'Tis the Season
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This story begins a few years ago. Against all sorts of better judgement, I decided to get into publishing. We were working up the first season of books, and conversation turned to what other projects we could get into. Why wasn’t I publishing my own stuff? Well, I didn’t want to muddy the waters with putting books out under the house imprimatur. Yeah, okay, the answer went, so make a new imprint. Use the skills you’re learning, Teppo!
So we did, and that book was Rudolph!. The first portion of this book was my first professional sale, a decade earlier. The publisher folded soon thereafter, and the story finally came out a few years later when the writers opted to fund their own production. I wrote the other sections over a couple of Christmases near the turn of the millennium. The whole story had never been put in a single volume.
So, yeah, I wrote a new interstitial, and we put the book into the production queue for that fall. The imprint was ROTA Books, because, you know “ROTA, ORAT, TARO.”
Rudolph! was to be an offset run. Reps at my distributor thought the book was clever; we thought the marketing was on point (look at those postcards!). Books-a-Million wanted to do co-op for the holiday season. I rolled the dice and opted for a 5,000 copy print run.
A couple months before the book came out, the guy doing the ebook layout send me a note. “Hey, I think you messed up the chapter numbers. They go back and repeat a few.”
What the fuck? We pulled up the printer files, and sure enough, we had screwed up the numbers. I immediately called the printer and said, “Omg! Tell me you haven’t started the print run.”
“We have,” they said. “In fact, we finished the page printing this morning.”
“I need to fix, uh, twelve pages.”
“Well, this is an offset run, so all we can do is replace signatures.”
“What? I just need twelve pages fixed.”
“Those pages? No, we have to print new signatures for those sections, which is total of 82 pages.”
(Typing this up now, it occurs to me that it would have been cheaper for me to fly out and stand there in the warehouse, hand-correcting these chapter numbers with a Sharpie.)
I wept in the corner for awhile, but caved in the end and told the printer to run the fix. They did, and the books went into the warehouse. I crossed my fingers.
Co-op, by the way, is code for “publisher pays the bookstore for the pleasure of placing books in optimal locations.” You know how many copies I sent to Books-a-Million? 1,000. Paid co-op for every copy. Know how many Books-a-Million sent back the following March? 800. Do I get that co-op back? Oh, goodness no.
The end of this tale? Oh, I ate it on this book. I ate it hard.
Anyway, when Bernie and the reindeer learn they have to go to Hell to save Santa, they find an entrance in Las Vegas, at the exploding volcano outside the Mirage.
As I’m in Vegas this week for the 20Books to 50k conference, I thought I would visit the volcano where Rudolph and the team caught a boat across the River of Sorrow.
Well, so much for that.
Anyway, the book is still available (under the 51325 Books imprint now). I still love the postcards we got Dylan Todd to illustrate. It’s the only audiobook I have available and Emil N Gallina absolutely killed it. He understood how much Dirty Harry Santa was channeling during the assault on Purgatory.
There’s an odd thing that happens at this time of year. People stop shopping for themselves. You’d think that Rudolph! would clean up during the holiday season, but it’s not a book you can buy for Grandma (well, cool Grandmas, but you know what I mean) and people stop shopping for themselves. “Oh, I shouldn’t. What if someone wants to get this thing for me for Christmas and now I’ve ruined it.” Hey, here’s a bookseller secret: if you love a thing, two copies means you can share.
So, yeah, this means I can only hand sell Rudolph! during August and early September, when all of publishing is driving through town on flatbed trailers, hurling the new shiny at passersby. Showing up with a Christmas book when the heat index is still in the red zone is like starting pumpkin spice latte season in—oh wait, they did this year, didn’t they?
All right then. Here’s your Christmas read. No pushing. No shoving. There are copies for everyone. And since I’m still wrangling out this new Shopify storefront, use code XMAS4ME and get 20% off your order.
Rudolph! at Firebird Creative Store
