OT : Self-Publishing: "Why Don't You Do It on Your Own?"

[Tom Roche]

December 26, 2006

  A Book Publisher, Beatlemaniacs? Why Don't You Do It on Your Own?
By ALLAN KOZINN

  Maybe you thought the publishing world had exploited every bit of 
information about the Beatles, useful and trivial, in the Himalayan 
stack of books published since the group's heyday in the 1960s: 
biographies both straight and gossipy, musical analyses, 
chronologies, as well as Beatles-theme novels.

Guess again. Now, if mainstream publishers reject their work as too 
specialized, even the most Beatles-obsessed authors are finding 
audiences for their books by publishing them themselves. But don't 
even think the phrase ''vanity press.'' Many of these self-published 
books are lavishly produced and packed with original research that 
makes them invaluable to Beatles scholars and collectors, and some 
have been startlingly successful through online sales.

They range from meticulous descriptions of the Beatles' recording 
process to multi-volume examinations of the group's American 
releases, to evaluations of unreleased studio and concert recordings 
now on the bootleg market.

Like indie rock bands rebuffed by major record labels, some of the 
self-published authors tried getting publishing deals before deciding 
to go it alone. But a growing number are saying: Why bother? 
Self-publishing, on top of giving the authors all the profits, gives 
them editorial and design control too, which they feel outweighs the 
drawback of having to research on their own dime rather than on a 
publisher's advance.

''Everything I read seemed to suggest that self-publication would be 
a good idea,'' said John C. Winn, the author of ''Way Beyond 
Compare,'' ''That Magic Feeling'' and ''Lifting Latches,'' a 
self-published series that offers annotated source information about 
all the Beatles' known audio and video recordings, including 
interviews. ''My books are targeted to a specific audience that I'm 
able to reach directly. Being a Beatlemaniac, I hung around with 
other Beatlemaniacs, and I knew where to find them and what they'd be 
interested in reading about.''

Some authors report surprisingly brisk sales. Published in August, 
''Recording the Beatles,'' a 540-page study of the equipment and 
techniques used to make the Beatles' recordings, has sold out its 
first run of 3,000 copies at $100 apiece. The authors, Kevin Ryan and 
Brian Kehew, have a second printing on order and plan a less 
expensive edition in 2007.

Mr. Ryan and Mr. Kehew, who both work as producers and engineers, 
took a decade to research their book, which includes pictures and 
descriptions of every piece of recording and sound-processing 
equipment used at the Abbey Road Studios in London, as well as 
diagrams showing how the Beatles set up for particular recordings, 
and step-by-step analyses of how the songs were assembled.

Bruce Spizer, a lawyer in New Orleans, began his work as a 
do-it-yourself Beatles author with a study of the fraught legal 
relationship between EMI, the Beatles' British record label, and 
Vee-Jay, which licensed the group's early recordings. His four 
sequels to ''The Beatles Records on Vee-Jay'' include books about the 
Beatles' releases in the United States on Capitol and on their own 
imprint, Apple, each offering reproductions of cover art (including 
rejected designs), labels (including variations), correspondence and 
promotional materials. A final installment, ''The Beatles Swan 
Song,'' is due in March. He has also published ''The Beatles Are 
Coming!,'' about the band's first visit to America, in February 1964.

All told, Mr. Spizer said, he has sold 37,000 copies of his six 
books, which have brought in more than $1 million since the first was 
published in 1998. But more important for Mr. Spizer, the books put 
him on the radar at EMI and Apple. When they released CDs of the 
Beatles' albums in their American configurations (the original CDs 
follow the British album versions, which have different track 
sequences), they hired Mr. Spizer as a consultant.

''I could do this full time,'' Mr. Spizer said. ''But I'm keeping my 
day job. I like to say that as a tax attorney, I make $210 an hour, 
and as a Beatles publisher, I make $2.10 an hour.''

The books are part of a growing self-published library of must-haves 
for anyone fascinated with the Beatles' music, released and 
unreleased. Others include Doug Sulpy's regularly updated ''Complete 
Beatles Audio Guide,'' which sorts out the tangled bootleg market, 
and Chip Madinger and Mark Easter's ''Eight Arms to Hold You,'' a 
catalog of every known live, studio, television and radio recording 
by the solo Beatles. (Full disclosure: I contributed a foreword, 
without compensation.) Mr. Madinger is at work, with Scott Raile, on 
a two-volume study of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's work together, in 
which one book is a day-by-day chronology, and the other is a 
detailed sessionography.

