Flashback Friday: A 2009 Conversation with Twin Ports Writer/Editor/Publisher Ron Brochu

This is an interview I posted in 2009. While re-reading it recently it became apparent that the content here remains relevant, especially for the local writing and publishing scene. Ron is one of many local writers/publishers for whom I have high regard.

I'm still not sure how our paths first crossed, but it was our writing vocations for sure. What I do recall is that Ron Brochu was a journalist serious about his craft. Over the years we have met from time to time to compare notes on the writing life.

I'd like to imagine that all writers are like me, they respect anyone who writes and keeps writing even when it all feels so futile at times. Are we filling the world with too many words? Well, there are stories that still need to be told. And many that bear repeating to a new audience.

The original title for this blog entry was going to be "Journalism in the Internet Age and Other Adventures" because Ron has been in a perfect position to see the Internet's raw power as it has run roughshod over the newspaper industry. Take a minute and listen up.

EN: Can you briefly outline your career path as a writer?

Ron Brochu: It began at Denfeld High School and continued at UMD, where I became business manager, then entertainment editor and editor-in-chief at the campus newspaper.

I lived in Minneapolis after graduation, freelancing for the Southside Newspaper, then in 1978 took a trade magazine editing job at the former Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. During that time, I also freelanced for the Milwaukee Sentinel, Hermantown Star and Duluth Budgeteer. Using those bylines, I landed a part time reporting/photography job at the Superior Evening Telegram in 1984, where I eventually covered government and was assistant managing editor. Wayne Nelson recruited me to BusinessNorth in 1995, where I worked as managing editor but also learned pagination, graphics and a host of business software skills. Two years later, I moved to the Budgeteer News, where Murphy McGinnis Media moved us to a twice weekly, with dreams of becoming a daily. It became clear we lacked the resources to make that move, so I joined the competition when the Duluth News Tribune opened a Superior bureau in 1999. Worked there as a business writer for about two years, then moved to Duluth, where I covered education for a year before becoming city editor in charge of business, labor, health and environment reporters.

In 2005, the DNT sent me to the Telegram, which Knight Ridder had purchased two years earlier. My mission was to retrain and coach the newsroom staff until a permanent editor could be hired. I soon became that editor and remained in Superior until July 2008, when I was canned for exercising my right to free speech in a private e-mail to my bosses.

EN: Getting published is not that challenging for any determined writer producing sufficiently professional work. Getting paid for one’s writing seems a little more problematic. Why is this? Is it a supply and demand issue or something else?

RB: I think it’s more of a problem in Duluth than elsewhere. Compensation here is very low, likely because there are too many publications and they’re all strapped for cash.

As an HBJ editor, I was paying $250-$400 for trade magazine feature articles in 1978, and the Milwaukee Sentinel was paying me about $75 for features. At the same time, the Budgeteer was paying me $10 for each city council story. It hasn’t improved much since then. Last year, I was paying Telegram contributors anywhere from nothing to $50 for weekly columns – whatever they’d take. Contributors to the annual marketing supplement were getting up to $100 for feature stories, which still isn’t much.

EN: This (the overall economy) is just a very weak market. How has the publishing scene changed since the advent of the Internet?

RB: Print news publications have lost considerable advertising revenue. They’ve reacted by cutting staff and content, hurting their circulation revenue. Although many have developed a Web presence, few have developed innovative new products that generate sales comparable to advertising revenue. Newcomers have outsmarted print publishers on every front. A few examples include eBay, Craig’s List and Amazon.com. By having customers input orders, these web marketers have drastically reduced the cost of sales. Print publications, particularly newspapers, are strangled by high overhead.

Until they shed expensive labor and equipment costs, print will continue to struggle. The inexpensive Internet model is both a blessing and a curse. Although costs are virtually nonexistent, any idiot can launch a web page and pass off nonsense as truth. It’s extremely difficult to differentiate legitimate Internet journalism from rants and opinion.

