BLITZES at bltcpress

Well today I’ve been mostly working on my awakenings.com site, which I am cleaning up and transition to Joola as a content management system for it.  In the process of cleaning up my root directory, I found this orphaned bit I worte some time ago on Crockett Johnson, best known for Harold and the Purple Crayon, but most loved by me (I was probably at least eight years old before I conected the dots and realized the Harold and the Purple Crayon Guy was also the “Blue Ribbon Puppies” guy, although it is intuitively obvious by the illustrations) for “Puppies”.  Since “The Blue Ribbon Puppies” is probably the least known of the three “BLTC Press” inspirational books (the other two being The Little Engine That Could and Stone Soup” (= BLTC PRESS as an anagram), I thought I’d repost it here.  So here goes, here’s my Homage to Crockett Johnson:

Crockett Johnson is best known as the author/illustrator of Harold and the Purple Crayon, a classic of modern children’s literature. He is also the author (among a number of other children’s books) of The Blue Ribbon Puppies (an illustration from which above).

The Blue Ribbon Puppies is the story of a boy and a girl who want to give a blue ribbon to the best dog out of a pack of puppies. To select him, they proceed to try a blue ribbon on each of them, expecting I suppose to ‘recognize’ the best by how he wears his ribbon. Unfortunately, as each of them is examined in turn, they all prove to have some significant defect: too fat, too long, too tall, too big, too short, too shaggy, too spotty, too plain.

However, when the defect is announced, each puppy stares plaintively at the boy and girl, who respond by declaring each pupy the best fat, the best long, the best tall, etc., puppy. In the end, they all wind up with a puppy, and sit around and admire each other ‘for quite some time.’

When I was three or four years old, living in Rowayton, Connecticut in the late fifties, I lived on Crockett Street. My older brother thought that the cool thing about me living on Crockett Street was that my name was David, Davey Crockett being the hot thing on television at the time. For me, thought, the special thing about living on Crockett Street was that Crockett Johnson lived down the street.

I’m pretty sure I never actually met him, although I have owned since that age an inscribed copy of The Blue Ribbon Puppies, which I liked to think he gave to that ‘cute boy down the street;’ unfortunately, my mother recently disabused me of any such fantasy notion by telling me that she bought it at a book signing Crockett did at the local bookstore.

Notwithstanding, it remains my earliest memory of a book that belonged especially to me, and a special favorite (along with The Little Engine That Could).

Recently, I’ve begun to dream about Crockett Johnson and The Blue Ribbon Puppies.

I re-connected with The Little Engine That Could when I was 22 and went to work for the Platt & Munk Company, who were its publishers. How that happened, and what happened, is mostly another (not super interesting) story. In the short time I was there (before it was bought up by Grosset & Dunlap), I was tasked to ‘write’ three children’s books of my own. Amazingly, one of them was credited using the ‘house pseudonym’ of Watty Piper — ‘author’ of The Little Engine. (This used to impress women tremendoulsy. In 1979, there was a cartoon in the New Yorker of one woman breathlessly telling another: “Imagine! 24 years old, and he already has a pseudonym!” That was about me, honest.) Anyway, it was a pretty crummy book ‘Watty Piper’s Trucks.’ I also did ‘Puppy Pals’ (the Blue Ribbon connection) and also the only one I put my name to, ‘It’s Fun To Wash,’ mostly because the illustration was so good (not by me).

I was editorially involved with a number of projects there, one of which was a re-issue of a slightly sanitized Little Black Sambo, which Platt and Munk had published off and on for years.

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There is a great Crockett Johnson site here.

BLTC Press is a “follow your bliss” activity for me — or as Rudolf Steiner would say, something, at bottom, that I pursue from “pure love of the deed”.  Just about a year ago (July 2007) I bought my first Sony Reader with some of the proceeds from a sell-off - give-off - trade-off of several thousand “extra” books I had accumulated over the years.

I made the jump from my first passion, book publishing, into the software business (once upon a time it was even called “software publishing” and my first business card even said “software acquisition editor”) years and years ago, and found myself weaving in and out of various text and extext projects — product manager for an early Word Processor for the Apple II (PIE Writer); Development lead on a publishing system at Mirror Systems (part of Times Mirror) to move medical abstracts from Year Book Medical Publishers online with Lexis/Nexis, and at Apple involved in various technical publication projects as part of my software tools product manager role, and “godfather” of their Adobe Acrobat precursor, DocViewer - rightly abandoned by Apple as Adobe stepped forward with PDF.

