I wonder what experiences folks have had with the "Images of Rail" or other books from Arcadia Publishing?
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookse ... SID=290281

I am surprised with their ability to publish so many historic topics, in what clearly must be small print runs. (How many "Alameda by rail" books can you sell?)

Does your bookshop stock them, how well do they do?

I know a few museums have been involved in writing them, how well does that work?

All I can say is that there are some volumes which have great pictures, but a whole lot of wasted ink in the captions. Some of these are really, really bad, which makes it tough for the authors who actually did their work.

Rob

As a newly minted Arcadia author, I will share my experiences.

Overall, I think the company has an interesting and admirable approach. They exist to make history easily available and affordable.

That being said, I think the success of each book relates directly to the abilities of the authors of each book. Arcadia has very specific formatting requirements- between 180 and 240 photographs, between 4,000 and 14,000 words, at least three or four chapters, plus acknoweldgements and an introduction and the last page reserved for their purposes. All chapters must start on right pages. You can start chapters with either one picture or a short introduction. How the books are formatted within these requirements in entirely up to the individual author and their abilities, as Arcadia will only make gramatical and spelling changes to what you send them to conform with their adopted house styles. Their picture reproductions are excellent, but the captions are entirely up to the author to produce.

Arcadia does give endless support to its authors. That was my experience. They have handbooks and manuals for every step of the process, and they send you the next one you will need as you finish each step. I found that to be very usefull. The manuals also had a lot of tips and recommendations.

My book is Rails Around McCloud, which is about the railroads of McCloud, CA. It will be on store shelves Monday, 14 January 2008. Arcadia did compliment me several times that it was one of the better books they had seen, and I hope it does well.

I'm interested to hear more about impressions and experiences.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV

I authored the Railroads of Los Gatos volume released last November. It was definitely among the wordier, with my editor having to go to bat to win 1,500 extra words beyond the house guidelines (this beyond an initial 4,000-word reduction from my original manuscript).

On the whole, my experience with the company was good -- with the glaring exception of the editing process. One of the sacrifices you make as an Arcadia author (perhaps this has changed) is you agree to only work with one set of proofs; you make your red scribbles in the margins and pray they get it all before it goes to print. The first copyeditor I was assigned had a penchant for inserting redundant articles and slicing words for the sake of preserving a few pixels of grass in the pictures. More often than not, her tailoring rendered the captions factually inaccurate (the damage changing two words will do!) or blatantly misused technical terms. Luckily, the second copyeditor was very understanding and, after a pleasant phone call, conceded to revert back to my draft -- though, unfortunately, carelessly omitting one or two small errors from the blunder (a misconstruing of a train number versus engine number in Chapter 6...and I'm sure you were just dying to know). If the "quantity over quality" attitude one can sense becomes enough of a trend, I can't imagine too many people wanting to buy Arcadia books anymore.

Other than that, however, I have no complaints. I have nothing but praise for the marketing department. Each Arcadia author is assigned a publicist and mine was especially astute -- very easy to work with and constantly consulting me for my input. She managed to get us several articles in local newspapers and even a live television spot on our local NBC affiliate's morning news program. I credit her diligence for bringing 200+ to our book launch event after I had only printed 75 programs!

Arcadia has started a new era in local history writing and, for anyone with the means to document theirs, I recommend sending them a proposal.

I did a "railroad" search at the Arcadia website, 127 hits!

Arcadia Publishing
http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?

There's a good and a bad side to Arcadia's efforts.

On the one hand, it has opened up many possibilities for books and subjects that would otherwise not be covered (think a lot of potential gift-shop books with very local interests).

On the other hand, Arcadia formally approached me for a book project some time back. They promptly lost interest in me when I asked "how much do you pay your authors?" and questions about photo rights/fees.

Unless someone can tell me of a different experience, I have to say that what I've seen of Arcadia's business model, as someone who makes a fair portion of his income from the written word and photograph, is but one step shy of the "vanity press" syndrome. It's certainly a way for a book to get on the market that otherwise wouldn't, but producers of quality writing/photography/history would be encouraged to look elsewhere for more return on their work.

If I understand it correctly, Morning Sun, publishers of the Color Guide series, is the same way. The business model guarantees that the publisher makes back his costs and makes a profit, and the author gets to see his material in print. Whether he ever gets any money is questionable; the risk is all his.

