An Interview with Dave Kuhn

I was really impressed by how Dave decided to start his own publishing company because he knew people whose books he wants to publish.  He knows there is no money involved but does it for the love of reading.  I also thought it was funny how interconnected the publishing business is, the mentor he kept mentioning, craven, someone else in our class interviewed as well.  I also thought it as interesting how against self publishing he was.  But it does make some sense, he is a very small publishing company that would be easier to work with than someone in New York.  

M: Start by going through your career, like a very broad overview of how you’ve gotten to where you are.

D: Well, I always liked writing and reading but I resisted the urge to do it as a profession for a long time. I was actually a political science major as an undergrad. And then after a business career when I went to University of Arkansas, I got an MFA in creative writing. And then I taught for a while, then I quit teaching for a while and I opened a business here in Fort Worth. Then I came to TCU and got my PHD and published my dissertation. Then I decided – the department would let me edit Descant, their literary journal – and I did that for about 13 years. And in the meantime I was associate director of the writing center here on campus for 16 years, until my retirement. And um, that’s about it. When I retired I started a very small publishing company, we’re on our second book now. Our third book will be Steve Sherwood’s book, I don’t know whether you know Sherwood, but he’s the director of the writing center and he’s got a wonderful collection called Field Guide: Tales from the Contemporary West. So he’s our third book, but this is our first one and it’s just a memoir about a fellow growing up in Venezuela in the fifties and his father was an oil worker there. So I just though you might be interested in these books for several reasons. Being in a publishing and book culture class, I wanted to point out that both this book by my company and this book by Inkbrush Press, are called print on demand books, okay? And this is a real trend that even some University presses are going to, they’re real books and fairly well-edited, I think. And you know they’re for sale on Amazon and B&N and that kind of thing, but you know, they’re not stored in some warehouse and they don’t run a thousand copies at a time. We can produce hardcopy or paper copy through a company call Lighting Source. So anyway, to make a long story short, one of the important trends that is coming to be now is that more and more independent publishers, small presses, micro presses, and even University presses are going this way for financial reasons. They usually tie it in with the publishing that comes with that kind of thing. So I kind of got interested in starting one these small presses because of the fellow that runs Inkbrush press and he has published about 30-35 books already. And he is now using the same process – print on demand publishing – for Lemar University press and scholarly work. So. And a lot of University presses you see don’t have the future that TCU press does, have either folded quick or gone to this kind of process where they don’t have to spend so much money on inventory. The first thing I tell you about books and publishing culture is that it’s still business culture. It’s all about money, how much can you afford to lose basically, you know? It’s kind of a roll of the dice with the entertainment industry, you know. No telling who’s going to read it and how to market it and that kind of thing. You know as I, as the years have gone by, my initial ambitions were to publish a hardcover book with New York in kids creative writing or something, something, something. And that didn’t happen but other publishing opportunities became available to me through academic work and through, you know, my continued creative writing and just more opportunities to publish. And I don’t know if that means more readers. But another thing you might have noticed if you look at the, um, any listings of top selling books, or if you look at, I don’t know, even USA today used to run a hundred titles of book that were selling. About thirty percent of those are now not even books. They’re just pure, Amazon ecopies and a lot of them are by authors that are so established, they have huge 50, 60 thousand personal audiences already there. And so they don’t even mess with this anymore, they just go for the 99 cent ebook and do well. They skip agents, they skip publishing and at that point, really successful artists are doing that. Then there’s everybody else in the world that could publish a book like that too. So that’s sort of, it’s more of a wide open field that I’m not sure if there’s anymore people reading it, there’s just more people publishing. No shortage of writers out there. It’s really been a changing sort of world between the time I seriously considered this as a career in 1978 when it was all pretty much, you know, get you an agent to read your book, get New York to publish your book, you know. And a very small world still, though of course. But it’s just so much more loose and kind of malleable now and changing real fast. And for all I know, current trends, we won’t even have these, we’ll just be reading on these and you know it’s quite possible. Although, sometimes these are handy to have around too.

M: Do you have a Kindle or an eReader?