Yet I never ever seriously considered ebooks a viable thing.  I’ve never read a book (other than documentation) from a PDF.  I did read a couple of books on my Palm Pilot, and also bought a few of those “Books in a Hypercard stack” for the Macintosh (weird!).  But when I saw the e-ink display, I flipped a bit and felt all my book publishing, software, and platform ecosystems juices flowing.  I got religion.

I couldn’t quite figure out where to channel it, so I wound up doing BLTC Press in my spare time (I’m currently unemployed from my day job in enterprise software product management, so there’s a bit of that right now).  I am the chief cook and bottle washer here, and trying to figure out how to scale it, and also contemplating a move into copyright publications, among other things.

Mostly, I enjoy publishing books that I think are worth reading and interesting.  I remember last fall standing in the basement of the Strand bookstore in New York and laughing at the hubris/impossibility of ever gettin all this backlist stuff electronic.  But that’s the space that interests me the most — the copyright backlist stuff that you pick up in used bookstores.  Used bookstores (good ones) are great filters as they (usually) are pretty selective — they know what sells and what doesn’t (what has sold).  New York and Amazon will take care of the frontlist — which is great, and which become tomorrow’s backlist.  Meanwhile, there is tons of gold to be mined.

More later, like — “Why haven’t you published any new titles in the last month?”

One of the initiatives at BLTC Press is a sub-brand called “GoodMountain Books”.  Right now these titles are only available on the Amazon site for Kindle, but will be showing up here for Sony and non-DRM availability soon.

Anyway, the principle is — let’s embrace and acknowledge Project Gutenberg as the source of many (most) public domain titles published as ebooks.  Typically, the Project Gutenberg attribution is ripped out of the text, as its use entails a trademark license and some somewhat onerous additional requirements, e.g., inclusion of their (hopelessly verbose) trademark license, the commitment to make the “raw text” available, and of course, payment of a trademark royalty (20%).

On the other hand, production of an ebook from existing source text such Project Gutenberg source is … pretty easy.  Not so easy, however, that many (most?) of the (for example) public domain titles on Mobipocket/Kindle are less than elegant productions — some of the are simply a cut and paste yielding what I refer to as a long scroll of toliet paper — no chapter headings, no linked table of contents, etc.

Meanwhile, the tagline for GoodMountain books is “Premium editions of Project Gutenberg (TM) etexts”.  Imagine my dismay then when a review showed up for my “Wuthering Heights” which was, to say the least, withering (wuthering?).  Apparently the chief complaint was that the text was right (full) justified — which in fact, it isn’t and further, I don’t believe it’s possible to force right justification in a Kindle book — they’re designed to “flow”.  The USER can however select left or full justified using the “J” key (secret option) when the font key is pressed.  The reviewer also complained that there was too much space between paragraphs (which, for some obscure reason, in the build as published there WERE an extra blank between paragraphs).

Well, I posted a rebuttal and an invitation for the reviewer to contact me and explain what the heck their expeience was, because on my Kindle, it looks fine — the way I intended.  (I have however since updated with the extra blanks removed).

Not a good start to a brand intended to be about quality.  When purchasing a public domain book (especially one that is available in raw text, at least, for free from Project Gutenberg), the ONLY thing worth paying for is the quality of the formatting/packaging.  One should ALWAYS use the “download preview” option when purchasing any public domain work published in multiple editions and shop for the best.  I don’t know why this reviewer didn’t do that, but I hope that in future, despite this particular review, those who compare BLTC Press and GoodMountain titles (either the free downloads or Amazon Kindle samples) will find them worth the price.

I am looking for the best mechanism to process customer comments on the books, especially formatting editing and transcription corrections.

I’ve been doing some work on the www.bltcpress.com commercial site, and thought I would augment it with a little “running commentary” and other remarks on my one-man-band book (as of today anyway) book publishing site.  Perhaps it will generate a little more interest/traffic, which is the primary concern, as one of the first “learnings” in the process is how expensive it is to generate traffic using AdWords or similar advertising.  And moreso, when your “shop” at the present is still quite humble, and the average unsuspecting visitor is at present limited to a choice of the 30 or so titles here.

My ambition however is simple and perhaps marvelously illustrated by the story of the daffodil principle. That is, over time, we’ll have more and more of a list for people to choose from.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested, you’re welcome to follow me along as I plug along with my contribution to the creation of a target-rich ebook universe for readers.