Jazz in Print - Three Self-Publishing Success Stories

Three accomplished jazz authors share their journeys from traditional publishing to successful independent careers. Join host Lawrence Peryer as Debbie Burke, Steve Cerra, and Rick Mitchell reveal the tools, economics, and creative freedom they've found in self-publishing. Learn how these writers are reshaping the jazz book world by taking control of their work - from manuscript to marketing. 

Whether you are a jazz enthusiast or an aspiring author, this conversation offers valuable insights into turning passion projects into world-class publishing ventures.

Topics include: creative control vs. traditional publishing, royalty structures, marketing strategies, production challenges, and the advantages of independence in specialized fields of writing.

April is Jazz Appreciation Month the JJA Is honoring Jazz Heroes, the "activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz," in 27 localities across America, including US cities, the San Diego-Tijuana Borderland, and Guelph Canada. More information on Jazz Heroes -- and the annual JJA Jazz Awards -- at our website JJAJazzAwards.org. 

Don’t miss new episodes of The Buzz. Make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

For more from the Jazz Journalists Association, go to JJANews.org.

Transcript

Lawrence: Debbie, I'd like to start with you. If you could tell me a little bit about your journey to self-publishing and whether it was something born of necessity or desire. If you could provide a little bit of context about how you chose that path.

Debbie Burke: Sure. Thanks for asking. When I started writing my first book, I was living up in the Poconos and I was sax for a community jazz band for East Stroudsburg University. I started to realize that Phil Woods lived up there, Bob Dorough, and a whole host of other jazzers who lived in the Poconos, a straight shot to New York City. I thought, someone must have written a book about the jazz scene here—and nobody had. I have a journalism background in PR, advertising, marketing, and editorial, so I decided I would be the one to write that book. I think a lot of authors probably come to their first book by saying, "There's gotta be a book about this. Oh, no? Then I'll do it."

I just wanted to get the book out there, and this was 2011, so self-publishing wasn't in its full bloom yet. I went with a vanity publisher—God forbid—but they were out there, and they charge you—it's pay to play. I waited till they had some kind of introductory offer at half price. So for $700, they'll make you legit, they'll put you up on Amazon, they'll give you your ISBN, Library of Congress, all that kind of stuff. The unboxing of your first ever book is so exciting, and to see it up there on Amazon. But there were so many problems in the process.

The second book I pitched traditionally. And I did get picked up, but she was looking to fill a hole and had no idea really what good writing was. My writing was good, but there was no kind of vetting process or anything like that. I also found a lot of pitfalls along the way and things that were inefficient and that I didn't care for. Plus, you don't get the lion's share of the royalties. That never happens when you are with another publisher.

So the first book was The Poconos and B Flat. I interviewed Phil Woods at his home as he was writing on Finale or whatever he was doing. I made sure that they were okay with how they came across in the book. By my second book when I was picked up by a small publisher, there were some pitfalls along the way, and I decided—this was 2014—I was going to teach myself self-publishing. Although the learning curve is steep and just full of twists and turns, nothing was written down to formalize the process. After having gone through all that, I'm like, never again. The full creative control you have—it's not looked on as a second-class citizen anymore. There's plenty of extremely respectable literature out there, both fiction and nonfiction, and I'm proud to be an indie author.

Lawrence: That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Steve, can I ask you to answer the same question? Tell us a little bit about your journey to self-publishing.

Steve Cerra: Sure. I went the traditional route initially with a focus on Jerry Mulligan. I felt that there were a couple of things out there on him. Citi had a book based on his recordings. Stan Sanford Josephson had put one out, but I didn't really feel there was a definitive study of Mulligan available.

