Nancy Lynn Jarvis: Accidental Publisher

My husband and I owned a small real estate company which we wound down after the real estate collapse in 2008. Our plan was to declare ourselves retired and travel, but our investments weren’t generating enough income to let us do what we planned, and we found ourselves stuck at home.

I had way too much time on my hands and got bored, so at age 59, I decided to start killing people.

Writing my first mystery, “The Death Contingency” quite literally began as a time filling game, a mental exercise like playing Sudoku. I had a beginning and an ending in mind for the book and absolutely no idea how to connect the two. It took a great deal of fumbling and learning for both me as a writer and for Regan McHenry, the amateur sleuth protagonist, to solve the mystery. It was fun, though — more fun than anything I had ever done before — so much fun that I immediately started on a second mystery, “Backyard Bones.”

I never intended to do anything with what I wrote; writing was a game, after all. That changed when our friend Charlotte Bridges, a woman who always wanted to see her name in print, was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

Possibly because my husband and I had a long history of being small business owners and weren’t daunted by the idea of doing so, we set up a micro publishing company, dedicated “The Death Contingency” to Charlotte, printed some books, and got a copy to her so she could have her wish fulfilled before she died.

We would never have been able to make such a gesture if we went the traditional publishing route. Charlotte had months to live — not enough time to try and secure an agent or the attention of a big publishing house. We also couldn’t have done what we did a few years earlier when self-publishing entailed a big financial investment and the printing of a thousand or more copies of a book. Timing is important; 2008 was early in a new era of publishing.

It was surprisingly easy and inexpensive to go into the self-publishing business. We invested $35 to copyright a company name and logo. I went online looking for printing deals and limited book runs and discovered Createspace. They charged a $35 printer set-up fee and offered to print the book under their auspices with only an additional small fee for the ISBN number they would supply. Books could be purchased one-at-a-time. There offer was tempting — it’s a good solution for many who want to publish a book easily and inexpensively — but we had our company name and logo…and the possibility of a new adventure. I hired them to print our books, but no more.

The next step was purchasing an ISBN number. For one book, the cost was $55. I discovered ISBN numbers are cheaper in bulk so I splurged and purchased a bank of ten for $275—just in case.

We couldn’t afford a graphic designer to do the cover. I scoured the web and discovered iStockphotos.com and Dreamstime.com, sites that sold cheap graphics and photos. We borrowed when we could, too. The skeleton hand on the cover of “The Death Contingency” started out as a full body skeleton on a chiropractic website. My husband cropped and rotated it until the hand worked for us. It took his computer and design background skills to work what I found into what we had in mind for a book cover, but it was doable and affordable.

Print-on-demand was the key to producing books inexpensively and in small quantities. Our first run was a hundred books; I could have ordered fewer books, but I was too embarrassed to do so. It was exciting when the books arrived; you can imagine what it feels like to hold a book you’ve written. After we gave Charlotte her copy, we threw a party to celebrate and dispose of the other ninety-nine. Our friends turned our party into a book signing and almost paid for our venture that first day.

We were on our way as publishers until a friend who had earned a living as an editor brought her book back filled with stick-ums.

Click Here For Part #2: Editing is Critical for the Self-publisher. So is Research, Even for Fiction. (Coming Soon)

Murder House Bio

Nancy Lynn Jarvis finally acknowledged she’s having too much fun writing to ever sell another house and let her license lapse in May of 2013, after her twenty-fifth anniversary in real estate.

After earning a BA in behavioral science from San Jose State University, she worked in the advertising department of the San Jose Mercury News. A move to Santa Cruz meant a new job as a librarian and later a stint as the business manager for Shakespeare Santa Cruz at UCSC.

She invites you to take a peek into the real estate world through the stories that form the backdrop of her Regan McHenry mysteries. Real estate details and ideas come from Nancy’s own experiences.