EN: Sixties writers like Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe used fictional techniques to write about non-fiction themes. I remember a quote by Wolfe that the novel was dead due to reader interest in “reality” and “news.” He later wrote novels like Bonfire of the Vanities, and today bestseller novels continue to rake in millions. Do you think fiction will ever become obsolete?

RB: No. Even though truth can be stranger than fiction, it doesn’t flow as well. A good writer can always weave bits and pieces of truth into fiction that’s far more interesting. That’s not to say novels won’t go electronic, but they’ll definitely continue to exist.

EN: I spent a half hour trying to hook up my new HDTV box to a television set last night, and failed. Isn’t this move to digital television the craziest thing yet? Anything you’d like to add to what you have already written? What kind of feedback did you get to your story in the Reader.  

RB: For whatever reason, I don’t get much feedback to my Reader stories. The advantages of digital are overblown, in my opinion, at least for audio. I’m not a fan of unintelligible phone conversations, answering machines, MP3 recordings. We’re saving spectrum by cutting quality, then using the excess spectrum to broadcast more dumb sitcoms and even dumber reality shows. To me, the net gain is less than zero.

EN: As a former newspaper editor, what are the most shocking things you have seen that no one is talking about today?

RB: Governmental incompetence and waste top my personal list. Most of today’s reporters simply cover meetings and don’t take risks. For instance, they don’t dig into the early retirement benefit costs for police officers and firefighters. They haven’t revealed that Gary Doty has free lifetime medical benefits, even though they’re aware of it. They don’t write about the source of campaign contributions to Rep. Jim Oberstar or Rep. Dave Obey, and links between contributors and votes. In essence, they’re afraid to tackle beloved people and institutions. They’re as phony and incompetent as those they write about.
 

Throwback Thursday: eBooks Abound

THIS BLOG POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN 2011

Thursday, the Huffington Post published an article by Amy Edelman that called Indie eBooks the "Gateway Drug" to traditional publishing. Here's the opening, Edelman's article in blue, my comments in blood red:

Gone are the days when a writer had to spend hours hunched over a stack of query letters,

>>>Been there, done that<<<

...only to have their hopes dashed months later with the arrival of an unsigned form letter.

>>>I could wallpaper my office with this stuff<<<

Today, thanks entirely to the creation of the e-reader (yay Jeff Bezos!),

>>>Yay, Jeff Bezos<<<

there's no longer a need for authors to deal with middle men. For less than what it costs to buy a book, an author can jump directly to the end game: formatting their titles, uploading them to a sales site and finding actual readers.

>>>You still have to purchase an ISBN, but hey, thatz-ok.<<<

Edelman goes on to explain that for many writers the prize is still out there in the traditional publishing world, but for the time being getting readers satisfies an important need. Not only are eBook authors still looking for conventional publishers, the publishers themselves are combing the ranks of independent authors to find their next round of author heroes.

Edelman is founder of the website IndieReader.com which lists the top selling eBooks each week.

In other news: The Tulare County Library has gone digital and is doing away with late fees — on ebook downloads. If you have a Nook, more and more libraries are making these new digital works available just like regular books. The local libraries here will become accessible on Kindles by the end of the year.

I asked my publisher TJ Lind to write up some instructions on how to read eBooks via other platforms when you don't have the official Kindle or Nook reading devices. Here's a short piece he wrote up, aptly titled eBooks All Around.

eBooks All Around!
In a previous article, “eBook Supremacy,” I had mentioned that part of eBook success is due to the ability for customers to “buy once, read everywhere.” If one were to download a book on a Kindle or Nook they could read the first few chapters on their eReader before bed, then another few chapters on their phone during their commute, another few chapters on their iPad during lunch break, and read some more on their computer during down time at work! Moreover, some readers do not realize that they do not need to own a Kindle or Nook to read books from their respective stores. There is a Kindle app for every major platform; iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, and Mac. Chances are the device you are reading this article on is able to download.