That was my path. And I really ran into a wall with that because I don't have a background in theory and harmony, and it's pretty difficult to write about Jerry Mulligan talking about his unique skills as a composer and arranger. Long story short, I decided to put together an anthology. If I couldn't describe his skills, maybe I could find others who could—Jeff Sultan, Bill Kirchner—all of whom were very welcoming and very helpful. Where to go with all this? I reached out to Gary Giddens, who formed an introduction for me with Oxford University Press. A wonderful woman, Laura Lee Yuri, was very welcoming and very helpful. She took a look at a prologue and an introduction that I sent and then pushed back on the issue, which was copyright permissions. She said, "We're gonna have to deal with this head on because the legal staff—if you don't have permission to use these, it's gonna be very difficult for us to publish."

She sent me a copy of their Duke Ellington anthology by Mark Tucker. She said, "Here's a roadmap. Take a look at it, see how it works for you." The stumbling block was the copyright permissions. She loved the idea. She loved the initial draft and the materials. I was about 60% into okays at that time. But the issue was gonna be a lot of non-existent publishing houses.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Steve Cerra: A lot of non-existent authors. I reached around 70% and she said, "I'm really leery about moving forward." That's when I looked into self-publishing. The other thing was when I sent the materials to Laura Lee, she did her job, but it was gonna be more about Laura Lee's approach to the book than mine. I pushed back a bit. She pushed back a lot, and all of a sudden I'm writing Laura Lee's book and not mine, let alone the issue.

Anyway, I went to a copyright attorney and he said, "Why don't we do this? Publish the ones that you don't have permission for and use a disclaimer. If somebody challenges you, you can do one of two things. You can either offer a fee or basically select it out." Self-publishing offers you that flexibility. You can go back and resubmit the book and subtract anything that's controversial, but you could also add articles that you newly discovered along the way.

The great thing about it is I've been writing a blog since 2008, and I had a lot of the articles formatted in Google Docs, which also supports the blogging platform that I use, which is blogger.com. So it was really easy to transition and manipulate the documents into a final version of a book. The other thing that was easy was Kindle Direct Publishing. The step-by-step procedures that they provide make it almost impossible not to be a successful self-publisher. And I should know because I tried really hard not to be. So a lot of guidance. And finally October 2023, there we go. Jerry Mulligan: Writings on a Jazz Original got published, and I've published six more since October 2023: one on Bill Evans, one on Stan Kenton, one on Brubeck, and three on Jazz West Coast.

Lawrence: Incredible.

Steve Cerra: Because the Kindle Direct Publishing is just such a breeze to use—all sorts of tutorials, all sorts of examples, lots of videos. I have a couple of sons who are real techies, so I can get that kind of assistance in a moment's notice, but usually, I don't have to get off of the Amazon self-publishing platform.

It's all there. So I'm like a kid in a toy store. I'm thrilled having discovered it. The other thing about it is the finances. The revenues—Amazon takes a bite. Let's say $20, they're gonna take $10. They're gonna charge you $5 for the cost of publishing the book. But I get 25% royalties, sometimes 30% of the Kindle ebook. I get 70% of that royalty. The book's $9.99, so 70% of $9.99, but it's real.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Steve Cerra: They dump it in my bank account every month, no fuss. And they even send me a tax form for 1099 reporting at the end of the year.

Lawrence: Would you do me a favor and contrast the royalties to what you would've gotten through a traditional house?

Steve Cerra: Oh gosh. I brought this up with—I've done a lot of work with University of North Texas reviewing books for them, working as an editorial assistant, so I talked to them about royalties. The percentage would've been something like—I don't know, the first 100, 150 books would've been like 12%. Maybe the next 300 books moves up to 13.8%. It's a pittance compared to what Kindle Direct Publishing offers. It is a bite when you look at it, but I'm not doing anything. I'm just submitting texts. They take it from there. They do all the heavy lifting in terms of the publishing and whatnot.

It's publishing on demand. In terms of inventory risk, I can buy up to a thousand author copies at cost. So I keep some around. I go to clubs every once in a while or concerts, have a little table, share a table with someone. I do concerts here at the house. I have a quartet I play drums in. We feature vocalists here, and my wife, bless her soul, has the books at the gate where she collects the fees and has a little sign that says "Steve will autograph these for you."

Lawrence: Beautiful.

