{"id":5150,"date":"2014-03-21T00:05:04","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T07:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=5150"},"modified":"2014-03-20T20:48:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T03:48:19","slug":"small-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2014\/03\/21\/small-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tBesides being a writer and a teacher of biblical languages and theology, the small seminary that I\u2019m associated with also publishes books. Being a small press, we have no money for marketing or promotion. Over the years, we have published over fifty books now, most of them Bible related. For instance, Dr. Jim West, our adjunct professor who handles most of our online courses, has been working on a commentary of the whole Bible for the past decade. Thus far, we\u2019ve published over thirty volumes of his commentaries.<\/p>\n

\tHis books have been so well received that the Bible software company Logos has decided to offer them as ebooks for use with their Bible program. Logos Bible Software, headquartered in Bellingham, Washington, is the world\u2019s largest developer of Bible study software and a worldwide leader in multilingual electronic publishing. Logos licenses the electronic rights to more than 27,000 titles related to the Bible from more than 150 publishers, including Baker, Bantam, Catholic University Press, Eerdmans, Harvest House, Merriam Webster, Mood Press, Oxford University Press, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale House, Zondervan\u2014and now, Quartz Hill Publishing House, the publishing arm of the small seminary I teach at. <\/p>\n

\tI am delighted with this development, even though it offers very limited\u2014if any\u2014financial benefit to the school. <\/p>\n

Not all the books we publish are Bible related, however. Yesterday at our church I had turned over the preliminary version of a book that an African American woman in our congregation wrote. Eula Youngblood is in her eighties; she wrote the book about her paternal grandfather who was murdered by his brother at an Odd Fellows Lodge in Georgia back in 1911. <\/p>\n

\tEula used to write for television (for instance, she wrote an episode of the old TV series Bonanza), and she has authored a handful of other books. But now she is nearly blind and must use voice recognition software on her computer write. Although voice recognition has gotten quite good over the years, it still makes mistakes\u2014especially when it comes to punctuation. It also has some difficulty with homonyms. Consequently, as the editor of her latest book, I had to make a number of corrections, on top of the normal rewording and reworking of sentences here and there. Then I had to format the text, do the layout for the interior of the book and create an index. <\/p>\n

All together, I spent about two months on the project. Then I had to design the cover. She had a photograph of the Lodge where the murder had occurred so I started with that. I made substantial modifications to it in GIMP, an open source clone of Photoshop: I changed the colors, reduced their number to only three, and transformed it into a poster-like painting. I added the Odd Fellows symbol, the title, author, and a blurb to catch the eye: \u201cOne brother murdered. One brother in jail. A family divided.\u201d On the back cover I added a few lines of text from the book:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve killed me.\u201d
\n\tWillie grabbed Ed\u2019s arm to keep him from firing again. They fell to the floor.
\n\tEd yelled, \u201cI\u2019ve ruined myself! Somebody! Take my brother to the doctor. I\u2019ll pay for it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\tEula was thrilled with the cover design. Then I told her something along the lines of \u201cwe made corrections to the text and I think everything is okay now\u2014 but I\u2019d like you to go through it and make sure. Then let us know if there\u2019s anything that needs to be changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tShe looked at me funny and asked, \u201cWhat do you mean \u2018we.\u2019 Did you have any help doing this?\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWell, no.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tI tend to forget that I alone do all the work of putting the books together and publishing them. Quartz Hill Publishing House is really just a one man operation\u2014though the seminary as a whole was responsible for establishing it. We\u2014and I really do mean more people than just me, myself, and I\u2014had hopes that our publishing venture might generate some income for the seminary. However, as I said at the beginning, we have no distribution or marketing capabilities. The small seminary\u2019s website\u2014which includes pages for the publishing company\u2014gets around 1500 visitors per day. But most of those haven\u2019t come to buy books. Therefore \u201csome\u201d income has turned out to mean \u201csmidgen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tBut making money was not our only reason for publishing books. We hoped that we\u2019d do something that might benefit people. So, I can\u2019t help but be pleased that a large company like Logos has decided to pick up some of our\u2014my\u2014small press\u2019s publications and make them more widely available.<\/p>\n

\tThey say that you should do what you love and the money will follow. So far, in my experience, it doesn\u2019t work like that. Money mostly gets distracted by squirrels and gets lost along the way.<\/p>\n

Send to Kindle<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Besides being a writer and a teacher of biblical languages and theology, the small seminary that I\u2019m associated with also publishes books. Being a small press, we have no money for marketing or promotion. Over the years, we have published … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5150"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5153,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5150\/revisions\/5153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}