Way back when… not long after college (1975), I put a book together. Not what you might expect from me, perhaps: it was a songbook.

You see, I was a folk-music enthusiast back in high-school (guitar/vocal, etc.) at the height of what was called the “Folk Revival” in the 60’s, — not the synthetic Peter, Paul, and Mary sort of thing, but the outpouring of recordings of traditional folk music from the Appalachians, Elizabethan ditties, the British Isles regional traditions, and eventually Russian choral, Bulgarian, etc., etc., I was quite enthusiastic about the Child Ballads, as well as some of the American peculiarities, such as the Sacred Harp repertoire. I’ve always been an expert book-or-record finder/buyer, and I managed to drag quite a load of books and records to college, where I continued my enthusiasms, and added further researches in the associated traditional literature and poetry. (In fact, I ended up taking dead languages and majoring in the sui-generis field of Comparative Mythology (I blame Tolkien… 🙂 ).

Since the Folk Revival was well and truly in the air at the time, and obscure recordings were finally becoming available, I found (or seduced) fellow traditional folk specialists who liked to sing into getting together with recreational multi-part singing, based on the old trad stuff. I had the records and the books, and the interest and musical background to professionalize what we were doing to the extent of writing out Xeroxed harmonized scores (if they couldn’t just wing a harmony or remember the words), descriptions of the historical background, and so forth.

This went on in and after college for a few years, before everyone I sang with had sort of moved away and drifted apart, as they do. I missed it, and then a light bulb went off — why didn’t I produce a real printed songbook of these arrangements with background annotations. I thought maybe I could find more singers, or music teachers might like it for school students, or… whatever.

So, in 1993, I did the background research and produced a clean and tarted up edition of my old annotated photocopied song book. This was entirely a scanned image (highly illustrated) book (the software for more modern stuff was less suitable than it is today.)

It sure looked fine (to me), but how was I going to print it, much less sell it? The term “Self-publishing” wasn’t exactly floating around at that point. I didn’t pretend even to myself that there would be an interested commercial publisher, so I turned to a printing house and commissioned 1000 copies (it was a great price break vs smaller quantities, and, hey, I was working good jobs in the tech industry by then.) Eventually I had this absolutely gigantic box in storage, handed out specimens to my old songsters and occasional others, and then the remains (still several hundred copies) just sat there, following my several moves around the country and ending up in storage each time, with the color on the cover softly fading with age as “old stock”.

And that brings me up to the present. I’ve been very busy — career, multiple relocations, etc.

Eventually, when self-publishing finally came on the scene in the early 2000s, I founded Perkunas Press for real and started writing and publishing fiction. That took all my publishing attention, and I let the songbooks… drift. After all, I still had hard copies galore, if I ever found some more singers, and there was no clear focus of interest to advertise to or sell thru.

But what to do, now? I’d really like to make these books available to the Home-School and related markets. They’re ideal for that audience, but I’ve never spent enough time trying to crack that. One of my college singing friends took enough copies from me to annually teach her music classroom, and they’re certainly suitable for that. Wouldn’t really want them to die with me — seems a shame, since there is a satisfied audience, however obscure.

I had a service slice one of the old-stock copies so that I have a set of page images in PDF form that can be used for reconstituting the songbook using modern tech.

My school teaching friend has a conventional publisher for her own trad-culture mystery books, and through her connection it may be possible to interest her publisher re: an associated rights purchase or reprint process. Or I could try to publish the PDF version and figure out how to make new hardcopies available via Amazon et alia, like any self-published book.

My brain’s not getting any younger, and even my current series writing project is going to be a challenge for me — not the writing, but when I go to revive my older books’ processes for self-publishing a work (it’s been several years since the last one, and those neurons are toast). This songbook project may be a bridge too far for me. At this point, I want my songbook to survive in the culture stream more than I care about its revenue potential, and a rights deal might be suitable. At the moment, no one can buy the book anywhere other than personal contact and old stock.

In retrospect, when services like Etsy (2005) came around, I could perhaps have set up to sell online, but I really had no idea how to advertise it. My google-fu hasn’t turned up a central distribution solution for the Home-School market.

Suggestions? Encouragement? Similar stories?