Changing Technology a good and a bad thing Part I

Technology has changed dramatically since 1984 when I sat down to the keyboard of a discarded office computer with a brand name I think of Colombia. I bought it at a business liquidation sale at a motel. It ran on MS-Dos 1. It came with MS Word. The beautiful thing about the machine was it had an internal floppy 5 inch drive to save the typed file on. I added on an Epson dot matrix impact printers which was readable.

I was initially excited about my manuscript. We had gone through a unique experience back in 1978-1980 and there was a growing interest in others doing something similar. I wrote query letters to virtually every publisher and agent in the writers digest that indicated they dealt with that kind of product. The file grew with those who bothered to send a rejection notice.

I was out of work, (as society recognized it in 1984) and in the process of writing Gaijin! Gaijin! when I joined a group called the Willamette Writers Guild. It is based out of Portland, but we formed an auxiliary branch in Eugene and met once a month. Through the parent club in Portland we had some pretty savvy speakers visit our monthly meetings to give us inspiration and encouragement. It was invigorating to rub shoulders with the people in those meetings and share ideas as a 40 something with time to explore, write, research, and dig through stacks of notebooks and photos from two years in Japan. Then we had a guest at a meeting who explained the process of self publishing, and the pro's and con's.

I realized as she went through it step by step that it was exactly what I had taught my yearbook students for 14 years. Two of those years we had even printed and bound the yearbook ourselves.

I went back to the computer that night and evaluated it.  About that time Brother brought out an office printer. Proportionally spaced typefaces were on interchangeable reels and they used carbon ribbons. The print was sharp and clean and each page took forever to print. MS Word had a driver for the Brother printer. I was in business. I formatted my manuscript of the book Gaijin! Gaijin! in Word and printed it out on the best quality paper I could find, sent it off to Thomson-Shore book manufacturers and had 1200 copies printed.

I sold those copies over the phone to the Japanese bookstores throughout the United States, and filled re-orders. Encouraged by letters that came back from readers through out the US and from those who had taken it to Japan or who had received it from friends back in the states, I went to work on Mo Ichido and published it in 1985.

By 1987 the first run of that armature first venture was sold out and I owned a PC Clone with an honest to goodness hard drive plus a 3.5 inch higher capacity drive. It was hooked up to my first HP laser duplex printer. It ran Windows 2 and I immediately bought Aldus Pagemaker, re-formatted and re-printed Gaijin! Gaijin! The laser printer made the book look like a professionally typeset book. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to re-edit it. By that time I was marketing Mo Ichido and back to full time teaching. Time had entered into the equation.

The point here is that the Computer, a graphical interface, and a means of printing that enabled an individual to produce a page proof that looked professional suddenly changed the complexion of small press publishing.

Next Part II: entering the internet age