Somebody posted a meme about how "thirty years ago" seems like it should be big collars and bell-bottom jeans, but is actually just 1994. And it dawned on me that 1994 is the anniversary of the publication of the Pocket Dictionary of Farrier Terms and Technical Language. The pathfinder for a whole series of farriery lexicons that culminated in Millwater's FARRIERY.
While 1994 doesn't seem like it's THAT long ago to some of us, a lot has changed in that time.
Today I found myself groaning at the hassle of having to re-upload a book manuscript to my P.O.D. after fixing a PDF formatting error that they (fortunately) detected. Big uploads take a while (several minutes) with our out-in-the-boonies Internet.
Then I remembered putting together and publishing that first dictionary. P.O.D. wasn't really a thing then. Neither was Amazon, really. The Internet as we know it was just getting started. PDF was still in development.
Most of the work on the Pocket Dictionary was done on an archaic (even by '90s standards) Commodore computer, which is why the main body text was output by daisy wheel printer. Got a 68030 Macintosh to help towards the end. Didn't have fancy printer or scanner to go with it, so it was off to Kinko's with diskettes in-hand to intimidate the nerds out of the way so we could monopolize the machines needed.
Back then, for us, "cut and paste" involved actual scissors and glue! I had to create photo-ready master sheets, make copies and assemble them into prototypes. We'd take all this to a printing shop and get a literal truckload of books made, paid-for up-front. Hauled 'em home to warehouse. No wonder I tried to keep the page-count down, and omitted anything fancy! I had no guarantee any of the bloody things would sell to recoup that investment.
And selling them was problematic, since online retail wasn't really a thing yet. We had to get people to snail-mail us checks so we could package-up and ship books to fill their orders. So cumbersome!
But the press releases and review copies did their job, and before long, half of the first printing was gone and we were in the black on the project. From there it was onward and upward, publishing-wise.
Can't say I miss the "good ol' days" of publishing too much. Though I am nostalgic for when more people were into reading... I'm too old and homely to do trendy video content!
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