Kevin Knauss, author of Hidden History Beneath Folsom Lake, writes at his home office in Granite Bay, Ca.
I am not a born writer. I don’t have the patience to write and rewrite a sentence or paragraph until it is just perfect. In the absence of a writer’s personality I do have a curious mind, a desire to be creative, and an interest in sharing my work with other people. When I reviewed the amount of content I had produced pertaining to the history of the Folsom Lake region I figured it would make a good book. So I decided to write and publish a book.
Self-Publishing My History Book
Since 2012 I had been posting pictures and writing blogs for my website about my hikes out at Folsom Lake. When I came upon an interesting structure or artifact I would research the history and include that in the blog post. I figured that if there was one guy that was interested in the history that is usually covered by Folsom Lake water, there would probably be others.
In 2015 Folsom Lake was drained to historically low water levels and I was able to hike around and take pictures of the gold rush era landscape that had not been seen since the reservoir was filled in the 1950s. At the beginning of 2016 a friend said, “Hey, you should write a book about this Folsom Lake history stuff.” I said, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea.”
Unique Content
Abandon ore cart peeks out of the low water levels of Folsom Lake, November 2015.
One of the reasons a real book sounded like a good idea is that history nerds like me like to hold books in our hands. We like to study pictures and maps and have reference material. There is just something about physically holding a book or map that can’t be replicated with online material. As a collector of old junk, euphemistically called antiques, I am afflicted with the personality disorder to acquire printed material. In a weird way, I guess I wanted to write the book just so I could cradle the history in my hands.
How Much Will This Book Cost Me?
For reasons I’ll describe later, I decided that I wanted to self-publish my history book. The first order of business was to determine how much the printing costs would be. With a vague format of how I wanted the book to look like I met with a printer in Auburn, Ca, to get a ball park quote. For approximately $1,800 I could get 200 copies printed.
I looked at publishing the book as a gamble. How much money was I willing to lose? My goal was to break even on the project. I looked at comparable history books on the shelves of book retailers and decided to price my book at $21.95. If I could sell 100 books of a 200 count production run, I’d break even with my investment. I figured there had to be at least 100 people in the local area that would buy a history book with unique photos found no place else, except on my website.
Let’s Write The Book
House foundation and porch revealed by low water level near 5% beach or east tip of Mooney Ridge.
At this point I was giving myself the green light to proceed. But I still worked up a budget that included costs for editing, cover design, and miscellaneous expenses for marketing the book. Once I determined I really could self-publish my book, I had to get down to the business of writing it. I reasoned that I could just take all my blog posts, string them together and the book would write itself. Wrong!
The outline of actually putting a book together is where a real publisher can be very helpful. Early on in the process of researching the feasibility of writing the book I communicated with a known publisher of history books. This publisher wanted certain items included in the book to maximize sales and appeal to their market demographic. Publishers understand how to create books that sell to their target audience. This is not a bad thing. But it can mean the author must compromise on his or her vision. At 52 years of age, I was not interested in compromising. I decided the book had to be a reflection of me and how I wanted the history book to present the content.
How Hard Is It To Write A Picture Book?
It was a fairly easy decision not to pursue collaborating with a professional publisher. While not to be too arrogant, I’ve had a fair amount of success with my website. All the content on my website was produced by me. People tell me the website provides lots of useful information and they find it of value. I’ve been told I write in a concise manner that conveys the information in the manner in which the reader understands. Plus, I was writing a book with lots of pictures. How difficult could it be?
When I really sat down to write the book, I realized my original concept of stringing all the blog post together would not fly. I had to essentially re-write the content. This was not a bad thing. I settled for an approach that narrated a tour of my hikes up and down the North and South Forks of the American River. My photos were the anchor points of the narration. I added additional depth by referencing 19th century newspaper stories of the regions along the rivers I was focusing on.
I Needed Good Quality Pictures
Folsom Lake, in front of dam, September 5, 2015.
Writing the book was actually the easy part. The time consuming job was converting the pictures for publication. All the photos were taken with my iPhone. These images are usually 96 dots per inch (dpi). You need a 300 dpi resolution for printing. Except for the cover, all the photos were to be black and white to save money. But converting a color image to black and white usually results in a muddy picture. So I had to adjust each converted black and white image to make it more viewable by adjusting the contrast and a few other tricks.
At the same time as I was converting the images for printing, I had to format the pictures for the e-book edition. While the e-book could have color photos, I had to crop and reduce the image sizes. E-books have limited file sizes. No one wants to download a 100MB book to read on their Kindle or iPad. As it turned out, I still had to break the printed book into five separate e-books to stay under the file size limitations.