Steve Cerra: It is another way of making it available. Anyhow, I'm thrilled. I'm obviously enthusiastic about self-publishing, and I'm glad there's that alternative.

Incidentally, postscript, I've never had a challenge yet on copyright issues.

Lawrence: Fascinating.

Steve Cerra: If anything, I've had people come to me after the fact who do own copyright and say, "Oh, I'm so happy to see this article in print. Thank you."

Lawrence: Beautiful. Thank you for that. Rick, how about you? Do you have two cents there to weigh in on what your path's been?

Rick Mitchell: Sure. First, I published two previous books with, quote-unquote, legitimate publishers. The first one—I was still the music critic at the Houston Chronicle. I interviewed Garth Brooks very early in his career multiple times. And I pitched an agent on a very different book. She came back, and in trying to get her to be my agent, I sent her a couple of those interviews, and she came back with an offer from Simon and Schuster for me to do an unauthorized biography on Garth Brooks. And I said, "This is not the book I wanna write." And she said, "Let's make some money and then you can write the book that you wanna write." I got a very nice advance. And the book wound up selling, I don't know, about 40,000 copies worldwide. But I never saw any royalties because I got a nice advance.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick Mitchell: The second book, which was closer to the book that I'd originally wanted to write—in the course of my job at the Chronicle, I had interviewed a lot of Texas Western swing musicians who'd played with Bob Wills and then later honky-tonk musicians. And so the book was called The True Story of Texas Honky-Tonk. It was published by University of Texas Press. I got a very minimal advance, but up until a couple of years ago, I was still getting royalties. That book sold probably five or 6,000 copies. It went to a second printing, which I guess is fairly unusual for a college press.

But for this book, Jazz in the New Millennium, the book collects interviews that I've done with prominent jazz musicians over the last 25 years. The first edition was published in 2014. I did the interviews for a nonprofit arts organization that presents jazz concerts in Houston called Da Camera of Houston. And basically they partnered with me on the costs for self-publishing, and we did a press run of 500, and I reached a break-even point. I guess not, except for the fact that I needed to set up a website to sell the book. I think if you count the website costs into the sales, then I'm not really quite at break-even.

I have about 60 out of that 500 left. I gave about 60 away as promos. We just decided this year to do a second revised edition of that book with the new interviews that I've done in the last 10 years. Some of those interviews are with artists who were in the first book, and I substitute the later interview for the first interview. Others were with artists who were not included in the first book, so there are now 84 artists in this new edition. It is a pretty hefty book. Again, I partnered with Da Camera, and they bought some books in order to use as premiums for their concert series subscription premiums. That gives me a good running start on getting to break-even. There is a relatively narrow profit margin in the budget, and I'm over half of the way there to getting there. And the book's only been out a couple of months, so I guess that's not too bad.

It's a bit disheartening in some cases when you get turned down by a bookstore because you would be bringing it to them yourself rather than them ordering it from Ingram or somewhere.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick Mitchell: I could have marketed this book to a college publisher probably. I don't think Simon and Schuster would take it. Somebody once told me books on jazz sell 5,000 copies at the most. It doesn't matter who it is.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick Mitchell: I have no idea if that's true or not, but if that was the case, then I probably wasn't going to make much money going that route either. This way, I didn't do this to make a bunch of money, but I also didn't do it to lose a bunch of money.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick Mitchell: I'm about where I expected to be, and I have no second thoughts. I'm actually really proud of how the book turned out. It looks good and I can answer some of these other questions that you've proposed as we go through.

Lawrence: Your experience seems to be a little bit different from our other two guests in that you are—correct me if I'm wrong—you're more going direct to consumer with some stock. You've taken some risk on, whereas I think Debbie and Steve are saying they're more in the print-on-demand leveraging Amazon realm.

Is that a fair bifurcation?

Rick Mitchell: It is.

Lawrence: Okay.