D: My wife has a Kindle. It’s a funny story because I gave it to her when they were pretty new a few years ago for Christmas. And right before Christmas there was an add for one and she’s an English professor too and she said, oh I can’t understand how anybody would ever want one of those. Well the minute she got it, I can’t pry it away from her now, so yeah she has a Kindle but I’m still catching that. Believe it or not I had about a hundred to read when I quit teaching, I’m still reading what I’ve got. But I do read electronically a lot in PDF files people will send me stories and book to look at, so I do a lot of that electronically but I don’t actually use a Kindle myself. I’ll probably branch out one of these days. If I could get my wife to surrender it, she’s got several books on there I ordered but I know it’s a very convenient and popular way. And I’m for anything that makes people read more, that get’s people engaged in reading. Which is kind of becoming a not so popular thing, if it ever was, I don’t know. There were always the book geeks out there, you know. But when you’re at the university it’s such a rarified world, you know? Because you’re around people reading and reading who respect learning all the time and that’s not the case once you get off campus. This is our currency, you know, these books? Its how we keep score and get promotions and tenure and those kinds of things so it depends on how many of these things they accomplish.

M: What do you think they role of the publisher is going to be in the future?

D: Well, generally speaking self-publishing is still pretty frowned upon by a lot of reviewers and critics so I think that the publisher whether it’s epublishing or print on demand publishing or whatever is still the intermediary that gives more credibility to that piece and takes it away from just being the author’s own creation, published and produced because that’s financially possible now by that person. It’s like a stamp of validity or credibility still. If someone else thinks it’s worth the time for them to design this book cover and risk not making any money. I’ve not made any money yet on my publishing endeavor but we’re only on our second book coming out soon. So, it just does give credibility to the work not to self-publish. And a lot of people do it. And if you really wanted to you could set up a company like I did and just publish it anyway and no one would ever know. But I do know that reviewers refuse to accept quite frequently self-published books and no one will hear about it except if you have a web presence and some kind of an audience and some kind of web page would help. So I’m not a real fan of self-publishing. There are so many ways around it now, too. But if you’re really trying you can get published I’m pretty sure. There’re lots of these little independent people. Especially the world of poetry by the way, which I’m pretty familiar with out of descant because we used to get 4,000 poems a year and publish about 50 of them and we awarded a total of 750 dollars in prizes for those poems every year. Same amount for fiction too. But there’re just a lot of poetry out there that has very limited readership and so the publish, print on demand method is very good for the poets and what they’ll do is they’ll get some independent press like mine or inkbrush to publish that book of poetry and they’ll make presentations at classes and colleges and such and more or less they’re just sort of traveling around with their briefcase full of their book and they’re selling them. And I think literary fiction is close to going that way too with the exception of you know you’re super stars and your really well selling authors. A lot of people I know simply carry their book around and when they do a presentation or workshop for a creative writing class they sell a few books and it’s kind of like the poet world.

M: So, with the print on demand is it just a specific software?

D: Well there are several companies that are involved in this. Now I’m going through a company called lightning source, which is owned, by a company that distributes the books called Ingram. And they’re pretty specific about how they want the books set up and laid out including a certain limit on the type of cover colors and that sort of thing. But basically what happens is, a really simplified method. We take the manuscript, usually it comes in word and we’ll turn it into a PDF file that looks exactly like this, print page. Then with a jpeg file we’ll design a cover with a certain number of characters and colors that are required by that publishing company. And then I’ll just simply upload it to them. And then you know they’ll print out a proof copy and send it to me. And what I love about this by the way is that I’m a terrible proofreader. I have a tendency to be better on other people’s writing than my own but unlike if a thousand copies of my book, Road to Roma had appeared and I had a typo on the last page and it was just there forever for a small fee, and because they’re only printing like 10 or 20 at a time depending on my order, they can fix it. So it was nice to know that damage is not irreparable. But if you’re prone to making mistakes like I am, just a sloppy reader basically, that’s really nice.  In fact, on this one here my first one, I should be better at this, when I got my first copy I noticed that Caribbean only had one b in it. And so, it was a little more expensive to change a cover than the interior but of course that couldn’t stand. But instead of here’s a thousand copies of this guy’s book with Caribbean misspelled on the back cover, for 50 bucks they just redid it. So I don’t think anybody ever got a copy with the mistake on it. Some people did get a few typos before I corrected them. That’s what I like about them, though, the ease of correcting. And of course the second edition is pretty easy too, because you’re probably not changing that much. So I like it I just don’t know about the problem of marketing is still the big problem for most people I think, and how to get exposure.  Now, in the old, old days, back when we were walking through the snow barefoot to the college, the publishing house would have a publicist and a marketing program for every book and as time has gone by and they have less and less to do with that and fewer and fewer employees now almost everybody has to do a lot of their own marketing. You know, from designing copies to sell the book to sending review copies out to organizing readings so that the marketing issue has fallen to the author and some people are better at it than others and some people take it more seriously than others too. So how to get the word out about how great your book is always a problem.