''The goal is to answer any question you might have about their life 
and work together,'' Mr. Madinger said of his Lennon project.

One thing these books have in common is that they began as private 
research projects, not as book ideas, because the authors sought 
information that was not readily available. In some cases their 
Beatles research intersected with their day jobs. Mr. Ryan and Mr. 
Kehew, as musicians and engineers, became fascinated with how the 
Beatles and their production team created the band's sound on disc. 
They began working separately, Mr. Ryan in Houston, Mr. Kehew in Los 
Angeles in the early 1990s.

''When I started writing and recording my own songs, I tried to make 
them sound like the Beatles' records, but I couldn't do it,'' Mr. 
Ryan said. ''So I wanted to know: What were they doing? What were 
their tools? Writing the book was a good excuse to contact people and 
ask questions.''

Mr. Ryan began traveling to Britain to interview EMI engineers and 
quickly learned that Mr. Kehew was covering similar ground. They 
decided to pool their resources.

''And it was great,'' Mr. Ryan said, ''because wherever our 
overlapping research agreed, it was corroboration; and wherever there 
were discrepancies, we knew we had to look more closely and figure 
out why.''

Eventually they interviewed just about everyone who worked on the 
Beatles sessions between 1962 and 1970, with a few notable 
exceptions: the former Beatles themselves; George Martin, their 
producer; and Geoff Emerick, their engineer from 1966 to 1969. Mr. 
Martin and Mr. Emerick have each written books about their work with 
the group.

''We found that the people who were a real gold mine were the ones 
who haven't been asked about this every day of their lives,'' Mr. 
Ryan said. ''You're asking them things they haven't been asked 
before, and you're getting fresh, undiluted responses that haven't 
become simplified through constant repetition.''

Ms. Ono was taken with ''Recording the Beatles'' when she saw it. 
''Because I was lucky enough to have been there in some of the later 
sessions,'' she wrote in an e-mail message, ''I am happy that Kevin 
Ryan and Brian Kehew have done such a great job. It's a strong 
magical and nostalgic trip for me.''

They were able to solve a few mysteries along the way. Collectors 
have long noted, for example, that the stereo and mono versions of 
''Help!'' have different lead vocal tracks from Lennon. All 12 takes 
of the song recorded at Abbey Road circulate among collectors, and 
the vocal on Take 12 is in the stereo version. But the vocal in the 
mono mix is nowhere among them.

While collecting illustrations for their book, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Kehew 
found photographs taken during dialogue dubbing sessions for the film 
''Help!'' at C.T.S. Studios in London. Some shots showed Mr. Martin, 
even though there was no reason he should have attended a dialogue 
session; others showed the group in a typical singing configuration, 
with Lennon at one microphone and George Harrison and Paul McCartney 
sharing another.

Each is holding a sheet of paper that, when magnified and reversed, 
showed the lyrics of ''Help!'' Clearly, the group remade the vocals 
at C.T.S., and because that studio's equipment was incompatible with 
EMI's, the mono version was mixed on the spot and handed over for use 
on the soundtrack.

''I think it's a marvelous book; in fact it embarrasses my 'Recording 
Sessions' book,'' said Mark Lewisohn, the British author whose 1988 
book, ''The Beatles Recording Sessions'' (Harmony Books), was the 
first detailed examination of the group's recording process, and 
whose other books, ''The Beatles Live!'' (Henry Holt) and ''The 
Complete Beatles Chronicle'' (Harmony), set the standard for serious 
Beatles research in the 1980s and '90s.

Mr. Lewisohn has taken the more traditional publishing route. (His 
current project, a three-volume Beatles biography, is to be published 
by Crown, starting in 2009.) But he said he understood the attraction 
of doing it on your own.

''When you self-publish, you have the opportunity to be as indulgent 
as you like,'' he said. ''You can go into everything with a 
thoroughness that a conventional publisher would try to limit for 
reasons of cost.''

That said, self-publication forces authors to become fluent in 
budgeting, printing, copyrights, design and other details of getting 
their books into print.