Rick Mitchell: I printed 500 for the first edition and the revised edition. The print run was 500. You had asked about the costs. My total expenses right now are almost exactly at $10,000. And of that, about $6,000 was the printing and mailing costs. And about $4,000 was the layout and design. Like I said, I'm within budget of where I expected to be. One thing too—I was paid for all of these interviews at the time I did them.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick Mitchell: So if I make more money off of it, great, but I've already been paid for my writing basically.

Lawrence: I also think there's an element that Steve talked about, which is now your work's gathered—not well, obviously it's not a comprehensive view of everything you've ever done, but your work is now in one place and it's not scattered to the four winds, the way some of the writers that Steve is—he's salvaging a lot of people or bringing a lot of stuff that was otherwise lost.

And especially now in this era of physical publications going away, digital being so ephemeral. So I think it's lovely just in that regard as a monument to a life's work. But Debbie, could you talk a little bit about when you decide to embark on your own to be a self-published writer? I would think you have to learn a lot about a lot of things other than just writing.

Steve talked about leveraging the tools that are available. Rick talked a little bit about having to hire a designer. Curious if you could talk about what it's like to put on the hat that's like the CEO, editor-in-chief, and publisher of the publishing house. What parts of that were the most difficult and did you find any that you actually liked doing?

Debbie Burke: I started a company in the middle of the pandemic, Queen Esther Publishing. I'm a professional editor. That's not to say that I have this arrogance about—I don't make errors. My husband will be sure to find one in each book. But I do work for University Press of Mississippi and other, a lot of other publishers. That's one way to save money, although it really does help to get another set of eyes, even if it's someone else assisting you. And I love the writing process. I love the gathering up of my sources. I don't necessarily follow an outline like you do when you have a publisher. When you self-publish, you could pants it, you could wing it. But at some point, you have to have some kind of architecture inside the book that's gonna keep it afloat.

The editing process—I took care of that. The design work—I'm also a photographer, so I know something. I do not bring my own cover to the table, but I know something about design. I know what I like.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Debbie Burke: And I had found this collage artist on Instagram and started following him. And he'd never thought about doing book covers, but he had this kind of vibe, like the Blue Note LPs. And—

Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Burke: He did my covers for my series, Jazz Jams, and this kind of chunky, rough font—

Lawrence: Yeah.

Debbie Burke: Stuff like that.

Lawrence: Mid-century look. Yeah.

Debbie Burke: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love mid-century anything. That's an expenditure you take on as a self-published author, but it was well worth it. Could I have a friend throw something together in Photoshop? Yeah, I could, but who wants that? One of the things about self-publishing is that some of it does look like schlock because people don't go to real pros.

And I know my limitations. I'm not a graphic designer, so I sought that out. His name is Charlie Coney, and he's done almost all my covers. Another thing is the interior formatting, which you can pay somebody for. But I learned it myself. It's not this gorgeous, lush interior with drop caps, but it's highly functional and it reads fine. So that's another decision as far as expenditures. When you're a self-published author, are you going to hire out for a formatter or are you gonna DIY it?

Lawrence: Are there one of your books that you've worked on that you, when you hold it and you flip through it, you say, "You know what? I think I'm getting better." Or "I've gotten it. This one has the look and feel"—content aside.

Are you feeling like you're getting better each time?

Debbie Burke: Yeah, one thing is that KDP has this previewer function so that you could see how you could flip through the pages virtually, and you can see if, like you hit a line break in the wrong part and you have three blank pages in a row, or something like that. So when I don't get kicked back with the errors, that tells me that, okay, I'm starting to get the hang of this formatting business.

Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. Steve, tell me a little bit about print-on-demand versus Rick's approach as it relates to your work. Something that strikes me in what you told us and just looking through your bibliography, is that self-publishing seems to have allowed you to be much more prolific than a relationship with a house would've allowed you to do.

Or even as an independent author pitching constantly—your body of work grew very quickly. And I'm curious, do you think about the inventory risk world at all? Outside of the publisher or the author copies you're allowed to buy through Amazon, do you see a need to take on risk to fill other distribution channels or your own direct-to-consumer channels?

