When Norma and I decided to sell our San Francisco house and move to Italy, we had a lot of books. Now, books are a medium of art and knowledge. The purpose of a book is to be read. I reasoned that as much as I loved the books we owned, it made sense to move as many of them as possible into the stream of human curiosity and knowledge, to make the available to lovers of literature, to put them into the stream of commerce and in doing so bring them back to life.
So we did that. We sold almost all of our books, keeping maybe one or two hundred each of the most important, well-loved and useful ones.
OK, here is a parallel situation. In 2005 when I was working as copy chief and advice columnist at Salon.com, our editorial group decided that a book of my columns would be a great project, so we created a book proposal and submitted it to agents and had some talks. For many reasons we didn’t like how that was going so we decided to self-publish a book. This was not amateur hour. My wife Norma was a professional print designer and I was a skilled editor as well as a writer. We went about it in a highly professional competent way and produced a really well made book that sold remarkably well for a self-published book. That was because we had the platform of my widely read column on Salon.com. We also produced a second book the following year which did well but not as well as the first.
Like many many novice publishers we manufactured more copies than we sold, so we have quite a few left over. A few hundred, anyway. These we could not as easily sell to used bookstores. They are inventory. So we left them in storage in San Francisco. They have been in storage for two years now. The complexities and expense of shipping them here and then selling them here in Italy are forbidding. We’re not going to do that. Amazon takes only a few at a time. There are fulfillment houses that would take them but they would charge us a monthly fee and that all seems too expensive and too much trouble for our tiny little operation. And blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. We’ve been through it all.
So: I decided a fun thing to do, to get rid of our inventory and put these books into the hands of people who will actually read them, I decided, when we visit San Francisco in June and July, that it would be a fund and useful thing to have a big party and give these books away to people who might read them.
The headline of this piece, “Free books!” has a dual meaning. The books will be free, but also in the process of giving them away we will be freeing them from bondage and death in a dark storage unit. We will be freeing them and giving them new life.
I haven’t figured out where and how to do this yet but the idea has got ahold of me and so I welcome your thoughts and comments. Also, I figure we are not the only small publishers who have inventory that it would be cheaper and more fun to give away than it would be to continue to try to sell it, so it may be possible to join with a few other publishers who also want to give their books away. It could be an event.
I’m talking to people in San Francisco about venues. If you have any ideas, let me know.–Cary T.
