For the last couple of weeks my publishing company, Moonfire Publishing, has been finishing up the rollout for our latest title, What Haunts Us by Loren Niemi. Loren is a storyteller who performs all over the country, and What Haunts Us is his first-ever published story collection.
This book was challenging to produce, but if I don’t say so myself the result is pretty outstanding. From a literary standpoint the narrative style comes from performance storytelling, which gives it a fundamentally different feel than your standard anthology of short stories. Some are adapted from existing folklore and others are entirely original compositions. This is a work that has been long in the making, as Loren has been performing for more than forty years. You can check out his website here for more information about him and his background.
One of things we learned in the course of producing this book is that publishing a title directly through Ingram is not nearly as difficult as some authors make it out to be. You do want to have the latest Adobe stuff like Creative Cloud, but if you do the process can be streamlined quite efficiently. I was pretty solid at putting books together for CreateSpace and the new KDP paperback production works pretty similarly, but the advantage with going directly through Ingram is that bookstores are actually willing to order copies through them. Even with Amazon’s “expanded distribution” that’s not really an option.
Loren will be performing tomorrow evening, Wednesday February 27th, at Tillie’s Farmhouse in Saint Paul, Minnesota. If you are local to the area, come by and check it out. It promises to be a good time with opening music starting at 6 PM and Loren’s storytelling starting at 7 PM. He also travels around the country, with his upcoming events posted on his website. If you get a chance to see him, you should – there aren’t a lot of storytellers around any more, and Loren is an excellent one.
Scott Michael Stenwick 