How do you think about inventory risk? Or do you?

Steve Cerra: I don't. To me, the final product was the point of the whole thing. Let's see, I've got seven books out since October 2023, I've sold 442. I'm thrilled. I would've been happy to sell two. I get excited about the process of putting it all together. I'm writing about my heroes. These are people who have put so much joy and so much pleasure in my life over the years. Being able to get this together and get a focal point, bring it all together—and then, the hero, I've got heroes within the heroes—Ira Gitler, Nat Hentoff—all of these people have brought so much information and knowledge into my life about the subject of jazz.

And when I started my blog in 2008, I put up on the banner that this wasn't just about Steve Cerra's blog. It was about all the other jazz writers writing about jazz topics that I've known over the years. So the focal point is not so much on being a successful writer of books, the distribution aspects and whatnot, although having the blog certainly helps. If you go to my blog and look on the sidebar, all the books are there and all of the tables of contents are there. So Lawrence, if you're considering the three Jazz West Coast volumes, you can check out each one of those and look at the chapter headings and make a buying decision. And in terms of the actual buying, my name in a search box in Amazon—the books come up. What's not to like about this? It's so easy.

Having said that, Debbie talked about graphic design. I do have a friend who's very good at it, but he's busy. I can't really afford his fee. He gave me the Mulligan as a freebie, but I've since learned how to be a graphic designer. The other six books—I've created the covers for them. So that's another challenge and another aspect of this that's fun. It also helps to have a very understanding wife, because I spend an awful lot of time putting all aspects of this together. I've drifted from your initial question, but there's only one approach right now, and that's self-publishing. And it's incumbent upon me to become as good as I can be to deal with all facets of it. That's another aspect of the challenge that I like. No disrespect to the professional commercial publishing houses and the academic publishing houses. Where would we be without Sheldon Meyer? And Oxford University Press, they do a wonderful job. University of North Texas. Michigan has a great series out, a few nice things from Mississippi. So they do what they do. I do what I do.

Lawrence: Yeah. Rick, something that I feel like we haven't really talked about enough yet is marketing. My sense is that again, because you're going a bit more direct to consumer, more marketing falls on you, right? I don't mean to say the other two guests don't have to do anything, but it's a different challenge. If they start to get traction on Amazon, something magically I think happens and there's an algorithm and recommendations and how you game that.

I think it might be out of the scope of this conversation, but as someone who's taken on more of the retailer's burden, I'm curious how you think about marketing. Getting the book and the box of books to your house is one thing. Getting them to the readers is quite different.

Rick Mitchell: Glad you asked, and first I hired a jazz publicist named Jim Eigo, who has a national mailing list. And he sent out a news release with a press release that I drafted. Has it paid off dollar for dollar? No, not yet, and it probably never will, but I am getting some reviews.

Actually, yesterday I just got an email with a review from a jazz magazine in Poland, and it had Polish alphabet, which of course, I couldn't read. I did figure out how to translate it, and the review was partly from my press release that I wrote, but they did say nice things about it. What I found that in terms of marketing—events are necessary. I did a book signing in Houston at a Terri Lyne Carrington concert, before the concert. She's in the book, and I did a book signing at a record store here in Portland where I live. If 20 or 30 people walk up to you and 12 of them buy the book, that's pretty good actually. And it certainly makes it easier when you can sell 12 at a time instead of one at a time off my website.

The other thing that I'm hoping—I feel like my book would be useful in college and high school jazz programs. It's got 84 interviews of living jazz musicians. A few of them have died since I did the interview, but history books tend to focus on the first 50 years or so of jazz history from the 1920s up to the seventies, maybe. There've been a few books—a couple recently since I did the first edition—on jazz in the 21st century. But those books are more the writer analyzing. In my book, what I wanted was to give the musicians a chance to speak for themselves. Although I'm steering the narrative by my questions.

