Michael Martinez |
The Official Web Site for Michael Martinez |
Questions and Answers |
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Michael Martinez |
The Official Web Site for Michael Martinez |
Questions and Answers |
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Q: How many translations have there been of your work?
A: I honestly have no idea. People have been very good about asking me for permission to use or translate my articles, but there have been so many requests through the years -- and I have lost a lot of email through computer crashes -- that I have lost track of all the authorized reprints and translations. A few people have asked for permission to translate some essays into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, but I cannot find their Web sites and must assume they abandoned the projects. I know for sure of Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, and Hebrew translations. I have been in contact with all the translators I know about. And a Hungarian publisher acquired rights to translate Visualizing Middle-earth. A Greek publisher inquired about similar rights, but my computer crashed and I lost their email. I've been unable to figure out who it was. Another group approached me about a Portuguese translation for VME. Q: So anyone can use your work? A: No, not exactly. I've published probably close to 200 essays on the Web (not all of them about Tolkien and Middle-earth). I was originally paid for distribution rights for most of them. However, fan sites cannot afford to pay for content. If they want to use just a few, I'll allow them (generally) to reprint or translate some of my essays. Parma Endorion is a special case. The eBook has been translated into several languages (if you include the Polish translation of the original Web sites). Since Parma Endorion is free, the translators don't have to pay for rights (but they cannot sell their translations, either). Q: What do you do when you find someone using your content? A: I try to contact them. If I think I may have given permission in the past, I'll ask for a confirmation. If I am sure they have not asked permission, I will ask them to limit their use and to provide me with appropriate credit and a link back. If someone is selling Parma Endorion, I insist they stop immediately. Q: You've now posted an extensive collection of links to Web sites that cite you or your work in some way. Why? A: Oh, I've always been curious about how many actual citations there are. And I had some free time while recovering from a virus. So, I put together a list of citations. Q: Does that validate your scholarship in any way? A: Michael Drout, regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Tolkien scholarship, notes that "...a great many of the very best contemporary Tolkien scholars are not professors: Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, Doug Anderson, David Bratman, Richard West, Carl Hostetter... many of these scholars have academic affiliations (at libraries, etc.), but they aren't professors of English or history or cultural studies. Yet they are among the best." Q: Drout didn't mention you. A: I suppose that does mean I'm not foremost in his mind when he thinks about non-academic scholars. His point, however, is that Tolkien scholarship flourishes among what he calls "independent scholars". I don't need Michael Drout's endorsement to validate my work. I only need to know that there is an audience for that work. That makes it worthwhile. I think he agrees with that point of view. Q: How did you start writing? A: It was a long, slow process. I tried to write my first book when I was six years old. I took some school paper, drew pictures of sharks, and wrote captions under the pictures. I created a little foreword page saying something like, "This is my first book. I hope you like it." Then I stapled the pages together. I never showed it to anyone and after a few months I threw it away. After I read The Lord of the Rings (when I was fifteen), I was so inspired by Tolkien's pseudo history I tried to create my own. Naturally, it resembled Middle-earth in many ways. After I finished drawing some maps and writing some notes (in the style of LoTR's appendices), I realized I had just stolen all of Tolkien's ideas. So I rewrote the history and set it on a completely imaginary "other planet". For the next three or four years, I kept rewriting the histories, adding new ideas, changing my maps. Eventually, I reached the point where I was no longer satisfied with writing background material. So I asked my mother to buy me an electric typewriter for my birthday, which she did, and I wrote my first novel -- starting with chapter five. I knew how the story should progress, but I couldn't figure out how to start it. After I finished that book (without ever writing the first chapters), I set it aside and rewrote my background material. This was tedious work, as I wrote the background notes by hand on college-ruled notebook paper. After I reached another plateau, I decided it was time to write the beginning of the novel. But instead I wrote a full-length story which took place about 70 years before the events in the first novel. The second book was better than the first. But I still wanted to write the first book. And yet, I couldn't think of how to start it. So, I ended up writing a couple more books, and starting many more. Each project came a little more smoothly, but the one book I most wanted to write just wouldn't come out. Finally, I abandoned the process (after years). While I was in college, my English professors encouraged me to write again. I took English as a minor and really enjoyed the advanced classes, including Creative Writing and Advanced Composition (essays). Several of the professors told me I could probably make it as an essayist, but at the time I didn't have any interest in that kind of writing. Still, encouraged by the faculty, I went back to my prequel novel and rewrote it twice, both times getting detailed critiques from one of my professors. He helped me improve my writing tremendously, but I was still unable to write the opening chapters of the first book. I spent a couple of years trying to find a market for the novel the professor and I had worked on. A couple of agents and editors expressed support for me but no one offered any contracts. So, eventually, I gave up on the project and tried writing short stories. I almost sold one, but the magazine which had accepted it lost its funding and folded. I had a couple of other near sales, as well. By this time, I realized my career as a programmer was going nowhere. I had gone from small job to small job, dealing with a lot of stress and learning from a lot of people. But the money just wasn't there. Maybe I was a bad negotiator. But I finally decided that what I needed to do was find a way to earn some recognition. About that time, I was told to join the BASIS FORUM on Compuserve. There I was introduced to the world-wide Business Basic community, and after a year or so had proven myself enough that people began quietly contacting me about possible jobs. Somewhere in that period, I began writing technical papers for the Business Basic community. Some of them were pretty long, book-length, but many were just essays. A few years and some magazine articles later, I found myself engaged in lively discussions on the Internet with other Tolkien fans. As the questions grew more