|
Read about the
|
|
Behind the Scenes… |
|
A story about a Book
the consequences
of publishing
Copyright 2007 by the Author,
Norman Gibat
Noguska LLC
Phone
419-435-0404 FAX
419-435-1844
WWW.NOGUSKA.COM WWW.NOLAPRO.COM WWW.NOLAPRINT.COM
Our
small company, Noguska LLC, prints and distributes a book titled The Lore
of Still Building. There’s
nothing remarkable about that; every year about 200,000 new titles are
published. The consequences of publishing that single book were and are remarkable.
We’ve
been selling this book, or a reasonable replica, since 1966. But those first few thousand were distributed
under different titles and mostly to different types of readers. To date we've sold almost a quarter million
copies, which would not qualify it as a best seller but it's profitable enough
to keep in print.
Our
advertising and marketing costs for this book are zero; we do not advertise
anywhere nor do we make sales calls. We
do not take any books back unless they are damaged which is almost unheard of
in the book publishing business.
There's no secret to this very modest success but there are
some unique factors.. Most of our sales
are made to specialty retail stores, of one type or another, throughout the
Aftershocks!
Really? Let me explain.
The
book started when I was working as an Electronics Engineer for the Air Force in
the mid 1960s. Back in the dark
ages. This was during the “cold war”
with
As
an engineering group, part of our duty was to write a report on each job after
completion. One of the engineers in
Arabia wrote up a fake report on distilling alcohol and used it as a Christmas
gift to all of his friends and buddies back home in
My boss and another co-worker liked the idea too, so we all
collaborated on some of the work and shared some of the expenses. We did not decide to do this without some
serious reservations--particularly for my two co-workers. . Distillation of potable (drinkable) alcohol
in the
My two friends and I were federal employees. Although it may be true today, in 1966 it was not considered to be a good career move for federal employees to encourage breaking federal laws.
We reasoned that while it may be illegal to build a still it was probably not illegal to know HOW to build one--and knowing how is only a single step from writing a book about what you know--even though my friends reminded me that it might also be only a single step from the clanging sound of a closing iron door.
I
rewrote the material and made an effort to make it easy to understand. The final booklet was 48 pages long. We printed it ourselves on a small Model 1000
Multilith offset printing press that I had in my garage at the time. We saddle stitched the pages together like a
small magazine. It was titled How
To Build a Still.
Our first copies were printed in 1966. Our first classified ad was in Popular Mechanics but later we bought ads in a few similar magazines. The book had a market but it was not very large; perhaps a few dozen orders each month. Usually the return was barely enough to pay for the ads. We gradually built up sales but even so they rarely exceeded 100 copies a month and usually nowhere near that!.
We
kept this up for the next few years, printing a few thousand copies at a
time. To cut down on our overhead we did
not bind them until we needed them. In
the meantime I read a convincing article in the Atlantic Monthly that
claimed that the least rewarding work (in the financial sense) was for the
government and the most rewarding was being in business for oneself. I won't claim this was the only reason for
doing so but, after some backing and filling, in January of 1968 I quit my
engineering job and set up a small printing business in Norman Oklahoma. I did this without considering that the
author of the convincing article had neither worked in a business nor been in
business for himself. This was much like
buying a book promising to make you a millionaire without considering why the
author would want to make you a millionaire since, if it is so easy, he or she
could just as well do it themselves.
Shortly
after I dropped out of engineering my two collaborators gave up on the book because
of its lackluster sales. I very nearly
had the good sense to quit myself but, being eternally an optimist, I kept it
alive—barely.
By
that point in time--because of the Still book--I had drifted into selling home
wine supplies. Shortly after we printed
the booklet I was surprised to discover that while home distillation was VERY
illegal and beer was modestly illegal, home wine making was legal if done by
the "head of the household", whatever that meant. Most people were unaware of this and I only
knew about it because one of my collaborators made his own wine at home. Many book buyers were home winemakers, or
wannabes, and they just naturally started asking me where they could buy
supplies. I thought this might be an
opportunity to finally make a profit from the book. However my printing business left me little
time to explore yet another option. And,
unfortunately, the academic who wrote the original article for the Atlantic
Monthly did not follow it up with yet another article on how a person
remained solvent if they followed his advice to quit their daytime job, with
its dependable paycheck, to start their own business, with no paycheck.
As luck would have it, one of my first employees in 1968 was a young lady who had made some home wine
She
wasn’t yet an expert but at least she had some experience and definitely knew
more about the subject of potable alcohol than did I. So I handed over the home wine supply ideas
to her--as well as the book sales--and expected her to take it from there so I
could concentrate on my core business of printing.