I feel like this book could be very helpful in jazz programs. In Houston, I sold a class set of books to Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, which six of the artists in my book graduated from—Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Eric Harland. It's remarkable that one high school has produced this number of national caliber musicians. So if I can get a couple of more opportunities such as that at college jazz programs—but so far I haven't. I reached out to the ones I know like here in Portland, no success yet, and I may not. Maybe I'm overly estimating the importance of what I've got here. I don't know. But that's one thing.

But as overall marketing, I've done radio interviews. I'm on the radio and I'm not allowed to talk about my own book when I'm the host, but I can be a guest on somebody else's show. And I've done that a bunch of times. But again, the breakthrough that I'm looking for is really with jazz educators.

Lawrence: Yeah, I would imagine if you could tap into university libraries, if you could get 10% of them to each buy a copy, you're cooking with gas.

Rick Mitchell: I just mailed a book yesterday to a bookstore in San Francisco called Bird and Beckett, which is a great name for a bookstore. It costs me $5 to mail the book, so I'm actually not really making any money, but I am happy to be in a bookstore called Bird and Beckett. I think that's pretty cool.

Lawrence: Debbie, I wonder, could you talk to me a little bit about the role of marketing and what you do? Do you take it upon yourself? Do you cultivate a mailing list? Are you a social media person? Do you hire a publicist or are you letting Amazon's algorithm do all the work?

Debbie Burke: I do what Steve has done when possible. Before I really got going with my current editing business, I think being out in the community and doing events is the best way, the meet and greet, just schmoozing and stuff to meet people. Especially when I lived in northeast PA—the Celebration of the Arts festival, which is always around Labor Day-ish—a weekend of just wall-to-wall jazz, three stages and so on. So those are opportunities that I've tried to avail myself of, as well as book fairs like in Decatur, Georgia. That's a really nice book fair.

Marketing is a challenge, and when you have other things going on—some of us have works in progress. We're writing new books now and doing research for that. I'm editing and I'm also involved in photography. So marketing is hard to devote yourself to. Don't forget, there's a cost involved in traveling to these fairs, to these venues—your gas, your time, the hotel, food, and all that kind of stuff.

I also wanted to say that I do have like a built-in ambassadorship because my series, Tasty Jazz Jams—like Rick, I do that kind of Q&A with artists, and I have, over the three books—volumes one, two, and three—maybe 150 artists. It's a Q&A, and it's largely quotes from them about various topics—about theory, about their career, all kinds of stuff. And so when I tell them the book is out, sometimes they ask for a copy, and sometimes they offer to buy one, which is great. But they also—I also ask them to share, spread the word and say, "Hey, I'm in this book. Debbie Burke wrote it, my interview's been published in her book." So I use these people as brand ambassadors who go out and hopefully share the link and so on.

Honestly, quite honestly, this is not something many of us do to make the big bucks. It's very hard and you have to work very hard to be out in the community and finding all these kinds of synergies to sell your books. I do it because I have to. It's a compulsion inside, to write about jazz, to meet new jazz people and write about your experiences.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Debbie Burke: That's the primary thing.

Lawrence: Before I turn to Steve, Debbie, I wanted to ask you one other question. Creative people are notoriously bad at valuing their own work. And I'm curious how you determine pricing. Is that something that Amazon does for you? Do they give you guidelines? How do you decide what your retail price is going to be?

Debbie Burke: When you are uploading and you are finalizing all your metadata, they say, there's a price page. "What do you want to charge for this?" And they give you a minimum based on their production costs of how—whether you have a color interior, how many pages you have, what is the weight of your book.

So they'll tell you the minimum must be $14.99, for example. So you can charge anything from there on up. I've been very conservative with how I price my books. I have now 12 books that I've written up there. In the beginning, I was timid, and it's true. Of course, we value all work, but then, "Oh, no one's ever gonna pay that." And then at some point, you get real, you put on your big-boy pants and you say, "Hey, I did a lot of work for this. I did a lot of research. I worked really hard to polish this up and make sure it's a good read." So I've been—I don't like to go over $20. The $18.99, $19.99, that's the zone I'm comfortable in for paperbacks.

