Home
A Trip Down Nightmare Alley
Chuck Davis, congenial radio host, quizmaster, newspaper columnist and author, has devoted his life to being the expert on the city of Vancouver's history and its environs. His landmark volume, The Vancouver Book (1976), for which he was listed as general editor, was long regarded as his foremost accomplishment, even though it was eclipsed in size by his 882-page omnibus, The Greater Vancouver Book (1997), co-produced with business partner John Cochlin. Davis chose to self-publish the latter; and ultimately, it was this choice that denied him commercial success comparable to that of the former.
In this essay that originally appeared in the Summer 2002 issue, Davis recalls in candid and humble detail the self-inflicted self-publishing detour that led him from Easy Street to Nightmare Alley.
Something strange happened to me on the morning I started writing this. I was reading Deena Rosenberg's book Fascinating Rhythm, about George and Ira Gershwin. It describes the piano in the center of the room, one of George's favourite Steinway grands, where the brothers wrote all the songs from Porgy and Bess. I imagined standing in that room, awestruck, when suddenly and alarmingly I found myself blinking back tears.
I put the book aside, swallowing repeatedly to erase that ugly and unexpected little spasm of self-pity. The vision of the Gershwin brothers excitedly moving around that piano, George humming and playing new melodies, Ira creating those wonderfully smart lyrics, both men jauntily writing down their work, contrasted so painfully with my own agony of recent years, trying to create while eaten by worry and fear.
For four years I have been in the middle of a financial nightmare, caused by my creation of a book - my 13th - called The Greater Vancouver Book. That book drove my partner into personal bankruptcy; created an instant army of angry unpaid contributors; and saddled me with a debt. I have been paying off that debt at an average of about $500 a week and I will be paying for many years to come. That debt takes every cent I make, and I survive only because of my loving, generous (and steadily working) wife of 36 years.
I've asked her not to read this article if it runs. It would be just too damned painful.
How did a project that was going to put us on Easy Street dump us instead into Nightmare Alley? How did I come to have unpaid contributors snubbing me on the street, threatening to sue, and writing us nasty letters, including an anonymous "Merry Christmas"; greeting scrawled on a piece of used toilet paper?
Return with me to 1993. I was working on Top Dog!, the history of CKNW. When that work was finished, immeasurably faster thanks to the computer assistance of John and Kathy McQuarrie, we talked about a possible new project. Out of that discussion came the decision to launch The Greater Vancouver Book.
I had wanted for years to expand my 1976 Vancouver Book, an 'urban almanac.' Every time I walked into Duthie's the staff would ask when I was going to do an update. The book sold out, but the publisher (J.J. Douglas, now Douglas & McIntyre) declined to produce more because it had been too costly and time-consuming for them. I should have remembered that.
Even at 500 big pages, I thought The Vancouver Book was too small. My inclination was, and remains, to get everything in. I even toyed, but only briefly, with the idea of including maps showing every building in the city. And I mean every building. I'm not entirely sane about stuff like this. My first major decision was that every article in the new book would be brand new and at least 1.5 times bigger than in the original, more subjects would be included, and the area covered would be not just the city but all of Greater Vancouver. Because of its size and expanded coverage, we'd call it an 'urban encyclopedia'.
Denny Boyd had been a fan of the original The Vancouver Book. He was tickled when I told him that back in 1976 TVB had been the second-most frequently stolen book in the Vancouver Public Library system. "What,"; Denny wanted to know, "was the first-most stolen book?"; It was Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. Denny said, "Thank God the other guy isn't planning a sequel.";
I rashly announced I would write the entire book myself. It soon became apparent that wouldn't work. I could do it, but it would take way too long. We'd calculated the project would take two-and-a-half years. With more than 200 contributors, it ended up taking four. So we needed more writers. How to pay them? Sponsorships, I said. There would be no advertising in the book, but pages and sections could be sponsored. We'd put what's called "institutional"; copy along the bottom of sponsored pages.
My very first cold call resulted in sponsorship of the back cover by BC Gas!