For a few weeks I heard nothing from her on the matter. The few weeks turned into a few months and I
began to realize that, being young and a college student, she had lost interest
in the matter.
From
that point forward the home wine business was her responsibility and she built
it into a creditable and even profitable sideline to our main business of
printing.
A
little more than a year later we got what we expected to be some free
nationwide publicity. In the spring of
1969 the Whole Earth Catalog printed a picture of a crude Still from my
book and listed its source. This brought
us a flurry of immediate orders and what looked like an even better offer to
appear on nationwide TV. One of the researchers for the Dinah Shore TV show
(Dinah’s Place) in
The show's director called me and said they'd pay actor's minimum (which was about $300 at that time) if I'd agree to be on the show. Actually I knew very little about the subject. It must be remembered that when I originally wrote the book I mostly just rewrote the text I had inherited from the Saudi Arabian manuscript. I
added hardly any original material. That did not stop me from immediately
agreeing to appear on the
Which
brings me, naturally, back to the young lady who was quietly working behind the
scenes, filling home wine and book orders, and answering all the
questions. She was the only person who
knew very well that my experience and knowledge in the home wine field was
zero. When I told her of my agreement to
be on the Dinah Shore show as an expert, to her credit she did not upchuck her
lunch all over the floor. Instead she
managed to find a friend who had a bottle of genuine homemade dandelion wine. That was a great start and it was my ONLY
prop for the show. I took the bottle of
wine with me to
I went on the show on October 16, 1970 and Dan Rowan made fun of both me and the wine. Which is to be expected since, after all, comedy was his stock in trade. The one event that I recall the most about the show was when I was walking through one of those dreary backstage rooms at NBC, with lots of people going to and fro. Of course everyone was a stranger. Two ladies walked by a little distance away and to my utter surprise one of them looked over at me, waved her hand and said in a bright crisp voice "Good morning Norman". I was shocked that someone knew who we were but I mumbled something in return.
The
young lady who was with me whispered "That's Dinah Shore". I was there to play a very minor bit part in
a small skit and she obviously went out of her way to try to make me feel at
ease. As it turned out it didn't work
but I did end up admiring
Other
than the novelty of appearing on a nationwide TV show, it was a
disappointment. The appearance did not
give our book a boost because the show’s producer absolutely prohibited me from
even mentioning it on the air. After all
they were paying me the actor's minimum.
Self-advertising didn’t come with the deal. Nevertheless we continued to sell the Still
booklet and I encouraged the young lady to help me write another book on home
winemaking titled Making Wine Beer and Merry.
The young lady typeset the book using an old Varityper machine. I could not afford a commercial artist so,
once again, this same young lady drew most of the drawings and artwork for the
text. My small business printed and
bound this book.
We called our retail and wholesale home wine business The Wyne Table. One thing led to another, as they usually do, and we were soon publishing and distributing a small trade magazine for the home wine retail stores and wholesale outlets. This was the Beverage Communicator (BC). We used the magazine
for
lateral communication in the tiny home wine and beer industry. We were very much aware that there was no
real communication between the retail stores and other stores or wholesalers.
We tried to encourage the idea that we all should gather together somewhere and
start a small trade organization. There was some interest but not enough so we
used the pages of the magazine to continue pushing the idea of a trade
organization.
Finally,
in April of 1976, most of the leading retailers and wholesalers of this tiny
industry met at the Arlington Park Hilton in
In
1973 I left
Before
writing the book I decided it was about time I set up my own experiments with
distillation and fermentation so I would know what I was talking about. Being an engineer the chemistry and physics
involved were not difficult to digest.
It was the experience I lacked.
This was LONG before the internet so I went to our local library and
they kindly sent out to their branches to locate all the books on the subject I
could find the titles for. I read these
and with my notes and experimental data in front of me I sat down each day to
write. Within a month I had a draft and
within another month I had an edited copy.
When finished the book had 96 pages, double the number in How
To Build a Still.
The
same young lady that helped before felt she could do some of the art work
again. Eventually she did all the art work for inside the book
and then followed that act by
typesetting the book too! A very
fine artist named Mike Dirham, whom I’d known in
When I moved to
After
our first printing of LORE we made one remarkable
discovery that served us well over the next three decades! We found an unusual new market for the books;
retail stores and small wholesalers who specialized in novel niche markets such
as home winemaking, gift stores, specialty stores and even organic growers. We patiently collected a list of every one of
these stores we could find in the
Along
about this same time we discovered the perils of pricing. If we made the price right for retailers it
was wrong for wholesalers--and vice versa.
