HUMOROUS HISTORY OF PUBLISHING

History of Publishing. . .According to Earl Staggs, Mystery Author


Long, long ago, a bunch of us were sitting around the cave telling stories to each other and a guy we called Hiero came up with an idea.


"Hey," he said, "we should preserve these stories on rocks."

Earl's early
chiseling

So Hiero came up with a bunch of symbols for animals and fish and birds and people and other things. We invented a hammer and chisel and started chiseling our stories on rocks using the symbols. Since Hiero made up the symbols, we 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 used it as 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 which words to use. Webster came up with a word 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 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 an idea. 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.

No names, please!

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.

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. We’ll 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 only a couple bucks 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.


If you’ve read all the way to here, you now know everything I know about publishing. If you’re still in the mood for reading, here are some things you can read right now. Just click on the links.


MEMORY OF A MURDER. A mystery novel with a long list of Five Star reviews. Click to read Chapter One.


SHORT STORIES OF EARL STAGGS. A collection of 16 of my published short mystery stories in an ebook. A variety of stories ranging from hardboiled to soft to humorous. Click on "Earls Short Stories" for more information. Now on sale for .99 for all ereaders.


Click on "THE DAY I ALMOST BECAME A GREAT WRITER" and read the free story some say is the funniest one I’ve ever written.


There’s also "WHITE HATS AND HAPPY TRAILS" about the day I spent with a boyhood idol, Roy Rogers.


Thanks for visiting. Good reading and good writing to you, and let’s make 2012 the best year ever for all of us.

Earl is not originally from Texas, but he got here as soon as he could. And in the ten or twelve years I've known him he's always been this serious, solemn man even though his friends have encouraged him to lighten up. He's a Derringer winner for his short stories, a speaker, and teaches workshops. He and his wife live in Fort Worth, Texas.
　
Earl, thanks so much for visiting and sharing your historic expertise with us.

Readers, thank you for stopping by, too.　

　

OF TRUTH AND LEGEND BY EARL STAGGS

Earl Staggs

Please welcome a long time friend, Earl Staggs. He and his lovely wife, Carol, are transplants to North Central Texas from the Baltimore area. Earl and I belong to a small mystery writers group. His stories are always well written and often humorous. Earl is a spare bones writer who hates excessive adjectives and adverbs, so I feel it's my duty as a friend to throw in very and really to taunt him if he's going to read my work. What are friends for, after all?

His official bio reads: Derringer Award winning author Earl Staggs has seen many of his short stories published in magazines and anthologies. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine and as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. His novel MEMORY OF A MURDER earned thirteen Five Star reviews online at Amazon and BN. His column "Write Tight" appears in the online magazine Apollo’s Lyre. He is also a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make Mine Mystery. He hosts workshops for the Muse Online Writers Conference and the Catholic Writers Conference Online and is a frequent speaker at conferences and writers groups. Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net Website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com

Here's Earl:

OF TRUTH AND LEGEND

I love history, particularly about people, how they lived, loved, and died and what they did to earn a place in the archives of life. I learn about people from the past by reading books and watching movies and TV. The facts and truths are there, documented by stories handed down through generations or recorded by historians and writers.

But sometimes facts and truths foster legends and once born, legends develop an enduring life of their own. We may call them alternate truths, other possibilities, or myths. Was there really a King Arthur, or was he only a compilation of various myths and legends? Did George Washington really chop down that cherry tree, or is that only a legend forever linked to the truth?

How do we separate legends from truths? Fortunately, as a writer, I don’t have to. The truth is, I don’t want to. My job as a writer is to write an interesting and entertaining story, and it doesn’t matter if it is based on the truth, a legend, or a combination of both.

Available at Amazon

Not too long ago, I came across a legend that fascinated me, and I used it as the basis for a short story I called “Where Billy Died.” It could be my best story ever. It’s also one I talk about when people ask the question all writers are asked:

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Here’s what I tell them.

My wife and I took a day trip with friends to the small town of Hico, Texas, a couple years ago. There I learned a local legend. They contend and have convincing evidence that one of the most famous outlaws of the old west did not die at the wrong end of a gun as history books claim. History claims Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico, when Billy was only twenty-one years old.

Not true, according to the Hico legend. They claim Billy lived out his final years there and died in 1950, a month after his ninetieth birthday. I visited the museum devoted to him and stood on the exact spot where they say he dropped dead of a heart attack. The museum has pictures of him when he lived there under the name “Brushy Bill” Roberts. There are newspaper articles and write-ups covering his attempts to obtain the pardon from the state of New Mexico which had been promised him many years before. There are also stories there about how he eluded death that night in Old Fort Sumner and wound up in Hico some sixty years later.

 It didn’t matter to me whether Billy died in New Mexico at age twenty-one, or in Texas at age ninety.


I was fascinated by the legend and knew I had to use it in a story someday.

“But,” I reminded myself, “you don’t write westerns.”

That’s true. I don’t. Not that I won’t someday, but for now, I write contemporary mystery stories. That meant I had to come up with a contemporary story incorporating the Hico legend.

It took a while, but I eventually came up with a story about a modern day skip tracer named Jack who travels from Philadephia to Hico to bring back a young bail jumper named Billy Joe Raynor. Piece of cake, thinks Jack, until he discovers he has a tail. The chief bonebreaker for a New Jersey mobster has followed Jack to Hico. Is it because Jack beat up the mobster’s brother, or because of something young Billy Joe did before he skipped town? Jack only knows he’s tangled with the hulking bruiser before and will have to again. Jack doesn’t know he’ll also get tangled up in Hico’s legend about another young outlaw named Billy and that the past and present will merge in a surprising conclusion. Three different legends surrounding Billy’s life and death are mentioned. One of them saves Jack from his predicament in Texas and fixes his marriage problems back in Philadelphia.

If you have an opportunity to read “Where Billy Died,” I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Available at Amazon

and at Smashwords

Legends abound, forever intermingled with truth in history, and they’re often more provocative and interesting than what may really have happened. One legend, for example offers that Butch Cassidy may have escaped his storied death in Bolivia and lived to a ripe old age back in the US. Another one proposes that John Wilkes Booth lived in Texas many years after that night at Ford’s Theater.

Are these legends true or merely fanciful variations of the truth born and nurtured over the years? I don’t know and, as a writer, I don’t care. To me, they are more of the tempting nuggets in the gold mine of history begging to be written. I hope I live long enough to write more of them.

Earl Staggs

“Where Billy Died” available for $1.99 at http://untreedreads.com/

Read two stories for free at: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com/


“The Day I Almost Became A Great Writer” – Loaded with laughs and a message to writers.


“White Hats and Happy Trails” – About the day I spent with a boyhood idol, Roy Rogers.