Sample Chapters

I'm currently in the process of adding sample chapters from various titles to the website. Blue Tiger was first, others will be up throughout the day.

Lots of Scanning Ahead

Just got a package in the mail, a manuscript by Gary Mangiacopra and Dwight Smith, on Atlantic marine cryptids, that was put together a few years back. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 pages or so, which I'll be scanning and sorting next. I'll then be able to determine what needs updating, revising, etc. Who knows, might have it out by the end of the year...

Next, then, of course, will be their Pacific volume.

Update

OK, a quick update on what I'm working on at present. I have a few more photos to locate and some minor text revision yet to do on Eight-Legged Marvels: Beauty and Design in the World of Spiders. Hope to have that complete by Christmas.

Boss Snakes (on cryptozoological stories of giant snakes in North America) will probably be done by end of month, ready to send to printer. I've finished my digging for historical accounts, just have to piece it all together. Have several points to make (primary is that there is no single unknown snake species responsible for sightings all across North America), and it should offer a fair bit of new data for investigators. I think most past discussions of giant snakes noted maybe 30 or so big snake stories, and half of those were of irrelevant "lake monster" sightings that have nothing to do with true snakes. I'll have 225+ (rough count) sightings and stories of big snakes, not counting a good number of obvious hoaxes and tall tales.

I think after Boss Snakes, I'll be working on Varmints, another collection of historical mystery animal accounts, but focusing on canine-like, feline-like, and similar mammalian enigmas in North America.

Reprints: Paperback or HTML?

Looking forward, I have many more potential reprints than actual new material, in the pipeline. This is mostly because it's only a few days' or a weeks' work to get the scanning and OCR done, while months of research may go into a brand new title.

But, of course, not all reprints have a ready-made audience. Just because I find them interesting doesn't mean that anyone else will (or that my low-key low-cost marketing will attract anyone who might). Take for instance a reprint of a small booklet of philatelic cartoons from 1916 (I used to collect stamps, so still carry a slight interest in the subject); there might possibly be two or three philatelic historians who'd shell out for a copy (the cartoons are only mildly amusing today, as they appear to be riffing on people long gone...), but there wouldn't be much else. So, should I forego the print copy (which would cost me about $75 to produce via normal methods) and just reprint it on some pages on the CoachwhipBooks site? Maybe publish it as a paperback through Lulu, where there are no upfront costs, but wouldn't be distributable elsewhere and would have a higher print cost...

There are a few possible titles for alternative publishing routes, but will have to decide what's worth spending time on and what should be left to other salvagers.