Well, the third edition of
Final Cut is at the printers now and the book should be out by December 5. For those who don't know or care, this book covers the B-17 since 1945 and contains the histories of each of the surviving airplanes. What began as a quick update and reprint of the book, last done in 2000, turned into a major rewrite and expansion of the book that took about four times longer and required a huge investment of time (and money). Here is the table of contents of the third edition.
But I wanted to relate a few things for those who might be interested in how a project like this comes to fruition.
Final Cut was first put together in 1990 by me as a labor of love. It was my first book and I basically wrote it because I wanted to read it. I had the files and many of the photos. It was published by Pictorial Histories of Missoula, Montana. Pictorial Histories is a publishing house run by Stan Cohen, who has a huge catalog of books and would take on projects like mine. Aviation publishing is a risky business and not particularly lucrative, but Stan thought the book would sell and it did.
In the years that followed, I decided to try a few books myself and started Aero Vintage Books. I did three books in the first few years and learned much. Final Cut was out of print by 2000, so Stan and I decided to update it and bring out a second edition. I became a big-time investor, actually only investor, in the book and I did the layout as we had to convert it to digitized format. The book sold pretty well.
We were nearly sold out this year and I just figured to let it go out of print. However, a surge of sales through the Liberty Foundation touring Liberty Belle and the input from other interested parties caused me to rethink letting it go out of print. So, I then decided I would do a quick update and get it out by the end of summer.
Well, again, I am the major investor and then it turned out the book had to be laid out again to incorporate the updates and accommodate software changes. That is a very time consuming process. Plus, the photos were all rescanned and then cleaned up as needed. Photoshop and Indesign are your friend, indeed.
Since I was making changes anyway, I decided to include encapsulated histories on each of the civil B-17s. There were about 110 of them, and I have files on each. I wanted to get this material into print in a usable format so that was added to the appendix section. That was time consuming also but should be useful to those dedicated B-17 guys...I know you're out there. Okay, I admit it: I'm eager to show a sample of that section.
So, about six months later it is finally at the printers and it should be out in early December. I consider this third edition a joint Pictorial Histories/Aero Vintage project. My plan is for Aero Vintage to handle most of the retail sales and for Pictorial Histories to handle the wholesale ones. One of the toughest nuts to crack in the aviation book business is wholesale distribution. Good luck on that. Even Stan with his huge catalog has seen many of his distribution deals go away with the receding economy.
For anyone who is interested, though, I did the layout and photo work for the layout, so if anyone has questions about that process, let me know.
By the way, book printing is not cheap, and I had bids from a number of printers for the job. The Chinese bids were 15 to 20 percent cheaper than the U.S. bids. Most books, aviation or otherwise, are now printed overseas, usually China. When the Chinese guy makes $8 a day, it's hard to compete. But, I think about how virtually everything you buy just about everywhere, particularly WalMart, is made in China, and how the U.S. doesn't make too many things anymore, even though the quality by the U.S. companies is probably better. I decided my U.S. money would stay in the U.S., so the book is being printed right now at Visalia, California.
What this long ramble started out as, though, was to acknowledge that many from the WIX family were instrumental in putting this third edition together. Notable are Nick Veronico and Chris Brame, both of whom did an absolutely incredible job of proofreading and editing. And it needed it. Badly. Also, I got input from Chris Henry who read a final draft and contributed his input from someone who knows the subject. But beyond that, I got a whole lot of information and leads and direct contribution of photos from guys who contribute here every day. I'd like to name names but I'm sure I'd miss some, but there are some very knowledgeable and generous folks here. (Okay, Bill, Tom, and Mike stand out.) The WIX group is a good bunch of guys and gals. I roll my eyes and cringe a bit at some of the occasional "things" that go on once in awhile, as I'm sure others do, but overall it's a good place to visit and learn more than a few things.
So excuse the length of this post but I thought it might be of some interest to those here how this aviation book business works, at least for the likes of us, the "little" people.
http://www.aerovintage.com/final.htm
Scott Thompson
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