Shot Gun Publishing

by Matt Briggs, Free Press Contributor

oward the end of December last year a heavy brown envelope arrived from Northern Ireland decorated with gold foil postal stamps of angels under blue halos. I found a contract attached to a boiler-plate letter addressed to "Dear Author."

Domhan Books Contract - First English Language Paperback Edition. This agreement between Domhan Books and the Author in regards to the name and the name of the manuscript "Personal Archaeology" by Matt Brigs with original cover by S. McNally shall be considered legal and binding in all countries.

I had never heard of Domhan Book. My name is Matt Briggs and Personal Archaeology was the name of a manuscript I had been shuffling around my desk for almost five years. I had no idea how they found my manuscript, although the name S. McNally was familiar. I had contacted Siobhan McNally, a British agent at Island Literary Agency, almost a year before. If this was the same agent, I thought, it odd that she hadn't contacted me about a publishing company's interest in the book.

To test the book's ISBN, I went to Barnesandnoble.com. I scored a hit. My novel had been published in November 1998, a month before Domhan Books sent me the contract. I imagined in a moment of delirium as I looked at the flickering title of my book that copies filled Barnes & Noble worldwide. I called the University District store to see if they stocked the book. "Who is the author?" they asked. "Matt Briggs," I said. "We can order it," they said. I called Elliott Bay Bookstore; they could special order the book. I called my local Magnolia Bookstore; they could have a copy in her store by the end of the week.

A confusing series of corporate mergers and new technology had propelled Domhan Book's products, from virtual books distributed from the web to printed books stocking the shelves of the planet's two largest bookstores. The agent I had originally contacted, after agreeing to represent a number of writers, found conventional publishers unresponsive, so she bought an existing publishing company named Domhan Books. She took her catalog of books to LightningPrint, a Memphis company that produces books-on-demand. LightningPrint operates a press that generates finished books in just under three minutes from digital files - a process that promises to streamline book production with the precision McDonald's applies to sandwiches. Ingram, North America's largest book distributor, bought LightningPrint. Barnes & Noble, in turn, bought Ingram, and according to S. McNally, Barnes & Noble asked Ingram to make all of the Lightingprint titles under consideration available by Christmas 1998. Thus Domhan Book's entire catalog went from digital manuscript to perfect bound books.

I ordered my book from Barnesandnoble.com. After work the next day, I found my paperback novel shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard stuck in a FedEx box on my front porch. My book, which I had sent into cyberspace many months before, returned bound with cover art that looked like a bad computer scan of a Hardy Boy's jacket.

Disturbing things had happened to my manuscript. The first chapter had been rewritten. In the description of my principal character, someone had added, "But he was certainly an interesting figure. Now that he had come out, I could see he was more powerful than I had at first imagined." New paragraphs appeared throughout the book as well as cuttings indicated by ellipses, as if my entire manuscript had been poorly quoted in someone's term paper.

I became angry about how haphazardly this had occurred. The mechanics of the situation worked so smoothly, but how poor is the publicity for a book if the author is not even aware the book has been published? Irate, I went to Barnesandnoble.com and posted a glowing review of my own book. As William Styron, author of Sophie's Choice, I posted, "Five Stars. Amazing First Novel. Simply, I was blown away."

S. McNally responded to my work almost a year previous to the contract arriving in the mail. I found her in an on-line database of literary agents that included the names of famous agents like Amy Tan's agent, Sandra Dijkstra. She liked the book and asked if I minded if she posted the book to her website while she looked for a conventional publisher.

I didn't hear anything else from the Island Literary Agency. I periodically checked on my book and it just sat there; the web site growing dustier and duster into the summer and then the site disappeared. I've posted dozens of things on the web and the collapse of a web site is just as silent as the disappearance of print magazines, however, instead of outdated copies, the web site leaves a trail of broken links.

I found a publisher for my book of short stories, The Remains of River Names, with Black Heron Press a publisher that published books I admired. I began yet another revision of Personal Archeology, now, with the energy of knowing it would have a chance of getting published. An occasional letter came back from an editor or agent. One agent said that while they liked my novel, publishers don't publish fiction anymore. This is the space I'm used to working in. I work on something until I like it, and send it out; much more often than not, it is like throwing a stone into the sea. I never hear anything again. This time, the sea threw the stone back.

I found S. McNally's web-site for Domhan Books and e-mailed her asking to remove the book from her web-site, to return all printed copies to me, and to pass along all financial information to me. She responded that she had added value to the book by printing it, by having it professionally edited and that she wouldn't return it to me, but that she would pull the book from her web-site.

When people saw that my book's publication wasn't a good thing, they asked me, are you going to sue? It hadn't occurred to me that I could do this. Sue? Suing implied that I had a valuable commodity instead of a wad of typescript I had been farting around with for five years. I had intellectual property and this agent turned publisher had published my book and taken my property.

I went to the legal clinic in the old Vance building in downtown Seattle run by the Washington State Lawyers for the Arts. I presented the documents and the situation to a lawyer; he adjusted his glasses and said, well, the situation was too complicated for him, as this involved copyright law. While yes she definitely didn't have any legal right to publish the work, as I had never signed a contract, or even seen a publishing contract for that matter; she could pose an argument, however weak, that she had the right to distribute the electronic copy from her web-site.

S. McNally did remove the work from her web-site and at the heart of the matter, I don't think she was attempting to exploit her authors. Really there was very little money to be made. I believe she was possessed by the possibility of the digital delivery system. As someone who works on web pages and publishes on the web, myself, I understand this urge for instant communication. Except books are not instant units of information. They take a long time to write. They take a long time to read.

"One final point," S. McNally wrote to me on New Year's Eve, "I would like to mention is not to waste people's time contacting them and asking them to represent your work if you have no intention of using their professional expertise. YOU contacted me, gave me info, and the bio, and so on, not the other way around, and my time, money, and effort could certainly have been better bestowed upon more grateful authors who are serious about getting published."

At most, I had asked her to represent my work, not to publish it. Certainly, I want the work to finally get into the world, but the end is for the work to be read rather than just published. Regardless, it is confounding that a book can escape so rapidly from the wordprocessor and into the bookstore.

Matt Briggs has a story in the upcoming Northwest Review. His first book of stories, The Remains of River Names, won the 1998 King County Arts Commission publication award and will published by Black Heron Press in August. He lives in Seattle.