Lawrence: Yeah, could I ask you for your perspective on that, Steve? How do you think about pricing?

Steve Cerra: When you bring the book up on Amazon, Kindle Direct Publishing, it will ask you about the paper size, the font, that sort of thing. And then when you're done with all of that, a cost number comes up. It will tell you $7.89 cents. That's cost of actually producing the book. Then you can go from there. They're gonna take that and then they're also gonna take a profit margin.

That wasn't the issue with me. What makes me upset is how expensive jazz books are. I wanted to make my books very affordable. I got something back in the process, terrific. So I decided that I was gonna aim for 25 bucks for the paperback, and then the ebook, Kindle, they recommend 10 bucks, $9.99 up to $12.99. All of my eBooks are $9.99. This was a gift to the jazz community. It was a gift to the people that I'm representing in the books, and I didn't want it to be a necessarily a commercial benefit to me.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Steve Cerra: Other people could certainly approach it differently. With a $7.89 or $7.99 cost factor, you could probably charge $35, $40 bucks and still be fairly represented price-wise in the marketplace, but that's not the attitude I had or the approach I had.

I wanted to add one element—distribution—that I don't know if it's been brought up yet, but I use social media as a way of gaining attention for the books. There is a Bill Evans page on Facebook. I joined it, been accepted by the administrator, and I've represented the book there. And I would say that about 80% of my Bill Evans sales have come from that page. There is a Stan Kenton Appreciation Society on Facebook. Again, there's a Jazz West Coast chat group that is, I think, responsible for just about all of my Jazz West Coast sales. I'm not that conversant with X or Instagram or whatnot, but I found Facebook to be very useful in terms of getting the word out.

And I would imagine those who are more conversant with social media, that's another path.

Lawrence: Do you have any sense off the top of your head what the split is between physical and ebook sales across your catalog?

Steve Cerra: Yeah, I looked at it. It's 60/40, ebook to paperback.

Lawrence: Ah.

Steve Cerra: A little analysis—age grouping has something to do with this. Many jazz fans who would appreciate the books I'm writing are a little older, and using tablets and digital devices is a little easier on the eyes. Be careful when you format for the ebook, you can't just send a PDF file in or a Word document in. I mean, it will transfer, but then you can't manipulate the document, jump ahead. It's not tabbed as well. You can't enlarge the font. So you need to use a format that's suitable for electronic publishing.

I didn't know that. In the Mulligan book initially, I put it out on a PDF basis, and I had people writing who had bought it as an ebook saying, "Can't enlarge the font," which was self-defeating because this particular gentleman who wrote the note was 85 years old and really had some vision issues. I searched for an answer and found that you needed to use a format that's expressly developed for ePublishing.

Lawrence: Gotcha.

Steve Cerra: This is really a live-and-learn process.

Lawrence: Yeah, it sounds like it. Yeah. Before I get to the last theme I wanna explore with you all, I would love to hear your answer to that question as well. Debbie, do you have a feel for the split between physical and digital in your catalog?

Debbie Burke: That's a great question. I think it's about 50/50.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Debbie Burke: I think there are—I thought Steve was going in a different direction when he was talking about the older people with older eyes as we get older. I think that as a boomer, I like handling a physical book. I do everything online. I edit online. I'm on social media platforms, but when I go to bed early to read a book, I'm happy to turn actual pages. It was my theory that, for people who like jazz—and there are a lot of us who aren't 50-plus—

Lawrence: Easy.

Debbie Burke: That—

Lawrence: Easy there.

Steve Cerra: You.

Debbie Burke: Yeah, sure. That go for the print book. Yeah, I'd say mine is probably split around 50/50.

Rick Mitchell: I can weigh in here on this before you go to the next question, just very quick.

Lawrence: Please.