An old friend, adman Fin Anthony, advised me to double our fee schedule for everything. We discovered to our delight it made absolutely no difference. Sponsorships continued to pile up. We ended up with more than 200 sponsors. Many major companies signed on: Air Canada, BC Rail, BC Hydro, Canfor, VanCity, Finning, the Pan Pacific Hotel. I never got cocky but I was supremely confident that John and I were going to produce a blockbuster. By the end, Fin and I sold more than $300,000 in sponsorships.
But a small cloud was beginning to form.
The cost of the paper went up $40,000 while the book was in production. We were able to work out a contra deal with the paper company. But other costs of the book were rising steadily, far beyond what we'd expected. We could have saved thousands of dollars having the book printed in Hong Kong, but I said, "Hey, we can't celebrate Greater Vancouver with a book printed in Hong Kong."; Gawd, I was stupid.
Payment for these hard, practical things began to make it difficult to pay our contributors. The book couldn't happen without production work, without paper and printing, so we had to give these items priority. We gave advances to many of our earlier writers, but then we started asking other to do the work on promise of payment.
This was the 13th book I'd written, co-written or edited, but it was the first I'd ever published. To make a long and ugly story short, the total cost of the project was about $700,000 or so, meaning were short about $400,000 from breaking even. The book would have to sell really well to make that up. We were sure it would.
The articles by our 200-plus writers - more than 20 of whom, by the way, had also contributed to the 1976 book - covered just about every aspect of life in metropolitan Vancouver. Their work was extensive, and fact-filled and (my favourite description of the book) useful. Constance Brissenden, for instance, worked for months on her list of 500 people of Greater Vancouver's past. At 47,000 words it's a small book in itself. Nothing like it has ever been done before, and I'm prouder of her work in the book than I am about any other writer's.
The book ended up a big, fat, fact-packed marvel. Late as it was, we were very proud of it. The first copies came out of the bindery June 11, 1997.
The first review appeared in the Sun: the book was trashed. Thoroughly. The reviewer hated the articles, hated the cover, hated the paper it was printed on, she didn't like this and didn't like that, and on and on and on. It was a complete slash-and-burn job. Except for one thing: She had a kind word for Shane McCune's article on Burn's Bog.
I handled the distribution of the book, so I knew the Sun reviewer had had it for less than a week, maybe about two days. It's a book of more than 800,000 words, seven or eight times the size of a standard novel. That review was a body blow. The Province didn't review the book but they did run a photo of me holding it, with a nice caption. A little while later the Sun's City Limits column asked if they could run the occasional little tidbit from the book for free, in return for credit to the source. I agreed. CBC Radio's Ira Nadel gave it a terrific plug. I still recall sitting in my listening to it, and saying, "Thank you, Ira!"
We'd tried to interest Business in Vancouver in our project because it was financed by local businesses, but the magazine never wrote a story. Then one day, after our real financial problems had started, we got a call from one of BiV's writers who said he'd heard the book was in trouble. Now they were interested. I was so angry I could never bring myself to read whatever they printed.
Still blinded by our prospects for the book, John and I sent out letters time and again telling our contributors they would eventually be paid. And time and time again we just couldn't do it. Many times over these past four years I've received mail from writers that I didn't have the heart, or the guts, to open, and phone messages I found difficult or impossible to reply to.
The book did sell well but - in yet another example of my doltishness - I had arranged for 20,000 to be sold, at the full retail price of $39.95, that would be $799,000. Deduct the 40 per cent bookstore commission ($319,600) and that would leave us with $479,400. Add the sponsorhips to get approximately $779,000, deduct the $700,000 cost of the project and John/Kathy and I would split the hypothetical $79,000 net. That would be $39,500 to each of the partners for the work of four years, a little under $10,000 a year. Not quite enough for my dreamed-of four-door XJ6 Jaguar sedan.
In the end, we sold 11,000, a couple thousand of those at a discount, all in one corner of the country. In terms of sales, The Greater Vancouver Book was a roaring success. But thanks to that "success,"; John and I found ourselves in debt about a quarter of a million dollars. Visions of Samarkand and Machu Picchu faded, to be replaced by a sea of outstretched hands.