Wholesalers buy by the hundreds or low thousands, retail stores by the
dozens. Both groups must make a good
profit or they are not going to participate.
Our
biggest advantage is that we typeset and publish the books ourselves and we
handle all the details. So we can adjust
the prices for the market and we can sell for VERY LOW prices if the market is
large enough. We carefully crafted a
quantity pricing scale that allowed us to sell the books to wholesalers and
retailers so they could both make a fair profit. One of the keys to this is that when we,
Noguska, receive direct mail book orders we sell these at the same price as the
retailers so we do not undercut them.
Both retailers and wholesalers appreciate this protection from competing
with Noguska, itself. Thus we do not
drive either group away as often happens when you try to play both sides of the
street.
Later
in the 1970s Simon and Schuster
contacted me about printing the book. Finally.
I went to their office in NY but we had a disagreement. I wanted them to take BOTH our books (the LORE
and also Making Wine Beer and Merry).
They did not want the second book.
We
really felt little incentive to sell to them because we were and are making a
fair profit from LORE without any hassle.
We felt certain we'd make nowhere near that with S&S; after all it is a niche market, even if you take the
novelty and gift sales into consideration. S&S undoubtedly felt the same lack of
incentive to concede anything to me and for the same reason; niche markets are
not necessarily the best markets for mass book sellers. So we parted amicably and left empty handed.
We've
reprinted the book 9 times to date and we did a major revision with the advent
of gasohol in the 1990s. Once again the book doubled in size to 192 pages. Initially we called ourselves Popular Topics
Press but now we publish under the name of Noguska LLC.
The
Beverage Communicator, directly, and The
Lore of Still Building, indirectly, did bring the home wine industry at
least one more positive and lasting benefit.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the federal law governing the production of
home wine was restrictive to say the least. There was much complaining about
this by retail store owners as well as their customers. One of our readers managed to get his
congressman interested in the project.
We
knew however that Rex Davis, the director of the ATF, would have the last say
in the passage of any bill. So far as we could tell he had not taken a public
stand either way on the matter. I’m sure
he had more pressing problems to worry about than the tiny home wine and beer
market. In our magazine we printed a
sample petition and asked for retail stores to get their customers to sign this
petition to have the federal law changed and broadened. We promised to send the
signed petitions by certified mail to Rex Davis.
The
signed petitions poured in and formed an impressive pile: more than
17,000! Because the response was so
great I decided to deliver the
peititions to
The
same young lady who had helped so much before was available at that time so I
asked her to accompany me when I delivered the petitions. Since Rex Davis was a national personage of
some consequence she agreed. Mr. Davis
was there to greet us, as promised, and we had a most pleasant private visit
with him in his office. He knew of the book on Stills and suggested we look at
the small museum they had on premises where they had many captured Stills on
exhibit. Which we did. Within a year a
much broadened bill, including home beer production, was approved by Mr. Davis
and made its way through the national legislative process. It is now the law of the land.
By
the way did I mention that I married the young lady on October 16, 1971,
exactly one year after we did the
Kathleen
wrote her first Accounting and Inventory software during the 1970s while
working on a contract with the Bechtel Corporation. For this solo achievement Bechtel issued her
its employee performance award which was never before given to an outsider. She also wrote the job costing software for
the Fermi Nuclear plant owned by Detroit Edison in
No
single person can any longer write all the code produced by Noguska. However Kathleen still supervises its
production and often composes many of the more difficult stanzas herself.
In
1994 Kathleen wrote a popular computer text titled All You Need to Know about
MS-DOS. DOS was replaced by Windows
many years ago but requests for this seminal book still pop in the door. Today many corporations, large and small,
access her latest and best accounting, inventory and business control products
directly across the internet, as can anyone else at www.nolapro.com and www.noguska.com.
A
gradual intolerance to alcohol now prevents Kathleen from drinking it, but she
still draws and paints while her husband, who can drink alcohol, does so.
It
is surprising that all of these events--The Whole
Earth Catalog; Dan Rowan and
Sadly,
my two collaborators for How
To Build a Still died a number of years back. The original document, tricked up to look
like an engineering report, quickly deteriorated since it was produced, no
doubt, on a government copy machine in
I
no longer can recall the name or names of the authors of the document and I've never met or talked
with any of them. A shame, for they
shall never know how their seemingly trivial deed spread so much cheer and
goodwill, in so many different ways, to so many hundreds of thousands of people
throughout the world.
Norman Gibat
January 2007