Interview Questions for Emmett Murray from Trafford Publishers

May, 2009

Books published with Trafford.

Come Reminisce with Me (2003)

In the Company of Friends (2008)

What convinced you to write your book?

I have been a lifelong joke and story teller. This trait worked well in my practice of family medicine in helping to put patients at ease. At home, both when I was growing up and when I had my own family, we have always repeated with relish many momentous stories of our family experiences. I used to tell our four kids little fables I would devise while waiting in the car at train crossings and during other delays.

So as I reached retirement, they began asking me more and more about what life had been like for me as I grew up and moved into adulthood. Fortunately, a memoirs class was offered at our retirement home of the Woodlands of Shell Point Village in Ft. Myers, FL. Polly and I enrolled and thus began a series of story e-mails to our family and circle of friends.

Our second son Robb first thought of publishing these as a collection and he started mailing me prototypes of a possible illustrated book, which he copied and bound at Kinko’s.

I saw an ad for Trafford in Elks Magazine and Robb and I began to investigate what would be involved to publish the book in a quality way. The final results have been wonderful.

What challenges did you face in getting the book published?

You must be determined. The work involved technically in editing and production can equal or exceed the work of authoring itself. Plus, there are unexpected technical requirements and challenges that can arise as you go along and you can’t let these discourage you.

For example, Robb set up our first book in Times New Roman font but that font tends to print with unsightly little ink traps in the gaps that are part of some letters’ shapes. So Trafford directed us to use the Times New font instead. Robb had to make a mass-replace change.

Exacting consistency is required if you use headers or have special pagination needs where some pages are skipped, etc. Trafford is going to print your book the way you finalize it, so the ball is in your court to produce a product that is worthy of your ideals and standards for a self-statement.

Patience will be a virtue. Be prepared for a gap of a month or two between when you have submitted everything and the first approval copy of your book comes back to you. This could be agonizing if you didn’t prepare yourself for it.

We factored this expected delay into our plans and even had a book launch program before we actually had a final book back. We handled this by taking requests on a wait list to have the Trafford book postcard mailed to customers. When our first book came out, orders poured in from all over the country as a result of the postcards.

Stay committed to your goal. There can be unexpected disappointments, so your determination to finish the job and to “keep the main thing the main thing” (getting the book safely to market) is paramount. As our second book was being finished at Trafford, we put a month’s considerable time and effort into contacting thousands of potential buyers and linking them to a page Trafford had sent us that would notify them all via an e-mail announcement when the book was ready to order. We scoured many alumni and organization membership lists and had word of mouth reports that hundreds of readers were signing up on the page.

But by the time the book came out, Trafford had had an issue that someone had abused the service in one customer’s case, jamming in unsolicited e-mail addresses en masse so that many people who had not actually opted in personally got the book alert. Complaints were made to Yahoo Mail, etc., and so to err on the side of caution, Trafford closed down the e-mail notification service altogether. We were crestfallen, not to mention exhausted from our promotional efforts that were now coming to naught. Rather than getting stuck and making this an issue, despite our frustration we decided to accept the company’s verdict, since it was handed down to protect the company itself from getting an undeserved reputation as a spam hub.

How was Trafford able to help you?

Technical Help -- The folks in the print department were helpful technically in reaching back to meet us halfway in the preparation of manuscript files and in being sure that files were uploaded properly, etc.

Customer Advocacy -- When we had the crisis of losing our expected promotional e-mail service, our rep took our case up as far as she could, and confirmed more than once that we could not have e-mails sent out.

She definitely took the trouble to hear out our complaints and carefully confirmed that we could not have those e-mails go out after all. We felt that Trafford took the trouble to hear us out on our problems and objections and that they had a simple and honest business disagreement with us as to what needed to happen. We decided that we would accept their decision, since nothing had been done to thwart our efforts intentionally. Sometimes accidents happen.

Flexibility -- Our reps were flexible with us when we wanted to submit changes beyond original expectation and as a result our second book in particular came out looking just as we wanted.

Sensitivity -- Publishing a book is an emotionally important project and the Trafford staff seems to be sensitive to that fact. A customer can feel a sense of risk or threat to the project at any time and Trafford staff reassured us throughout our two publishing cycles.

What were your expectations when you first decided to publish with Trafford?

We thought that the process overall might take six months or a year. We wanted the convenience of letting the public order from Trafford, Amazon, etc., so none of us would have to turn into a personal book-mailing service.

What was your experience with the process at Trafford?

The publishing experience was a “learning and growing” endeavor. As much as anyone might want to offer a truly turn-key publishing service, authorship itself has twists and turns that make such a thing difficult or impossible for a publisher to deliver unilaterally. This is why Trafford has reps who work with the authors to dovetail everything together.

