By Hal Walter
My little jab at the Literary Industrial Complex – Wild Burro Tales – Thirty Years of Haulin’ Ass – is nearly reality. Soon the book will be available in local retail establishments and on amazon.com.
This collection of stories had its origins in my adventures on the Western Pack-Burro Racing circuit. But this experience grew to include a fascination with equus asinus, my exploration of using these animals as backcountry packers and saddle donkeys, and as therapeutic riding animals for my son Harrison. While the book is full of adventures, the process of putting this volume together is another story worth telling.
In 1998, I published a smaller volume called Pack-Burro Stories. Back then, I had a few stories about burros, some of which I had written many years before. One of them I remember retyping from old papers I had found in my barn. For what it was, Pack-Burro Stories was a minor success. People seemed to enjoy it, most of the copies got sold, and even 12 years later I still get an occasional out-of-state request – someone finds me on the Internet or whatever – to send out a copy. A recent check on amazon.com found someone trying to sell a single copy for an outrageous $30.
The problem with Pack-Burro Stories was I never stopped writing about burros, and it became clear even to someone as dense as myself that I was actually getting better at it. Then one day I realized there just weren’t that many copes of the old book left, and began to think about putting together another collection.
Over the last decade, I’ve watched as interest in donkeys seems to have grown. There are reportedly 44 million of these animals at hard labor in non-industrialized countries. They remain largely as pets in the U.S., and nobody seems to know exactly how many there are, though the figure of 55,000 seems to be well-accepted.
I began to see a larger market audience for this book. I noted there are three national magazines that contain articles about donkeys: Brayer, Mules and More, and Popular Farming Series Donkeys and Mules. In addition, two recent books have appeared – Donkey: The Mystique of Equus Asinus, and The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World.
Donkey books seemed to be in vogue, and it seemed I had nothing to lose. When you live on the edge of economic subsistence in Central Colorado, any new avenue for producing income aside from tending livestock and building fence is worth pursuing.
There’s a stigma about self-published books, “vanity press” and all that. And likewise there’s also a false sense of prestige about having a publishing house publish your book. The fact is traditional publishers generally buy all rights to the work, pay authors a small up-front “advance” on a title and then a puny royalty on sales – $1 per book may be fairly typical. If you’re a well-known author and stand to sell a million copies or more, that may be great.
I decided the traditional route wasn’t worth it when I know how to publish a book, and have in fact produced several starting with my own. In the decade since Pack-Burro Stories I’ve also produced several books for Dr. Phil Maffetone, including his recent 5th edition of In Fitness and In Health and the new Healthy Brains, Healthy Children written with Dr. Coralee Thompson, M.D.
Plus, I’ve learned a few things about marketing since 1998. Intriguing to me was the new book publishing service called CreateSpace. Essentially, CreateSpace allows the author to retain all rights to the book, and also pays much better royalties than a traditional publisher.
In addition, CreateSpace prints the books on demand and handles all the shipping. I don’t have to buy any inventory unless I have orders to fill, and I actually never have to touch a book if I don’t want to.
So about a year ago I began the tedious task of collecting all these stories in one folder on my computer. I decided to keep some of the original Pack-Burro Stories and rework some of them either a little or a lot. In addition, there were several more essays that I have written in more recent years. And there were six very short stories, some of which originated as blog entries or were excerpts from other columns I had written.
I was fortunate to have local artist Lorie Merfeld-Batson provide pen-and-ink drawings to accompany some of the stories. Several photographer friends provided some great photos. I am thankful to all who helped bring the stories to life with these images.
Mary Lyn Koval, an editor in New York with whom I worked on In Fitness and In Health, provided her editing expertise, and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for her efforts.
My previous experience taught me the value of doing the homework on marketing before publishing. And so I sought out influential people to review the book manuscript and provide quotes for the back cover. The first was Christopher McDougall, who wrote New York Times Best-Seller Born to Run. I met Christopher when he wrote about pack-burro racing for Men’s Health a few years ago. While in Leadville he also found many of the threads to the story that led to his current success. The true genius in Christopher’s book is that he made a book about running into a general interest phenomenon. If only I could do the same thing with “Wild Burro Tales.”
I also garnered endorsements from Colorado Central co-founder and Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen, and from noted mule and donkey trainer Steve Edwards.
As I assembled the book I had the feeling that either I was disappearing in my own vacuum, or that I really had something unique on my hands. Oddly the stories, which were written as stand-alone essays, seemed to fall together into a natural order, though it was not necessarily chronological. When Mary Lyn began to refer to them as “chapters,” I knew my feeling that these stories fit together as a larger tale was probably right.
I’ve written about many of my adventures with burros over the years, and many of these stories originally appeared as columns in this magazine. But producing this book has been another adventure itself. Hopefully people will enjoy it.
Hal Walter’s Wild Burro Tales will be available in August at local retailers, amazon.com, or by visiting www.createspace.com/3438422.