The biggest hand belonged to the bank from which we had made a big loan to cover the unanticipated extra costs of producing the book. The second biggest was attached to the credit union at which I had arranged, for the same purpose, a second mortgage on our home. The most stressful fact in all of this mess is that I had no one else to blame.
I had met the enemy and he was me.
I vividly recall a night back in 1998 when I waited for the decision of the judges as to which book would win the City of Vancouver Book Award that year. I really wanted to win that award and the $1,000 that went with it. The Greater Vancouver Book did win, and the very next morning I rushed to the credit union with that $1,000 cheque, just in time to pay my mortgage.
With three kids to support, and besieged on all sides by creditors, john had to make a decision. He declared personal bankruptcy. Goodbye to family trips to Disneyland. (He's out of bankruptcy now and doing well in unrelated work. And, astonishingly, he and I are still friends. In fact, we've just produced an offshoot called Vancouver Then and Now.)
I decided not to go into bankruptcy because I knew virtually all of those writers. I didn't want to go through what's left of my life having to look aside in embarrassment when I met one of them. I've been told I could have declared bankruptcy, got some relief, and still paid them off down the road. But I just couldn't do it.
Just before I started writing this article, an event occurred that convinced me it had to be written.
It was Wednesday night, September 5, at a Bard on the Beach performance of Taming of the Shrew (for which we had complimentary tickets). One of the book's contributors was also in the audience, and when our eyes happened to meet there was a little flash of anger and contempt from her. What was painful about that particular occasion was that she was one of the really good writers, and had sent me a letter shortly before beginning her assignments complimenting me on the pay scale I had set. We offered writer an average of about $400 a page. Contrast that with the payment I got for writing three articles in the Canadian Encyclopedia: $45. Total. That is not a misprint.
As a writer myself, one who has often been paid less than the work warranted, I wanted to do the decent thing. Now that angry writer is still waiting four years later for her money. She has lots of company. How many other contributors are out there, convinced we made a killing on the book?
Some of the writers, knowing my financial situation, wrote me to say forget what I owe them. Such generous and compassionate responses are gratefully acknowledged, and will be resolutely ignored. I commissioned the work, they did they work, and I'll pay for it. I would expect nothing less from someone who owed me money.
I still await the day I can start sending out letters that begin, "Please find enclosed a cheque for...";
Centre spread: Wait for me Daddy
Canada's most famous war photograph is a heart-stopping moment captured by the Province's chief photographer Claud Dettlof on October 10, 1940. As the British Columbia Regiment, Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles, are marching off to an uncertain future in the European theatre of the Second World War, five-year-old Warren Bernard breaks away from his mother's hand and rushes to grasp the outstretched hand of his father, Pte. Jack Bernard.
The photograph, taken on 8th Street in New Westminster, was flashed all around the world within days. It appeared in Life Magazine, and has papered in newspapers, magazines and books beyond counting.
It is a great photograph. And it was a happy ending: Jack Bernard returned from the war unscathed. He's gone now, but his son Warren - 'Whitey' to his friends - lives and works today in Tofino.
--Vancouver Then and Now (Magic Light $450
Right Sidebar: Exit from Nightmare Alley
Following the Greater Vancouver Book, Chuck Davis worked for a local dot.com company, Stratford Internet Technologies, until it crashed. A second internet firm he worked for crashed. Then the city of Port Coquitlam hired him to write its official history, Port Coquitlam: Where the Rivers Meet (Harbour $39.95). The monthly installment of his fee exactly matched his monthly loan repayments to the bank. That book was published in 2000. Now he's in trouble with the bank again. His former partner has arranged to have complimentary copies of the GVB distributed to schools. "That won't help the writer and other contributes,"; Davis says, "but it'll get the book into more places where it will do some good."; In October, an Ottawa firm released Davis & McQuarrie's collaboration Vancouver Then & Now (Magin Light $45), a 208-page, picture-rich look at physical changes in the city - printed in Hong Kong. Davis still hopes to write The Big One, the definitive book on the history of metropolitan Vancouver. "I won't publish it, I promise."; - Ed.