Did I Need E-Book Versions?
In retrospect, I wouldn’t have formatted and published the e-book versions until after I finished the printed version. The sales on Amazon and Smashwords for the e-books have not been very good. But I didn’t know what to expect when I was putting the book together. I wasted too much time for too little return. Plus, when people search for the book on the internet all they see are the e-book versions on Amazon. The Amazon website ranks so much better than my own website, were people can order the printed version, that my page and blog post on the book don’t make into the top 10 first search engine listings.
My Book, My Style
I follow the keep-it-simple-stupid principle. I wanted my book to look professional and easy to read. I didn’t need any fancy graphics. I decided on a two column format. I used MS Word and imported all the pictures right into the document. I then converted the Word document into a PDF and handed it to the printer. I wanted it easy to read for older folks like me so I used a 12 point Times New Roman font. I outlined all the pictures with a thin black line to delineate the edge. I put the page number in the upper right hand corner because that’s where I think it should be. It makes it easier to find a specific page when you are thumbing through the book. I also included a table of the GPS locations for most of the pictures in the back of the book.
The downside to using Word and inserting the pictures is that some pages have half columns of white space as the formatting pushed the text to the next page. Another unfortunate aspect is that some of the photos are smaller than I wanted. In 2014 I experienced a computer hard disk crash and lost a lot of data and pictures. The important pictures I had uploaded to my website, but in a reduce size. When I had to increase the dpi of these already small pictures to 300 dpi, they got proportionally smaller for printing purposes. Some photos I could not use and others are just smaller than average.
Book Cover: First Impression
If you research the best practices of self-publishing you will find most people agree that you should have the cover of the book professionally designed and hire and editor. I knew the elements that I wanted on my cover that I thought would appeal to potential buyers. I wanted an image of the lake and embedded photos of unique items I photographed on my hikes. I prepared draft of the cover and sent it over to a graphic designer. After a couple of iterations the designer captured what I was looking for.
The best move I made was hiring Bonnie Osborne to be my editor. She combed through the book cleaning up grammatical issues, proper notation of references, and properly formatted the bibliography. If a sentence or reference was not clear to her, I knew that I had to rework the text so that any reader could follow my narration. I didn’t want my book to only be accessible to history buffs that were knowledgeable about 19th century references. I wanted the book to be a reference guide for anyone who wants to explore Folsom Lake.
I’m Not A Perfectionist
I feel one of the reasons I was able to move forward with publishing my book, within the budget I had established, was I am no longer a perfectionist. I could have requested a dozen more cover designs, but the one presented met 90% of my objectives. I could have spent thousands of dollars on software to meticulously enhance the photographs or format the text with less white space. But all of the incremental improvements would have cost more than the benefit to either the reader or sales. I took a gamble that my market was like me; I don’t care about fancy graphics, just give me the information in an easily read and referenced format.
Marketing Stumbles
The weakest link of publishing my book has been the marketing plan and execution. Ideally I wanted to have the book available in local book stores and history museum gift shops. I sent out press releases and sent complimentary copies to my targeted outlets. No one responded. I did get a story in a local newspaper that helped initial sales. While I know that I should pursue the retail outlets with more tenacity, that isn’t a priority for me. My main marketing has been my website and the few local speaking engagements to talk about the book.
I did run a Facebook advertisement before Christmas. The sales did not pay for the advertising cost. But I did pick up a spot on a local radio show because the host had seen the ad on Facebook. That resulted in a few sales. Overall, I’m not too worried about sales. I have a strong belief that good content, products, or services will be found by consumers. In addition, I did not place myself in a financial position where I have to sell the book to make the mortgage payment.
The book is registered with the Library of Congress. It has ISBN numbers dedicated to it and I’ve given away many copies to libraries and museums in the local area. One of my inspirations for the book was the voluminous amounts of research John Plimpton did on the history of the American River before Folsom Lake was filled. Mr. Plimpton, who was a California State Parks employee, never published his work, which encompasses several large binders of accumulated research. His research was reproduced after his death and many historical archives such as Placer County have it available for viewing. There are also several copies reprinted that are in the hands of private collectors.
Just like Plimpton’s collection of historical research is somewhat inaccessible to the public, there are thousands of documents and images sequestered in museums and historical society libraries. It takes money to convert the material into a digital format that can be accessible to the public online. Many of these museums and libraries can also have an attitude that only trained historians should be able to view the material.
While I understand and respect the position of some of the archivists about restricting access to historical documents, I believe most of this material should be accessible to the public. I can’t change the rules and procedures of these repositories of historical information, but I can make my research available to the public on my website. And now I have made my explorations, photographs, and research available in a printed book form. That feels good.