The download process differs depending on which platform one is using. Users with Apple products need only to search for “Kindle” or “Nook” in the App store. Same goes for Android and Blackberry users. If one wants to download the Kindle or Nook apps on a computer, simply navigate to the Kindle Store on Amazon, and select “Kindle Reading Apps” in the left hand column.

Once the app is downloaded, it will present instructions to download eBooks. Now your books will be synced between your devices!

Edelman ends her HuffPost piece with this challenge: So next week, after you've finished the Times crossword puzzle, why not try a new game? See if you can discover (and pass on!) the next great indie book...before a traditional publisher beats you to it!

>>>Hint: The Red Scorpion.<<<

eBook Supremacy

As has been repeatedly noted throughout history, and especially recent history, change is the one constant in life. As Dylan once sang in To Ramona, "everything changes" and his third album was itself titled The Times They Are A-Changin'.

The book publishing industry is changing, too. Old timers in the publishing field have mixed feelings about the ramifications of electronic publishing. But what about young people today? How do they perceive what is going on in publishing today? In discussing some of these notions with my ePublishing collaborator, sixteen-year-old TJ Lind, I gained some interesting insights that were very different from the alarmist voices I've sometimes listened to. I asked TJ to share his thoughts on today's publishing scene.

TJ Lind on eBook Supremacy

Recently, eBooks are beginning to overtake traditional books because of their portability and convenience. Think about it, a typical book weighs one pound and an average textbook weighs 6 pounds. In a single one pound device, one can hold literally hundreds of books. This feature alone has attracted millions to the eReader market. There is no doubt that eBooks are the future of reading!

The greatest thing about eBooks for authors is there is no need to go through your typical publisher. There is no need to send your book in and get it rejected many times. The big publishing companies are in a run for their money because the books they sell are usually around $10. If you sell your eBook for ninety-nine cents, you do not have to have a book as great as if it were written by Stephen King. Because your book is ten times less the price of the Stephen King book, you do not have to prove to your readers that your book is better than his. He has to prove to his readers that his book is ten times better than yours!

Big publishing companies just can’t afford to price their books at ninety-nine cents because they have too many expenses to pay. The takeoff of eBooks has opened the doors for freelance authors to make a name for themselves. Just look at Amanda Hawking. Hawking wrote 17 novels in her spare time and published them to eBook markets. She completely dominated the top charts selling millions of books, priced very low, and made $2 Million! She was a self published author with no middle man, no publisher to take royalties away from her.

The balance of power in the book market is shifting. Publishing companies are losing their leverage on consumers, now that self publishing is taking off. One of the first questions a self published author must answer before actually publishing his or her works is: which platform should I choose? The answer: All of them! It will require a significant time commitment, but if it is free to self-publish on most eReader stores, why wouldn't you publish on every single one of them?

Moreover, before publishing one must understand how each store operates. For example on the Kindle store if a book is priced between $0.99 and $2.98, the author will receive 34% royalties. If a book is $2.99 or more, the author receives 70% royalties from the book’s revenue. Most stores operate on a similar pricing scheme, but Apple does it a bit differently. One cannot directly self-publish to the iBooks store. They must go through a third party, such as lulu.com. When a book is sold on the Apple store, the publisher is paid 70% royalties regardless the cost of the book. Lulu.com will take 20% of the remaining 70%, so you receive what is left.

Although a significant time commitment, self-publishers should publish on every eBook store they can to maximize their reach. Of course, hardly anyone has the time to take care of publishing on multiple platforms, AND to market the book. There are options available to help those of you, such as N&L Publishing. After Red Scorpion, and three or four additional collections of short stories by Ed Newman are published, N&L Publishing is considering the possibility of offering their services in publishing and marketing other writers’ books.

N&L Publishing is not a typical publisher. The unlikely combination of an experienced marketing executive and a 16-year-old marketing student bring unique angles to the publishing industry. Based in Duluth, Minnesota, N&L Publishing is breaking industry standard by being one of the first purely digital publishers. No hard copies of books will ever come out of our office. This is publishing for the new generation, the technology generation.


