I bypassed publishing gatekeepers to launch book

By John Toth

The Bulletin

After about a decade of on-and-off writing, I got my book published.

I didn’t submit it to publishing houses and waited for rejection letters or a letter of acceptance. That’s how I peddled articles to magazines when I was in college. Things have changed a little since then.

After I hired a professional book editor, Newsboy Marketing & Publishing, we decided to skip that step and take control of the publishing process through Amazon and various other outlets.

I was leaning toward knocking on publishing-house doors and then anxiously awaiting their decisions. We’d just need one to accept the manuscript. I was going to try it the old-fashioned way.

After all, J.K. Rowling’s manuscript for “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was rejected by 12 different publishers before it was finally accepted by Bloomsbury Publishing on the 13th attempt.

Look what happened with that one.

Lacey, my book editor, warned against doing that and recommended that we do it ourselves. Since I don’t know anything about book publishing, I agreed. I found out quickly that book publishing and publishing a weekly newspaper have absolutely nothing in common.

O.K., they both require writing and then printing it, but the two businesses are like night and day.

Lacey does this for a living, so I followed her advice, and we began the publishing process. On June 25, “No Turning Back” went live on Amazon, and we were in business.

There will be other outlets also, but Amazon was the most important. It took the decision-making away from the publishing house and kept it with the book’s writer and editor.

It still amazes me how this type of publishing is even possible, but technology has come a long way since my magazine articles were rejected when I was in college.

Amazon avoids traditional gatekeepers.

Physical paperbacks and hardcovers are only printed when a customer orders them. This eliminates the need to buy and store inventory, while Amazon handles the printing and shipping.

The author retains full rights to the intellectual property. Writers and editors can set or change the retail prices and update manuscripts anytime. That is a huge advantage over traditional book printing.

“No Turning Back” is about my mother’s plan - and then its subsequent implementation  - of the two of us escaping from Communist Hungary in 1966. It is about what I experienced being a refugee in Austria for a year and a half and what we had to go through to emigrate to the United States.

It was a big adventure for me, filled with excitement, fun, sadness and some danger. I wrote it as I remember it, along with some side trips provided by the imagination of a 10-year-old boy who went from a very simple way of life to the bright lights of Vienna.

I wrote it because I wanted to share that part of my life, especially with my family. As I started talking about it and printed snippets of my experience as columns in The Bulletin, it occurred to me that perhaps others would like to take this journey with me and learn what it was like to be a boy without a country.

Whatever happens commercially, I am super glad that I was able to put my memories down on paper and share them with whoever is interested in reading “No Turning Back.”

I am working on another book, maybe entitled, “No Turning Back II: My adventures in the USA in the 1960s,” or something like that. I’m already working on it.

(Go to johntothwrites.com to find out more about “No Turning Back” and how to order it. Please email your comments on this column to john.bulletin@gmail.com)