Quote from Davis: "I used to give slide-illustrated talks on local history at schools. At the very first school I showed a picture of the statue of Captain George Vancouver. I explained to the kids that this was a statue in front of Vancouver's city hall. 'Anyone know who that man is?' I asked. And back from a hundred kids' voices shouting as one, 'George Washington!' I laughed the first time I heard it, thought it was an aberration. Later, I stopped laughing. I visited more than 40 schools, and heard the same thing at all but one of them. Thousands of local kids believed that the first president of the USA is honored but a statue at Vancouver City Hall.";
In this essay that originally appeared in the Summer 2002 issue, Davis recalls in candid and humble detail the self-inflicted self-publishing detour that led him from Easy Street to Nightmare Alley.
Something strange happened to me on the morning I started writing this. I was reading Deena Rosenberg's book Fascinating Rhythm, about George and Ira Gershwin. It describes the piano in the center of the room, one of George's favourite Steinway grands, where the brothers wrote all the songs from Porgy and Bess. I imagined standing in that room, awestruck, when suddenly and alarmingly I found myself blinking back tears.
I put the book aside, swallowing repeatedly to erase that ugly and unexpected little spasm of self-pity. The vision of the Gershwin brothers excitedly moving around that piano, George humming and playing new melodies, Ira creating those wonderfully smart lyrics, both men jauntily writing down their work, contrasted so painfully with my own agony of recent years, trying to create while eaten by worry and fear.
For four years I have been in the middle of a financial nightmare, caused by my creation of a book - my 13th - called The Greater Vancouver Book. That book drove my partner into personal bankruptcy; created an instant army of angry unpaid contributors; and saddled me with a debt. I have been paying off that debt at an average of about $500 a week and I will be paying for many years to come. That debt takes every cent I make, and I survive only because of my loving, generous (and steadily working) wife of 36 years.
I've asked her not to read this article if it runs. It would be just too damned painful.
How did a project that was going to put us on Easy Street dump us instead into Nightmare Alley? How did I come to have unpaid contributors snubbing me on the street, threatening to sue, and writing us nasty letters, including an anonymous "Merry Christmas"; greeting scrawled on a piece of used toilet paper?
Return with me to 1993. I was working on Top Dog!, the history of CKNW. When that work was finished, immeasurably faster thanks to the computer assistance of John and Kathy McQuarrie, we talked about a possible new project. Out of that discussion came the decision to launch The Greater Vancouver Book.
I had wanted for years to expand my 1976 Vancouver Book, an 'urban almanac.' Every time I walked into Duthie's the staff would ask when I was going to do an update. The book sold out, but the publisher (J.J. Douglas, now Douglas & McIntyre) declined to produce more because it had been too costly and time-consuming for them. I should have remembered that.
Even at 500 big pages, I thought The Vancouver Book was too small. My inclination was, and remains, to get everything in. I even toyed, but only briefly, with the idea of including maps showing every building in the city. And I mean every building. I'm not entirely sane about stuff like this. My first major decision was that every article in the new book would be brand new and at least 1.5 times bigger than in the original, more subjects would be included, and the area covered would be not just the city but all of Greater Vancouver. Because of its size and expanded coverage, we'd call it an 'urban encyclopedia'.
Denny Boyd had been a fan of the original The Vancouver Book. He was tickled when I told him that back in 1976 TVB had been the second-most frequently stolen book in the Vancouver Public Library system. "What,"; Denny wanted to know, "was the first-most stolen book?"; It was Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. Denny said, "Thank God the other guy isn't planning a sequel.";
I rashly announced I would write the entire book myself. It soon became apparent that wouldn't work. I could do it, but it would take way too long. We'd calculated the project would take two-and-a-half years. With more than 200 contributors, it ended up taking four. So we needed more writers. How to pay them? Sponsorships, I said. There would be no advertising in the book, but pages and sections could be sponsored. We'd put what's called "institutional"; copy along the bottom of sponsored pages.