What are the effects of your success?

FRIENDS: The best result has been the many new and renewed friendship that have come about, all having in common a love for the Midwest and a fondness for the old times. We put contact information for Polly and me into the books and hundreds of readers have obliged whether by e-mail, postal mail or phone.

MOTIVATING EXAMPLE: We got copies out to some of the celebrities from Lima, our home town, one of whom is Phyllis Diller. She wrote me thanking me many times over for having written my first autobiographical book. The next year, she came out with her own autobiography.

We think that we may have had an influence at the right time.

Other members of my memoirs class have considered carrying their own stories to new levels of refinement, too.

LEGACY: My stories were originally repeated out loud many, many times over a period of decades. The reception was almost always great. That is why I like to see that the tales I have most loved to tell have been able to extend far beyond me in a pass-on-able form. Phrases from the books now retrieve on Google, so there is no telling where an idea or name may cross-pollinate something else to the good later on. My books are in a number of libraries, too.

DEMAND: Not a day goes by but someone doesn’t say to me, “What about your next book? Are you writing Book III?”

I am happy to say that I am writing that book. No promises as to delivery date but there are many, many stories from my years as a general practitioner in medicine that really deserve to be memorialized. I practiced during a Golden Age of medicine and I want some of the virtues of what was common practice at that time to be named, lauded, remembered and, I hope, reinvigorated into action. The kind of medicine we used to practice deserves to be remembered in detail, recognized for what it offered, and be available for thought and deliberation at the touch of a book.

RECOGNITION: At our book introduction program, the local Allen County Museum in Lima, Ohio had a standing room only crowd of over 200 (the highest in its history). Dozens had to be turned away with only a handout! The museum subsequently named me “The Mark Twain of Lima”:

Feature stories about the books and me have come out in our Shell Point Village magazine and also on our daily village TV show “Shell Point Today”.

I had a radio interview via telephone on WIMA Radio in my home town of Lima, Ohio.

I was awarded induction into the Lima City Schools Hall of Fame partly because of my published stories about our home town:

SATISFYING SENTIMENT: I was able to dedicate the second book to my one and only sweetheart, Pauline, my dear wife.

Then, the pictures in the books help to bring back many extra memories, recollections and warm feelings, and often phone calls and visits between readers and me result. I hope and believe that many readers have also reached out to others in their lives from the old days as a result of The Power of Positive Memoires.

CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES: Many doors continue to open that our two books helped us make. We have met other memoirists from our area of the country and I think that some of them may be a little emboldened to write even more when they realize that they are not alone in the impulse to do so.

How have you marketed your book?

Word of mouth has been our best friend. We don’t believe in advertizing to the cold market. Our books are specialty material in a sense. People who will enjoy them know who they are as soon as they hear about them. We have made small mailings to high school alumni lists and received mention in Ohio State Alumni publications.

We are planning to use book tables at the Ft. Myers airport during the next Christmas tourist season in Florida to find midwestern travelers who have come down and who are in a nostalgic frame of mind. Our books are perfect for them.

- What Trafford services did you/do you
use (if any)?

We have our listings on the Trafford site, on Amazon, and on other sites that Trafford includes in its package of services.

- What has been your most successful
marketing activity?

Word of mouth and home-town newspaper citations and mentions.

Do you have any helpful hints on book marketing/industry secrets to share with your fellow writers/authors?

Know the public you want to reach and focus on what they would want. But still, be aware that no one book can please or interest every reader.

Remember how the odds work in any product or service offered anywhere. Of 100 customers, 5 may rave and say you’ve got the best thing in the world, 5 will hate it, and many won’t mention what they think at all, being too preoccupied with other maters anyway. But your core of fans will make up most of your readers and will enjoy your offering in a way consistent with their personalities.

The best part of publication is the rekindling of friendships and the networking into new, unexpected pastures of possibility.

Enter the process determined to ENJOY it, regardless of what comes along. When that is your goal, you will attain it. Stay focused on the positive and on the exciting features of everything that happens. Every rose has thorns, so don’t curse the flower on a mistaken expectation. Enjoy the rose for what it is, which watching out for and dealing with the thorns as a natural part of the process, and count yourself fortunate to be able to do so.

Feel free to include any additional information not related to the previous questions.

We made a collateral site where we post new story material and various pieces of news and publicity that come out.

Additionally, there is The Books on YouTube

Thank you for this opportunity to communicate with you and your public. Authoring, publishing and the resulting connections and networking have been very satisfying and rewarding.

Dr. Emmett Murray Jr.

UNIQUE VISITORS