A bookseller once said that writing a book is hard, while publishing a book is even harder. But the hardest thing in the world is selling a book. I once knew some college students who were so good at selling books that they were able to pay for their education. For several years in the summer, Marion and Jerry Solom would host a college student from one of the former Soviet republics. These young people were recruited by a US encyclopedia publisher to scour northwestern Minnesota for sales. One time I asked a young man from Estonia what his technique was. "Grandparents," he said. He didn't call grandparents suckers, but he knew grandparents would do anything to help their grandkids succeed in school and that's what he told the grandparents his encyclopedia would do. A little over four million books are published in the US every year. Three and a half million of them are self-published, mostly through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Most self-published books ...
My friend Joe McDonnell and I are local writers. In the early 1990s, I wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about Polaris titled, “Points North” and Joe wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about 50th wedding anniversaries. We both contributed stories and illustrations for the Roseau County Centennial Book and the Roseau County Heritage Books. I also contributed to the Roseau County book, 'Up Home ', its title derived from my mother’s expression for her childhood home in Palmville Township. Joe and I interviewed people over the years and realized the tremendous wealth of human interest stories around us. All we had to do was be good emphatic listeners and accurately write their stories in their own voices. Consequently, in 1994, we started a publication we named THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal. The Roseau Times-Region did a story on us and launched us into the public’s eye. We were both working f...