''We did talk to some publishers, small and large,'' Mr. Ryan said, 
''but I don't think we were ever convinced that was the way to go. We 
had strong ideas about how the book should look, and about its 
content and organization. ''Also,'' he added, ''Brian and I have both 
dealt personally with record company contracts in the past, and we 
could see a correlation between the world of publishing and the music 
world. In both cases, unless you're going to sell a million copies of 
your product, you will never make a significant chunk of money. The 
publisher or record company takes the lion's share and you get 
scraps.''

Waiting to Take You Away on a Fact-Filled Tour
These are the Beatle books and authors mentioned in this article:

RECORDING THE BEATLES by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew (Curvebender 
Publishing, 2006).

A magnificently produced 11- by-11-inch hardcover, packaged in a 
slipcase designed to look like an EMI tape box, this book includes 
everything you could possibly want to know about the equipment used 
at the Abbey Road Studios when the Beatles worked there, and a great 
deal of information about how the group made its classic recordings. 
Mr. Ryan and Mr. Kehew's imprint, Curvebender, is named for a piece 
of equipment described in the book. Information: 
recordingthebeatles.com.

WAY BEYOND COMPARE: THE BEATLES' RECORDED LEGACY, VOL. 1: 1957-1965 (2003)
THAT MAGIC FEELING: THE BEATLES' RECORDED LEGACY, VOL. 2: 1966-1970 (2003)
LIFTING LATCHES: THE BEATLES' RECORDED LEGACY, VOL. 3: INSIDE THE 
BEATLES' VAULTS (2005)
BEATLEGMANIA, VOL. 1 (2006)
All by John C. Winn (Multiplus Books).

The first two volumes in Mr. Winn's ''Recorded Legacy'' series offer 
detailed source information about every snippet of the Beatles you're 
likely to hear on anything from a standard Beatles CD or a 
documentary to a bootleg. The third volume describes the contents of 
EMI's Beatles archives, reel by reel. And the ''Beatlegmania'' series 
promises to be a nostalgic look at classic bootlegs, going all the 
back to the days when they were vinyl discs with rubber-stamped 
covers. Mr. Winn's imprint, Multiplus, refers to a line in ''Alec 
Speaking,'' a poem in John Lennon's first book, ''In His Own Write.'' 
Information: members.aol.com/multiplusbooks.

THE BEATLES RECORDS ON VEE-JAY (1998)
THE BEATLES' STORY ON CAPITOL RECORDS -- PART ONE: BEATLEMANIA & THE 
SINGLES (2000)
THE BEATLES' STORY ON CAPITOL RECORDS -- PART TWO: THE ALBUMS (2000)
THE BEATLES ARE COMING! (2003)
THE BEATLES ON APPLE RECORDS (2003)
THE BEATLES SOLO ON APPLE RECORDS (2005)
THE BEATLES SWAN SONG (DUE 2007)
All by Bruce Spizer, (498 Productions).

These volumes offer a wealth of detail about the Beatles' American 
recordings and their first visit to the United States, touching on 
everything from contracts and lawsuits to promotional materials, all 
richly illustrated. Mr. Spizer's imprint, 498 Productions, refers to 
the catalog number of a Vee-Jay single on which the Beatles' name is 
misspelled (as Beattles). Information: beatle.net.

COMPLETE BEATLES AUDIO GUIDE, by Doug Sulpy (The 910, 2006).

The latest in a regularly updated series of bootleg guides, this 
volume points collectors to the best sources for every circulating 
(officially or otherwise) Beatles recording. Mr. Sulpy's imprint, The 
910, refers to his quarterly bootleg review magazine, which in turn 
refers to the Beatles song ''One After 909.'' Information: 
dougsulpy.com.

EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU: THE SOLO BEATLES COMPENDIU, by Chip Madinger 
and Mark Easter, (44.1 Productions, 2000).

This is the place to look for information about the former Beatles 
solo live and studio recordings, through 2000. A more comprehensive 
two-volume look at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's music, by Mr. Madinger 
and Scott Raile, is planned for October 2007. The imprint, 44.1, is 
the sampling rate of the digital waveform on a CD. Information: 
8-arms.com and lennonstrangedays.com. ALLAN KOZINN
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company