interesting and involved, and I as continued to followup with new research, I decided to try writing a history book about Middle-earth. I never quite finished it, but was advised to either make it a little more scholarly or somewhat less so (to give it mass audience appeal). That research project served as the groundwork for my breakout in Tolkien writing. I began writing the Parma Endorion Web site around the same time, and was asked to contribute some articles to a few Tolkien journals. I landed some contracts to write about Hercules and Xena topics, and then was offered a contract to write some essays about Middle-earth's characters for Toy Vault. Eventually, I applied for and was given a contract to write about Tolkien and Middle-earth at Suite101.com. Q: You self-published your first book, Visualizing Middle-earth. How did that come about? A: A friend of mine knew about my abandoned Tolkien history book project. He called me up one day and told me about a company he had just read about. They were offering to publish anyone's book for free. He felt it was an opportunity I shouldn't pass up. So, I checked out their Web site and realized they were a self-publishing services provider. Sort of a vanity press, but not quite. There was no editorial review, but they weren't asking authors to pay to have their books published. I didn't feel I should put the history book into that kind of market, but I had a lot of essays from Suite101 which people were constantly asking me how they could print them out. I thought a collection of my essays would be appropriate. It was a way to earn a little more money from them without risking anything. I put the book together in about a week. Regrettably, it looks like that much work went into it. Still, for no money down, it turned out to be a great investment. VME is still selling well today. The publishing company changed their program soon after I brought out that book. They no longer offer free publishing services and are now a full vanity press. Q: Would you recommend self-publishing to other people today? A: Self-publishing is a road fraught with peril, as Tolkien might say. Some very successful books were self-published, but most successful books are traditionally published after being accepted through the process of editorial review. And it helps tremendously for a writer to be able to work with an editor, particularly if that editor has a passion for the subject. My advice for people who want to self-publish is to know what they are getting into. They will have to spend a lot of money, and they will be responsible for marketing their books. If they use print-on-demand publishing services providers, they will have a difficult time getting their books into the stores. Many self-published authors have to buy large quantities of their own books and act as distributors before they can get into mainstream channels. Online bookstores are more friendly to self-published authors, but the burden of marketing your book is still on you, the author. So, as frustrating as it is, I think people should first try the traditional publishing markets. Competition is intense and most people get rejected. But most self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies. People should not give in to the vagues promises that the vanity presses make in their marketing pitches. They make most of their money by selling services and products to authors, not by selling books to the reading public. Q: Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, is an eBook. Why did you choose electronic publishing for your second book, and how successful has it been? A: Parma Endorion is one of the most popular eBooks of all time. I was blown away by its success. More than a half million copies had been downloaded by the beginning of 2004. To the best of my knowledge, only Stephen King has had more downloads of a single title. I had originally published the Parma essays as a Web book. There were almost a hundred HTML pages on the site by the end of that process. I had originally encoded each essay onto a single page. But I used awful background colors and images to make it difficult for people to print out the essays. I was afraid of that. I wanted people to read the Web book. But I was inundated with emails from around the world, asking me how to print out the essays. At first I asked people not to do that, but it became impossible to stop the requests. Finally, I revised the Web site to use individual pages and look more like a book. With white backgrounds, the pages were easily printed out. But people still said the format was very tedious (which it was). So, when I began thinking about writing a third edition of the Web book, I realized that an eBook would be a much better platform. About that time, Matt Tinaglia contacted me and asked if/when I was going to write a sequel to Visualizing Middle-earth. I told him I was working on the new Parma Endorion and he asked if he could help. As we worked together, I realized that I could invite other people to join in the project, too. It was always my intention to leave Parma Endorion as a free resource. I was afraid that if I tried to sell it, I might run into a dispute with the Tolkien Estate (although that is probably unlikely). So, we looked at hundreds of pictures by fan artists and chose several artists to invite. Rich Sullivan and Anke Eissman agreed to let us use some of their work. I feel that Matt's work as editor and the inclusion of the artwork made the eBook an extremely valuable and popular resource. My initial hope was to get 50,000 downloads in the first year. I felt that was a very bold, liberal projection. To be honest, I wasn't even sure it was realistic. And then we had 25,000 downloads in the first month alone. What an incredible experience that was! My only regret now is that we DIDN'T charge for the eBook, but what's done is done. Q: And what about Understanding Middle-earth? How has it been received? A: UME has been better received than VME in many respects. It is a better written, better edited (thanks to Matt Tinaglia), and better organized book than VME. But it has still been overshadowed by Parma Endorion. To this day, I meet people who have read Parma Endorion but not my other books. I suppose that is the true price of a free eBook. You reach a larger audience which isn't willing to pay for your other books. Other eBook authors have had similar experiences. One doctor had a free eBook about health on his Web site. After 20,000 downloads, he pulled it from distribution because people were not buying his other books. But the people who have read and reviewed Understanding Middle-earth tell me they really like it. Some reviewers have been blown away by it. The essays represent an immense amount of time and effort. And they are not simply reprints of the Suite101 essays, although most of them were originally published on Suite101. Matt and I strove to bring new value to this collection. He rearranged and combined some essays, and he asked me to rewrite portions of several essays. I also took the opportunity to update several of the essays with new information and corrections. And one essay, "How the Elves have changed", was written explicitly for that book (along with another which Matt ultimately rejected). Continued on page 2 |
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This page is copyright © 2004-2006 by Michael L. Martinez. All rights reserved. |
Michael Martinez
