My mother published a book, Rose, in 2007 about her life growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. I wasn’t involved with the process back then. She spent five years on the book and one day she showed up with a copy for me. I read about a third of it and had to put it down. To explain why I have to pull back the curtain and expose a bit of my personal life that I normally don’t talk about. We’ll get to that in a minute…
She went with a vanity press, paying them thousands of dollars to publish her book. They did a crap job. There was clearly no editing done. She provided all the artwork. They just had her sign a contract giving them rights to her work, loaded the files without putting any work into it, and sat back to collect what little money would come in. I say little money, but the truth is, this vanity press did pretty well off my mom’s book. When it was published, she ordered a thousand copies to pass out to everyone. She sent copies to the libraries, everyone she knew she even sent a copy to the governor.
You see, my mother has severe mental illness. She’s doing quite well now, although that wasn’t always the case. When she was working on this book, she told me how it was going to make us rich. Late 2023, we were talking on the phone, and she asked my how she gets the royalties from her book. She told me she had never collected any royalties since it was published. Figuring that out was an ordeal. We had to look at the book to figure out who it was published with and get an account set up. Long story short, after a couple weeks of messing with it, she had a whopping twenty dollars in royalties waiting for her. She was making ninety-seven cents per sale of the book.
Seeing numbers like this made me sick. I didn’t expect a lot but less than a dollar a sale is nothing. It wasn’t available in ebook, only paperback. She was getting ripped off. I told her I would publish the book under my press, Sidestreet Publishing. That way I could make sure the money is going to her rather than a predatory “publisher”.
It took weeks to get the rights back and then I could get to work. Unfortunately, there was no file for the book, so I had to transcribe it from a physical copy. This went very slow at first, but I transitioned into using an app that would pull the text from a picture. It was faster, but considerably less accurate. It took a lot more clean up to fix it this way, but was still better than transcribing line by line.
The reason I never finished reading it, and the issue I’ve run into again in the editing process, is her mental illness presents itself in this book. That made it very difficult for me to get through. It was like going back to a time I thought I left behind.
After editing the book, I discovered that I’m in a bit of a predicament with it. Since I published it under my press, I want to set expectations. It’s not the kind of book I would normally publish. It was written as a children’s book, but the content makes it unsuitable for children. There are accurate descriptions of life on the farm. The chapter about castrating steers comes to mind.
So, who would this book be good for? Anyone that wants to get a glimpse into the mind of someone with schizophrenia. It’s a strange read. It’s supposed to be a true story. Some of the events in the book happened, but not in the way it's presented. Some things didn’t happen at all. Take it with a grain of salt.
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