Farewell to My First Book
How do you say goodbye to a book that went through 21 editions, paid for your European vacation for double-digit years, and put you on the map as a successful self-published author? Thank you, Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Video and Audio Systems.
PHT started life under the best of the subsidy publishers (1stBooks Library, later Authorhouse) that sprang up in tandem with print-on-demand technology, whereby as few as one copy at a time can be printed and shipped. I paid to publish it but the investment soon paid for itself — and then some. And then a lot. For years and years.
I was my own editor, cover designer, and chief bottle washer. Had I not tried self-publishing, the gatekeepers of the traditional book publishing industry would still have me unpublished. Tech writers get no respect, and while I don’t regret making a living in the field — I met some amazing people — I don’t regret exiting it now.
Later a good samaritan pointed out that my book, then three editions old, was among the bestsellers in the POD genre. He suggested that I would keep more of the income it was producing by going independent with my own imprint via the giant book distributor Ingram and its POD subsidiary Lighting Source. Thank you, Morris Rosenthal. When I did the next edition under my own imprint, Quiet River Press, my book income doubled.
Special thanks to the supportive readers who bought the book. A few bought it more than once, as home theater technology developed and I kept the book fresh by updating it (a little or a lot, as needed) every year.
A few reader reviews complained that much of the book was old tech. However, home theater technology no longer moves forward at its formerly zesty pace. Old tech is just about all there is left. Best wishes to the reader who inexplicably claimed the book had no content on audio gear. The system no longer allows a response, but this, too, is something I need to let go.
So my old warhorse is in its victory lap now. Only the two editions at far right, the 2022 edition of PHT and its radical two-channel revision The Friendly Audio Guide, remain in print. The 2022 edition was also the 20th Anniversary Edition. It remains available (print | ebook) and it seems a good place to stop, or at least pause indefinitely.
Practical Home Theater started as an outgrowth of an ill-fated internet business venture and an adjunct to the writing career I needed to revive in its wake. Having a “Mark is the author of…” bio-tag running with my magazine stories was so productive, I wish I’d written my first book sooner.
But began I no longer have a full-time tech-writing career. The publishing industry, as currently constituted, does not support as many of those as it used to. I feel lucky to have made a living at it, with a nice side hustle, for as long as I did. The living is gone and the side hustle is on life support.
I’m shelving a few editions spaced five years apart and discarding the rest, though I’ll still have the production masters and published Kindle editions for reference. But with consolidation of titles and concentration of ownership in my corner of the dying magazine industry, and the maturing and near-stasis of HT tech, it’s time to refocus my attention on other subjects.
At last count, I was up to 11 books under various names, and while some of them are pretty lightweight (three volumes of Zoom backgrounds, anyone?) I like to think my best work is still ahead of me. I used to write a lot about tech and not much about people. Now I’d like to write a lot about people and not much about tech. I’m old but healthy — at the age of 66.6 — and there’s still time to turn that around.
So goodbye, and thank you, my old friend.
Look upon my collected works, and weep!