You can follow our progress on Facebook. If you "Like" us there, we'll do our best to keep you in the loop.

The Publishing Scene

We've come a long way since books were chiseled onto stone tablets. It's no wonder that early correspondence was generally brief. It's evident that our ancestors had the same need to communicate as we do today, except now it's a tad easier and faster.

Parchment made book-making quite a bit easier, but before the printing press it sure got tedious if you wanted to produce anything in quantity. I'd be curious how many books you had to reproduce by hand to make a bestseller.

Paper was eventually invented by the Chinese who taught book binding and book making to the Arabs in the 8th century. In the 12th century Marrakech in Morocco had one street alone with over 100 book sellers. Kind of a book fair, it seems. These selfsame Arabs brought the new technology into Europe where it evidently helped play a role in the Protestant Reformation in conjunction with the invention of movable type.

At a writer's conference that I attended in 1995 I learned that 50,000 books were being printed a year. The instructor of that class was attempting to impart a little realism to temper our expectations of becoming a published author. This did not include the countless volumes of manuscripts in various stages of development in desk drawers and waste baskets across the land.

Today, easy access to print-on-demand and digital publishing have resulted in one million volumes being created this past year. The Kindle, B&N Nook and other digital devices have enabled breezy access to publication.

Who knows where it will all lead. I can picture a land someday where everyone is writing books but no one is reading them because they are too busy writing their own. Or are we already there? It's called blogging. Hmmm.

Thought for the day: your life itself is a living book, read by all. Make it a worthwhile read.

Ten Minutes with Mike Savage

Susie and I moved to Duluth in 1986. At the time I had been doing freelance writing for about three years (evenings) and was looking to get a full time job as a writer. I also imagined being the next Hemingway and sought to connect with literary folks up here are well.

As it turns out, there was an ad or newspaper story about a writer's group that was meeting at The Depot. It drew a fairly large batch of area writers... maybe fifteen or so. During that first meeting I was sizing up the group to find which were the serious writers and which were simply wannabes. In the course of a lifetime, there are twenty wannabes for every one who actually writes. A Native American writer named Jim Northrup was there. He read a few poems that were incredibly powerful, and since that time his work reached the national stage.

Another writer in that room was Mike Savage. I believe he was on the verge of publishing his first novel, Something in the Water. I hit it off with Mike immediately, impressed by his work ethic. He was serious about the craft and over the past two decades we have had many lunches together where we discuss the challenges of writing and publishing.

Early on Mike founded Savage Press, to help local writers find a way to get into print and their stories told to a wider audience.

ennyman: How did you get your start as writer?
MS: Poetry interested me in high school. I had an interesting teacher named Anita Helski who somehow managed to connect with me at some subterranean level because, on the surface, I acted out a lot. But, poems interested me and I started writing them in high school. I compiled the poems into a mimeographed sheaf and handed a few around and that day on the bus ride home Tommy Daubner made a big deal of my writing and publishing. It was negative reinforcement, but it was reinforcement none-the-less. So, there it is, from high school on I was a writer and a publisher.

ennyman: You one time mentioned a writing discipline which you maintained for years. Can you describe that? How important is discipline for writers?
MS: I generally write every day in the morning. Usually I awake early and do some thinking, some meditating, some praying, and then some writing. Either journaling, book writing, article writing, letters, emails, poems, political commentary, humor, whatever is alive in me at that time, I express it on screen or paper.

Discipline is important to clear, concise writing. Discipline isn’t necessarily important as a stand-alone “commodity” so to speak. Anyone can do what I do in the mornings... journal, sloppy slathering of sentimental prose and/or poetry. But, if the goal is to present copy that is either salable or succinct or enviable, discipline is required. Everyone needs an editor, either their unmerciful selves, or some outside source that recognizes bad grammar, improper spelling, awkward usage, unclear expression, poor word choice, repetition… all the hallmarks of hasty, haphazard writing.

