Madison, thank you for letting the Mystery We Write Tour Bus stop
here on our blog tour. You asked us to talk about our settings and what makes
them unique. I’m afraid the settings for
my latest novel aren’t unique at all. TALL CHAMBERS: JUSTIFIED ACTION takes
place in Washington, DC, and in Afghanistan.
So, instead, I thought I’d offer a trip back through the pages of
history to see how the publishing industry we’re all involved in arrived at the
point where it is today. I’m sure you
won’t find any verifiable facts in this story, but you may find a chuckle or
two.
I originally wrote this about a year ago, and a lot of people
enjoyed it them. For those who saw it
before, here it is again. For those who
haven’t seen it before, here it is.
THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING
. . .according to Earl
Long,
long ago, a bunch of guys were sitting around the cave telling stories to each
other and a guy called Hiero came up with an idea.
“Hey,”
he said, “we should preserve these stories on rocks.”
So
Hiero came up with a bunch of symbols for animals and fish and birds and people
and other things. They invented a hammer and chisel and started chiseling their
stories on rocks using the symbols. Since Hiero made up the symbols, they
called them Hieroglyphics.
I
was just a kid then, but I studied hard and became a chiseler.
Then
one of the women fell on a basket of grapes and squashed them into liquid and
one guy said, “Hey, we can use that to draw our stories on the cave walls.” We
took some hair from a mastodon’s leg, tied it to a stick, and called it a
brush. Soon we learned to drop women on other fruits and berries and came up
with other liquids. We named it ink, and soon were drawing our symbols all over
the cave walls.
That
went fine for a while until some guy
invented something he called paper. He said, “Hey, let’s paint our stories on
paper.”
A
guy over in the corner named Webster said, “Hey, that’s fine, but enough with
the symbols. Let’s use words. I just made up a whole lot of them and someday
everybody will be using them.”
So
we invented pencils and pens and started drawing words on paper. That became
very popular, once you got the hang of picking the right words.
Now,
some people were better than others at picking words. Webster came up with a
name for what we were doing. He called it writing. The ones who were good at
picking the best words became known as writers. I was tired of chiseling, so I
studied hard and became a writer. It was tedious work doing one page at a time,
though.
A
few months later -- and you’ll notice I’m condensing the time frame to make
this move a little faster – a guy named Gutenberg invented a machine he called
a printing press. What a boon that was! Put words in a flat plate, smear ink on
it, and print thousands of pieces of paper. Oh, my. We were on a roll.
Then
another guy had the idea of putting those pieces of paper in a pile and gluing
them together. His name was Booker, so we called them books.
About
the same time, a couple of guys named Royal and Underwood invented gadgets
called typewriters. That made it a lot easier for writers to write the books.
That
was great. Soon we had stacks and stacks of books. Remember Webster, the guy
who came up with all those words? Even he got into the act. He gathered up all
his words, put them in a book, and called it a dictionary.
But
what to do with all those books? A guy named Barnes said, “Hey, I have a friend
named Noble. We’ll go in together and open a store to sell the books.”
Before
long, we had huge companies called publishers cranking out books, and we had
bookstores all over the world selling them. The whole system needed more people
to make it work, so editors, distributors, shippers, and warehousers were born.
Another group of people said, “Hey, we’re agents. You writers send us your
stuff, and we’ll sell it to the publishers.”
Yes,
a lot of people were involved in the system, but it worked. Everybody was
reading books.
Meanwhile,
up in Seattle, a couple of kids named Jobs and Gates were putting things
together called computers. Not the huge things big companies were using. These
were small enough to sit on a desk, and soon everybody had one. This made it
even easier for writers to write. These machines could even communicate with
each other over a web that covered the whole wide world called the Internet.
Wow! Talk about progress. Before long,
these machines were small and compact enough to hold on our laps.
Things
were about to change, though. A guy named Amazon started selling books over the
Internet. You didn’t even have to go to the bookstore. Just order them through
your computer, and they’d be shipped to your door. This Amazon guy went one
step further. One day, he said, “Hey, look what I invented. I call it a Kindle.
I don’t have to ship the books to you anymore. I’ll just send you the words and
you read them on this thing. Let’s call them ebooks”
Remember
those guys named Barnes and Noble? They said, “Hey, we have one of those, too.
We call it a Nook. Soon, there was a bunch more of them. A lot of people
weren’t reading printed books anymore. They were reading ebooks in the palm of
their hands. Talk about change!
More
changes were coming, though. A bunch of writers were sitting around one day and
one of them said, “Hey, we don’t need agents and publishers and distributors
and all those people. Let’s publish our ebooks ourselves. Since all those other
people won’t be getting any of the pie, we can sell them for less money and
still make more per book than before.”
And
that’s how it all happened and that brings us to where we are today. Writers
have a choice of going the traditional way through agents and publishers or we
can publish our own ebooks.
No
one knows what changes the future will bring. It could be the entire publishing
industry will crumble, and we’ll go back to preserving our stories on rocks. If
that happens, I’ll be okay. I still have my tools and I can be a chiseler
again.
. . .where you can read
Chapter One of my novel MEMORY OF A
MURDER, which gathered a long list of Five Star reviews. You can also read a short story called “The Day I Almost Became a Great Writer,”
which some say is the funniest story I’ve ever written. There’s also “White Hats and Happy Trails,” a true story about the day I spent
with a boyhood idol, Roy Rogers. There’s even a picture of my wife and me with
Roy to prove it’s all true
You might also click on Short
Stories at the top for information about my collection, SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS, 16 tales of Mystery, available in all
ebook formats, on sale for 99 cents.
Thanks,
Madison, for being so gracious and thanks to everyone who dropped by.
Please leave a comment before you go and you may win a
free book.
At the end of the tour, I’ll draw two
names from those who left comments. The
first name drawn will receive a signed print copy of MEMORY OF A MURDER, a mystery novel with a long list of Five Star
Reviews. The second name drawn will
receive their choice of a signed print copy or an ebook of SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS, a collection of 16 tales of mystery
from hardboiled to humorous.
Earl
Staggs
