-book on Amazon not available? I checked the other books I'd done with my sis-in-law; also unavailable. Oh man, what? I don't know (and never will) what caused the books to go down but I knew I didn't want them to stay down, and thus started the process of finding files (I only had "Queens..."), replicating the others, getting things digitized, getting art, rewriting bios, etc. Of that process, I did just about precisely the bio rewriting, maybe a little more.

But guess what? All the books that I published under that imprint (my last book, To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder, I did with Little A Books) will be back online and available by the 17th, when - and here's the silk purse - the new book, Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles drops. (And yes, for those who’ve asked, there will be a print copy on pub date.) High tide floats all boats!