BTW, most submissions that I read are hasty and haphazard.

ennyman: How did Savage Press evolve and what is its roll in the world of writing?
MS: Savage Press filled many needs when it started in 1989. Our literary magazine, “The Northern Reader” ran 13 or so issues and made a whole bunch of people published authors. The books filled a niche market for the Twin Ports region. Back then, I was writing much more, writing magazine articles, newspaper articles, radio stuff…and books. I wrote in the morning and published in the afternoon/evening.

ennyman: What do you enjoy most about the publishing business?
MS: I enjoy reading new work. This last weekend I read a proposal and the first four chapters of a 40-year-old man who went to Moscow, met, and eventually married a Russian woman. Then he divorced her and married a prostitute. And then he wrote a book about it. It was fairly interesting reading, but the author was pretty unsympathetic to me and I couldn’t see how we’d make any money publishing his story, even though he is adamant that he and his story are going to end up on Oprah some day.

I also enjoy editing and creating handsome books. I enjoy selling books to some degree too, but prefer direct sales to readers over wholesale distribution and marketing.

ennyman: What separates you and your company from the competition?
MS: Savage Press is not a profit-oriented business. Over the years we’ve published a lot of books that weren’t terribly profitable. But they did deserve to be published and would never have become a book if profit were the driving motive behind their publication.

ennyman: What advice would you give to someone just starting out as a writer? And specific books you’d point them to?
MS: Number one: Write every day. Two: Distinguish between writing for publication and writing for personal gratification. That book I mentioned above? The one about the guy who couldn’t marry well? His book is more of a long whiny testimony to his victimization. It is almost a rage book. The author is unqualified to judge his story because he is so caught up in the melodrama of his own life. He thinks he’s going to get published and get vindicated and get rich. In my opinion, as the story stands today, based on what I read, he will probably get only more bitter and angry.

ennyman: I like your honesty there and it is probably something I have always liked about our friendship. You are always a straight shooter. What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail?
MS: I’d publish a book that reduced readers’ fears by 90 percent.

ennyman: That probably wasn't the first thing that came to mind, but I like it. In what ways has the Internet changed the publishing world in general and your world in particular?
MS: The Internet and World Wide Web has made publishing about 75 times easier. Proofing documents using Adobe and transmitting files electronically makes prepress much more streamlined. I communicate almost exclusively via email these days. Web sales and marketing isn’t as peachy as it was cracked up to be back when the “paperless office” concept was being bandied about freely, but the Savpress website is a virtual catalog that informs people and saves paper. I gave up mass producing a catalog. If anyone wants to see a particular title I tell them to look at it on-line or I send them the specific URL.

ennyman: Describe the strangest or funniest incident you have experienced as a publisher?
MS: There are many, many such incidents. Too many to relate here. One that jumps immediately to mind is when I was called up to the dais at a book event to receive a minor award and as I approached the stage the presenter fell over in a dead faint. So much for getting my need for attention met. The entire focus went from my minor accomplishment to the poor woman’s body laying prostrate on the stage. I returned to my seat and finished my scalloped potatoes.

ennyman: Are we going to see any more Dave Davecki books? Where did Dave come from? I certainly saw some of you in this character. Were the books fun to write? What did you like most and least?
MS: One never knows, but I’m doubtful there will be another Dave Davecki installment. I have two Davecki books finished. One is called “DIErland” where Davecki uncovers a murderous band of Celtic crazies who get their jollies killing people, robbing graves, and selling priceless pre-Christian Irish artifacts to wealthy peabrains. The other is a rehash and amalgamation of “Death by Corvette.” It could be called “Death by Cadillac” or “Death by Being Terribly Stupid and Driving Your Caddy Convertible into St. Louis Bay.” I’ve got a raft of Dave Davecki plots stored away somewhere. Every once in a while I think of digging out the plot for “Death by Poetic License” and tinkering with it for my own amusement, but I always get caught up short by the utter financial foolishness of publishing another Davecki novel.

ennyman: Mike, thanks for sharing and for your contribution to the local literary scene. You've helped a lot of people find an audience. The very best to you going forward.