M: Right, and we talked a lot about how the book reviews are not as prominent as they used to be, and it’s all on blogging.

D: Yeah, there aren’t as many and what I’ve noticed is it’s really a kind of role the dice with your reviewers too because, you know, if you get slammed by a reviewer that’s one thing but you like to feel like the reviewer knows what he or she is talking about and sometimes the reviewers are just starting out and they’re not as really savvy as you would hope they would be. But sometimes they’re just really spot-on. And they’ll tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it. But no, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for review also. It’s just sort of, um, print culture world seems to be shrinking to me while the eculture world is giving us new ways to go at that audience.

M: Right, and going along that, newspapers are basically gone.

D: Yeah, and they usually run just the same old reviews they get out of NYT and they syndicate too. You don’t see very many local reviews really in the newspapers anymore. Although there are still some formats for reviews. There’s a magazine that I think our library has it in current periodicals I think called Texas Books and Review. And that’s a good one if you’re just interested in TX oriented books. It’s out of TX State Universtiy, they review everything. A lot of books out of TX A&M press, could be natural history, fiction, poetry, they’re not particular about the genre as long as it comes from TX interest. So there are some opportunities out there and there are still readers and there’s a lot more for fiction and poetry still given in TX and elsewhere to help promote the books.

M: So do you see the future of print books going to on-demand printing, as a way to compensate for

D: Yeah I think there will be more books because of on-demand printing. Now there’s still going to be your houses that run that 5,000 hard backs the first time around, very rarely but there are just more, there must be dozens of these little companies like Inkbrush and my company out there doing that and I don’t know whether it’ll keep on as strong as it’s come on in the last 5 years because I don’t know how much ereading is going to go. So nobody really knows, I don’t think and do you have a kindle, do you read on those at all?

M: No, I don’t

D: You see, I just don’t know if people are going to forever give up that hard copy for that but it’s obviously a pretty important factor in marketing. So, but I do think that on-demand print makes sense because who wants to store all those copies, you know, those remainder copies. And I still have buy copies back from the bookstores if some bookstore orders a hundred of these and they don’t sell but two they’re going to send me 98 back and get their money back. And so, hopefully nobody will do that to me but there is that problem of just capital outlay and storage and handling that hard merchandise that you don’t have in the e world. Now I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen. I suspect that in 20 years or so I’m probably going to be around if I’m lucky. But you’ll probably see more ecopy but I don’t think the paper copy’s going to go. I think you’ll still see a mixture and there will probably always be a third of the books will be real books, you know, paperback. I hope anyway. I think they have a place. A lot of people are going to be really surprised when the power goes out for a few days and they can’t charge and can’t read for a few days because I don’t have a book around it’s all on my kindle now.

M: So do you do the marketing for your own publishing company as well?

D: I usually work with the author on that. I’m only on my second author for one thing. But from my own experiences of marketing my own book I help them figure out review, targets, newspapers, internet possibilities. We have a website by the way. So yeah, I have the author… A lot of publishing companies like TCU press, even when you submit your work somewhere like TCU press or any other real press, they’re going to ask you what your marketing plans are right then and there. It’s part of the submission. And you’re going to say, this book’s going to appeal to this kind of audience and you probably will have already done the demographic on that and you’ll say, well we know that women read 70% of the book, so you’re probably going to say, hopefully aimed at this chunk of readership that is, you know, this demographic or it’s modeled after a genre that we know has an innate audience like a romance or a detective crime or historical fiction, so they’ll make an argument this is the kind of book it is, it’ll appeal to people like, literary mystery books or literary thrillers or whatever and I intend to promote it by asking these newpapers to review it and by giving lectures at these campuses or book clubs, that kind of thing.

M: So very specific?