Be that as it may, it does provide a way for people with large photo collections to share them with the world. The Morning Sun format is quite limiting in that they won't use B&W images, much to the detriment of subject matter that may need them to be complete. At least in this respect the Arcadia may be a better deal. Do they allow any color?

I am not an Arcadia author, but it seems to me that the quality of the photos in the books has gotten bettter. I am thinking about it.

Several of the volunteers at the Western Railway Museum have produced titles: Sacramento Northern,
Sacramento Street Cars, Northwestern Pacific Railroad, San Francisco's #40 Line.

They tell me that you do not expect to make money unless they do a second printing of your title.

We have both a bunch of Images of Rail books and a whole bunch of small town or regional histories on a shelf in the bookstore.

The company can supply a stand to hold 12 or 16 of their books if shelf space is short in your museum store.

As an Arcadia author, I have to say that their practices are pretty much industry standard. I retain the copyright to the book and all holders of copyrighted material used in the book retain their full rights.
I receive a decent royalty check on a regular basis-not bad considering that I do ZERO book promotion. The quality of the written material is good-only a couple of minor problems made it to press-both of which were my fault as they escaped my attention. The quality of the writing and information is that of the writer, not the publisher.

From what Arcadia has told me, Railroads of Chattanooga has already gone into a second printing-may well go into additional reprintings as it is sold in all the Chattanooga area bookshops and the Museum Store of the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum (hey, they appear in the last chapter!). It's been in print since 2003.

I should also note that their market research indicated that books that had people shown on the outside jacket/cover sold better than those without. Railroads of Chattanooga's cover doesn't have a train anywhere on the cover-just a picture of the VM Tower, Whiteside Tunnel and a bunch of railroaders. Personally I find books with this type of cover more interesting to me than those with just trains on them.

I concur strongly with the comments made by Sandy and Dennis. The current publishing landscape favors slide collection photo essays rather than detailed historical studies. But then this fits in well with our world of music-slide shows that display a couple hundred images with no narration or caption information, shown over a background of popular songs. The "speaker" drives a few hundred miles to push "enter" on a computer, watches the show with the audience, and then drives home having only spoken a few words. The audience gets to listen to a bunch of songs they could have heard at home, and watch hundreds of pretty pictures without learning anything. It's "MTV railfanning", noise and images with very little information. We are getting closer to the concept of the mimes with parasols doing "interpretive dances" around the steam locomotive as it spins on a turntable in the middle of a circle of seating stands while the audience listens to recorded music. The way things are going it seems like the ability to convey information by speaking or writing will someday be a part of history too.

If you have a serious topic that required a lot of time and effort to research, you are probably better off breaking it down into segments that can be published in the commercial railroad enthusiast magazines rather than handling it as a book and ending up with zero zilch nothing for your efforts.

MX (obviously not my real name)

Arcadia Publishing has created a market for itself by filling a niche that no one else has.
As books editor for the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society's journal, Railroad History, I've seen quite a few examples of the company's products. I'd concur with most of the comments already posted here. The quality of the output is almost entirely up to the author.

Arcadia is fine if you think of it as a printer, not a publisher. Our reviewers have found such ludicrous errors in its railroad books that you have to wonder if any editing process takes place at all. Here are some excerpts from the review Tom Hoback (CEO of Indiana Rail Road) wrote about "Railroads of Kankakee" :

"... the book is riddled with factual errors which begin with the book’s cover photograph (a picture of a NKP 765 built in the 1920’s on an excursion with both heavyweight and lightweight equipment) which the author attributes to a 1910 image of a Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago train.

"The author frequently incorrectly identifies locomotives and railroad lineage. There are at least three dozen erroneous captions. Errors range from steam locomotive wheel arrangements (the 4-6-0 “Pacific Style”; a 2-6-6 “Articulated” locomotive which turns out to be an Illinois Central 0-6-0 switcher; a “Northern Pacific” 4-8-4 which is in actuality an Illinois Central 4-8-2). The latter photograph also depicts a railroad crossing guard holding up a stop sign for motorists but the author suggests the sign is to stop a NYC diesel on a parallel track. A pair of NYC EMD units is referred to as ALCO’s.

"Some of the author’s captions are outrageous. Page 115 refers to an EMD F unit that ran for “365 consecutive days without servicing”, an impossibility if the term servicing includes fuel, water, sand and routine lubricating fluids. The author refers to nameless express trains operating between Chicago and the Twin Cities which originated in Kankakee.