Rick Mitchell: I did an ebook with my first edition and marketed it through Amazon, and it sold all of 10 copies. I decided not to do it this time. I've been going back and forth on whether to go on Amazon at all for the hard copy book. If I understand the math correctly, I lose money from the get-go selling it through Amazon. So I've been trying to use social media, my Facebook page, et cetera, to drive traffic to my website. But I think I may have to go to Amazon at some point just in the attempt to get to break-even. The cost of my book is $30, $29.95, but cost per book to get it done was $20.

So $30 is about as inexpensive as I could go.

Lawrence: Yeah.

Rick Mitchell: And make any money.

Lawrence: Yeah. When I was thinking about that question, I was assuming in your world, it was a little different because you could build it up from a cost-plus point of view, whereas for our other two panelists, it's a little bit more of a moving target because they're working so much in a pure digital realm.

Rick Mitchell: I would've preferred to have been able to sell it for at least $5 less, but I just couldn't make it work economically. I wanna amplify what both Steve and Debbie have said—this is a labor of love. I'm not so much in love with my own writing. I'm in love with this music. The writing is a skill that I have, but the music is my passion. And to be able to share that with people—every chapter has a selected discography of about four to six recordings that are familiar favorites from my record collection for the most part.

But also in the back, I did playlists for each of the artists, going back through those playlists—all 21st-century recordings, post-2000 recordings. It was just—to call that work—to go back and sit there and listen to this beautiful music? That's not work.

Lawrence: Beautiful.

Rick Mitchell: Working out the formats and all that stuff—I'm pretty low-tech. Like Steve said, fortunately I have some younger members within my extended family that were able to help me out in places, like tracking down some photos online and getting all that stuff organized.

Oh, one other thing—I have found the Jazz Journalist Association website and their Facebook page, which is members only, useful in terms of promoting the book.

Lawrence: Wonderful. Wonderful. Debbie, now that you've built a catalog and you've built the skills, is there something you'd like to see improved or changed or enhanced to make the self-publishing experience easier, better, more rewarding?

Debbie Burke: Not about self-publishing, but as far as jazz as a subject matter—and I've written three novels about jazz as well, so I have fiction and nonfiction—I still find that when I'm at a book fair or at a book signing in a bookstore or whatever, there are people who are like, "Oh, jazz."

I still feel that there's this hands-off, elitist, whatever—people that, you know. I don't know if I—I say these are interviews. These are just about how people were inspired to write the music that they wrote and the path to fame for some of them, all about tuning or tempos or whatever, those kind of things. And people—I think there's still this perception that it's not an accessible art form, that there is fear and trepidation, and I just don't know how you combat that.

I know that, as was already said, the high schools have a lot of up-and-coming musicians—these programs are still vibrant and producing the feeder into professional life as a musician, but there's still some kind of perception out there. Not only which books are about jazz—people will look at the other books and just say, "Oh, that's nice" when they see the jazz ones, and I don't know how to bridge that gap and get people to relax a little bit about it.

Lawrence: That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I think there's a whole other conversation that we could have around that topic. Steve, how about you? You seem to be so happy and bullish on self-publishing. I wonder, do you have any wishes or desires or complaints?

Steve Cerra: No, the other way around. I can't wait to bring the next one up. When I finally get to the template, it's a thrill manipulating the information. I've been a little reluctant on graphics, because I have a friend who licenses jazz photographs, and I've wanted to enhance the books because you can do all of that very easily in the self-publishing format, but that's a whole different ballgame in terms of copyright violations.

So it's more that self-publishing is there—it's me learning to use it more effectively and better. I don't have any issues with the templates. The limitations are on my end.

And so what it does is it frees me—I don't know if "creative" is the right word to use for what I'm doing, but creatively, in terms of the content, it frees me to just focus on that. I don't have to worry about the mechanics. So I'm very grateful that's all out there. It's all for the music and that's the point. The music and its makers—they need to be celebrated, and this is my way of doing it.

Lawrence: That's beautiful, and the three of you sharing your knowledge and your experience with the Jazz Journalism Association members is invaluable and it's such a service. So thank you for making time. Thank you for your work. I very much appreciate it.

Thank you.