D: Yeah, the more specific the better and especially narrowing down that potential audience. They’ll even ask you how many you think you’ll be able to sell. Before you print 500 up at first, can you sell 500? And there are actually companies that will print 500 of them up for you and if you don’t sell them you have to pay for them. So they’ll get you pretty close to self-publishing. But the marketing is so integral that a real publishing company that had money on the line, they would have already done that. I’m getting my books from people I met through editing Descant mostly. So I communicated with literary hundreds of fiction writers and poets for over a decade. And some of them have shown me books that I think are great. And I’m not even taking submissions right now from the outside world until I catch up on the 3 or 4 more that I know I want to publish and I’m still kind of beginner at this so it takes me a long time. So yeah marketing is always on the agenda.

M: Right, so you came into the publishing business knowing you had some you wanted to publish?

D: Yes, I did. That was one of the things that made me want to do it. And I set this up as a LLC, a limited liability company, which, since there’s no real money involved I’m not real sure it was worth the money. But that just means that say, some of this is non-fiction. Well what if I get sued for slander or something of that nature. It’s just kind of an insurance policy about that kind of thing. Now if there were an inadvertent copy write violation now there probably won’t be because I read every word of them and I know what’s in here and I know what they can do with copy write, down to how many words from a non-poetic source they can put in there without paying permissions. But you can never use any line from a poem or a song without getting permission. But you can use up to 200 words from a novel or a non-poetic source, for free. So my first book was an academic book on American novels set in Africa. I had to go through the whole thing before it was published and trim down any direct quotes to only 200 words per book to avoid having to get permission from the 150 people. Which can be expensive and troublesome. But anyway, just be careful. If I were ever to advise somebody to set up a micro-publishing company I would go for entities such as the LLC. Because you can get sued easily. People get mad at you easily a lot in publishing for reasons you don’t understand sometimes. Like, you reject them and their poems and they get all upset or you make a mistake and you can’t even see the mistake they said you made or just so many ways to get cross with people. And some of the folks especially, the poets can be a bit sensitive with those kinds of things.

M: And for the cover designs, do you work with someone on these or do you design it?

D: This one here was designed by the fellow that runs this company, Inkbrush. And he also did the cover for this one too. This was an original photograph and this one is a little but more involved, there was a non-copy writed picture of some river in Venezuela and grabbed it okay? And that’s basically what happened. Now these pictures on the front are from his own collections from his family. It’s a family down there. And so each one of these involves some story line. Now these pictures on the front are from his own collections, from his family. He has a family down there. So each one of these involves some story line in the book itself. And Jerry Craven, who owns inkbrush, and is really my mentor on my own company, is an excellent photographer and he took a picture of somewhere in Texas and it just seemed to fit the sense of my book and so we used it. Now of course there are independent companies that will help you with this if you want to pay money. You don’t have to do anything if you have enough money. But of course, the more you do on your own like set up the web page, design the book cover, that’s money out of pocket. And being a retired person that suits me fine I’m having a good time, but if this were, if I were crazy enough to think I’d make money at it, I’d have a professional artist do all that stuff. But I’m not that crazy.

M: What do you see as the future of libraries?

D: Well, you know, that’s a really good question. I think they’ll be around forever. I mean first of all, there are still things that haven’t been Gutenberged into the eculture yet. Somebody’s working on the Gutenberg project, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, and it’s going to take everything that’s ever been printed and put it up on the internet. Well, that’s great but the Internet is still not that old in my opinion and you can always have problems, so, I like safe deposit box for all that knowledge. And I think the world’s libraries have done a great job at kind of keeping it together and, you know, there’s no guarantee the lights will always be on and maybe that library will, you know, some library from the middle ages will just save the good stuff, I don’t know. And also, I think libraries, I mean if you look at this one, have changed so much since the old days. This library offers thousands of ebooks to you from anywhere that you are, if you have the access to this account. So they can do a lot of work, I think, moving readers and researchers into that eworld. But also it’s just a, you know, I like libraries because before we had the internet and searching, you could just walk around this place and have a good time, you know, it’s a cheap date.

M: And going along with that, for the bookstore, what do you think? Are we always going to have bookstores?

D: I don’t know, the guy the founded Barnes and Noble is going to buy it back and kick the nook out. And so, I don’t know what’s happening. Most of the independents are gone but some of the good ones like borders are gone too, so I think that’s definitely the eworld coming in and taking some of their marketing away. There will always be book stores but a lot of them might be kind of like my press, you know, sort of a micro-bookstore.

M: Right, specialty or something like that.