"There is a head on view of a locomotive approaching a single track railroad bridge in which the author states “the double tracking and siding is clearly evident”.

"The author’s lack of familiarity of railroad nomenclature is also evident throughout the book. For instance, he refers to locomotive cowcatchers (or pilots) as “Cow chasers”."

Need anything more be said?

Dan Cupper
Harrisburg, Pa.

This kind of reminds me of Motorbooks, where a couple of the authors who have done several dozen railroad related titles are still making mistakes with the most fundamental locomotive terminology. It must take a special effort to work with a topic that many times and not learn the basics. I am amazed when these folks fill up hundreds pages with conclusive proof that they have never operated a locomotive or attempted to learn how. You would think they could afford to buy at least one operators manual on eBay and find out the correct nomenclature.

MX

As I (and others) have said, the quality of Arcadia books is dependent on the quality of the author.

I will echo what Ed Kelley said about the editing process as well. I would have liked to get more than on opportunity to review the book proofs before they went to print- when my first advance copy showed up a couple days ago I found one small error that was entirely my fault and a couple boo boos that Arcadia created through their editing process. They made a few changes to my original text that I did not entirely agree with.

HOWEVER, in response to mxdata, Arcadia seems to have a mission to make history available to the unwashed masses, and as such they tend to shy away from any specific jargon or terminologies that may not be apparent or mean anything to a general audience. I suspect that Motorbooks may be doing something similar. Arcadia did change the wording in my book where I got too technical for their tastes. I can live with that.

One more hint, in response to Dan Cuppoer's observations about the Arcadia book he mentioned...if the caption doesn't exactly match the photograph, look at surrounding photographs to see if it would have been better associated with one of them. When I got my proofs back I discovered three or four places where photographs got switched around in the book creation process. I noticed this and marked it up in my proofs, and the photos all got switched back to where they needed to be, but that would not have been the case if I had not closely reviewed the proofs before returning them.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV

What other options are available for potential authors?
I want to do a couple, but mine would be very technical

dr

I've read the posts on this subject through this afternoon. As one who has worked in the S-T-M (scholarly, technical, and medical) publishing field (as opposed to the more commercial "trade" publishing field) for more than 40 years I'd like to add my "two cents."

Regarding royalties, S-T-M publishers pay very little, if anything, in the way of royalties. In fact, some of these publishers actually levy a page charge for publishing in their periodicals. Some authors pay their page charges through grants. Their royalties on book projects is in many cases minimal. I once had an author who mentioned in his invitation to potential co-authors that they should only expect to earn enough to take the family out to dinner at a fast-food restaurant! And this was an author who had a very high reputation in his discipline. Why do authors bother to write for these publications? Many times it's because they earn their livelihood in the "publish-or-perish" professions and publications in such specialties have very small audiences. Sometimes a book in such specialties that sells 1,000 copies can be considered a "blockbuster."

With regard to the "nuts and bolts" of actually asembling a publication, either book or periodical, in this field it is true that opportunities for proof review have become very limited. In the early 1960s it was commonplace for authors to review "galley" proofs (unpaginated, single-column proofs w/o illustrations in place) to check typography and editing. Separate proofs of illustrations usually accompanied galley proofs so the authors could check illustration quality and orientation (i.e., is the photo upside-down or has it been flopped ("mirror image") by a technician unfamiliar with the subject matter?). After the galley proofs were returned and corrected, a second proof stage, page proofs, were sent to authors. The authors could review these proofs to see how the galleys and illustrations were collated and make very few, limited typographical changes.

As costs escalated, the galley proofs were eliminated in favor of sending authors copies of their copy-edited manuscripts for review. Page proofs were sent after the author-approved edited manuscript was corrected.

Today, many publishers do not even send out copy-edited manuscript for review. Authors submit their "raw" manuscript and the next thing they receive from the publisher are page proofs--with a required turnaround time of only two or three days. Not much time to proofread and reassess the placement of illustrations and text. The universal reason given for this latest change is that with most manuscripts provided by authors in electronic format to publishers, and with all of the "electronic editing tools" now available, human editing does not need to be quite as "heavy" as in years past. Many of us "old timers" simply have not bought into this philosophy, but the powers-that-be, and the bean counters, pass down directives that the "worker bees" must follow. -- Ray