Continuing a growing trend of self-publishing among aspiring authors, Oak Park native and Chicago resident Patrick Waldron opted to side-step the New York publishing monopoly and take matters into his own hands.
His book, The Threshing Floor, was recently published on CreateSpace.com, a do-it-yourself service owned by Amazon.com.
“I was cornered into to it,” Waldron laughs, referring to the initial efforts he made to try and publish his book in a more traditional fashion through the submission of manuscripts and query letters.
“I think it’s crazy to spend an amount of time on querying agents and publishers in New York City that’s comparable to the time you spend writing,” Waldron declares.
So, almost accidentally, he stumbled upon CreateSpace.com and decided to give it a shot.
The Web site not only provides authors, musicians and filmmakers the opportunity to publish and release their work, it enables them to reach prospective audiences at an unprecedented level.
Waldron describes the service as “democratic,” emphasizing the freedom artists have in the design and distribution process.
“This carries authority with it, and people can pick it up and read it and give it its due because it has this accepted form,” Waldron says.
To use the service, artists must first create an account, free of charge. In the case of an author interested in publishing his work, he can control the number of books printed.
The Standard Plan is free and the Pro Plan comes at a cost of $39. Since Amazon and CreateSpace keep no inventory, the books are printed on demand with the Standard Plan, benefiting new authors who may want to print only a handful of books and selling books on the web. The Pro Plan is economical for someone buying in bulk for a release party, for example. The fee to create the books is less costly, and more royalties are awarded to the author upon the Internet sale of the book.
Amazon, CreateSpace and affiliated vendor Web sites – The Threshing Floor is also available on Target.com – then get a percentage of each sale, which is dependent on the vendor, the plan used, the type of book constructed and the number of pages.
The sale of books on such widely viewed Web sites enables authors to reach audiences that would have previously been virtually impenetrable without a major publishing company printing and distributing the work on a mass scale.
Waldron is a University of Chicago grad (English Literature), who worked at the Board of Trade for a while, then left in order to write his novel. He works as a valet parker in order “to keep body and soul together,” he says.
“It takes a great deal of effort to break through the traditional avenues of publishing,” Waldron says. “Now supposedly, it’s basically futile to send query letters or send your manuscript to publishers directly; you get an agent first. So you query them [and] if you don’t know anyone, if you don’t have any connections – which I don’t – you send them unsolicited query letters, which is like the lowest of the low for incoming mail. It’s like yours is the first thing to go if the mail load is too big.”
Waldron’s Threshing Floor is based on an actual murder investigation, but is a fictionalized tale of crime and ensuing police brutality on the South Side of Chicago. When two police officers – Jack O’Connor and Terry Cummings – are shot dead after stopping a car near 81st and Morgan, a massive manhunt, led in part by one of the central characters, Lt. Jon Burke, follows.
Two eyewitnesses recall a rust or burnt orange 1978-’80 model Chevy Impala, with damage to the front grill, as being the car driven by the alleged assailants – two to three young black males.
With no leads and such a vague description on which to proceed, Chicago Police officers embark on the search and are told to report to Burnside Station in Area 2, where Lt. Burke is the commanding officer, with any information.
Burke, working under the “supervision” of Deputy Superintendent Jim O’Grady, opts to take a certain amount of the investigation into his own hands, wreaking havoc on a significant portion of the Burnside community in pursuit of his own insatiable quest for “justice.” A quest that ends up entailing horrid and brutal tactics at times.
Solomon Armstrong, the other central character, is the owner of a small-time chop shop on the South Side. He fears the escalating police investigation, which has subjected the largely black community to virtual martial law, could expose the illegitimacy of his business.
As the story unravels Solomon grapples with moral struggles in a fight to save his business, his family and his community.
The book is loosely based on the accusations of torture at the hands of Lt. Jon Burge and his detectives during the actual murder investigation in 1982. Burge, who is currently awaiting trial on federal charges of perjury, was the commanding officer, Violent Crimes Division, at Burnside Station in Area 2, where most of the events in the book take place. Solomon Armstrong is based off of Solomon Morgan, a South Side body-shop owner who assisted the police in the murder investigation of officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien, who inspired the Jack O’Connor and Terry Cummings characters.
Waldron didn’t set out to write an expose, however. He wanted to write a crime novel.
“It doesn’t attempt to be realistic. … It’s more a thriller mystery,” Waldron says.
A fascination with classic crime novels by such authors as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett sparked Waldron’s interest in the genre, and moved him to write in a similar fashion.
“I think the crime novel gave me a back door route,” he observes. “I could kind of hide within that genre and there are these requirements that I could satisfy along the way with trying to make a really dramatic, moving work tied to these actual events.”
This piece of Chicago history was originally recorded in a series of articles by John Conroy of the Chicago Reader that Waldron had read, along with following the lengthy trial on charges of torture brought against Burge.
“The city’s history is contentious,” Waldron said, “and I felt like one of the things I wanted to do was resurrect one of those violent and anarchic struggles that occurred and really, I think, ought to be associated with the city and its identity.”
Waldron did just that without overemphasizing faithfulness to any sequence of events. While the historical parallels are apparent, clear emphasis is placed on the book telling its own story as a work of fiction.