My very first cold call resulted in sponsorship of the back cover by BC Gas!
An old friend, adman Fin Anthony, advised me to double our fee schedule for everything. We discovered to our delight it made absolutely no difference. Sponsorships continued to pile up. We ended up with more than 200 sponsors. Many major companies signed on: Air Canada, BC Rail, BC Hydro, Canfor, VanCity, Finning, the Pan Pacific Hotel. I never got cocky but I was supremely confident that John and I were going to produce a blockbuster. By the end, Fin and I sold more than $300,000 in sponsorships.
But a small cloud was beginning to form.
The cost of the paper went up $40,000 while the book was in production. We were able to work out a contra deal with the paper company. But other costs of the book were rising steadily, far beyond what we'd expected. We could have saved thousands of dollars having the book printed in Hong Kong, but I said, "Hey, we can't celebrate Greater Vancouver with a book printed in Hong Kong."; Gawd, I was stupid.
Payment for these hard, practical things began to make it difficult to pay our contributors. The book couldn't happen without production work, without paper and printing, so we had to give these items priority. We gave advances to many of our earlier writers, but then we started asking other to do the work on promise of payment.
This was the 13th book I'd written, co-written or edited, but it was the first I'd ever published. To make a long and ugly story short, the total cost of the project was about $700,000 or so, meaning were short about $400,000 from breaking even. The book would have to sell really well to make that up. We were sure it would.
The articles by our 200-plus writers - more than 20 of whom, by the way, had also contributed to the 1976 book - covered just about every aspect of life in metropolitan Vancouver. Their work was extensive, and fact-filled and (my favourite description of the book) useful. Constance Brissenden, for instance, worked for months on her list of 500 people of Greater Vancouver's past. At 47,000 words it's a small book in itself. Nothing like it has ever been done before, and I'm prouder of her work in the book than I am about any other writer's.
The book ended up a big, fat, fact-packed marvel. Late as it was, we were very proud of it. The first copies came out of the bindery June 11, 1997.
The first review appeared in the Sun: the book was trashed. Thoroughly. The reviewer hated the articles, hated the cover, hated the paper it was printed on, she didn't like this and didn't like that, and on and on and on. It was a complete slash-and-burn job. Except for one thing: She had a kind word for Shane McCune's article on Burn's Bog.
I handled the distribution of the book, so I knew the Sun reviewer had had it for less than a week, maybe about two days. It's a book of more than 800,000 words, seven or eight times the size of a standard novel. That review was a body blow. The Province didn't review the book but they did run a photo of me holding it, with a nice caption. A little while later the Sun's City Limits column asked if they could run the occasional little tidbit from the book for free, in return for credit to the source. I agreed. CBC Radio's Ira Nadel gave it a terrific plug. I still recall sitting in my listening to it, and saying, "Thank you, Ira!"
We'd tried to interest Business in Vancouver in our project because it was financed by local businesses, but the magazine never wrote a story. Then one day, after our real financial problems had started, we got a call from one of BiV's writers who said he'd heard the book was in trouble. Now they were interested. I was so angry I could never bring myself to read whatever they printed.
Still blinded by our prospects for the book, John and I sent out letters time and again telling our contributors they would eventually be paid. And time and time again we just couldn't do it. Many times over these past four years I've received mail from writers that I didn't have the heart, or the guts, to open, and phone messages I found difficult or impossible to reply to.
The book did sell well but - in yet another example of my doltishness - I had arranged for 20,000 to be sold, at the full retail price of $39.95, that would be $799,000. Deduct the 40 per cent bookstore commission ($319,600) and that would leave us with $479,400. Add the sponsorhips to get approximately $779,000, deduct the $700,000 cost of the project and John/Kathy and I would split the hypothetical $79,000 net. That would be $39,500 to each of the partners for the work of four years, a little under $10,000 a year. Not quite enough for my dreamed-of four-door XJ6 Jaguar sedan.
In the end, we sold 11,000, a couple thousand of those at a discount, all in one corner of the country. In terms of sales, The Greater Vancouver Book was a roaring success. But thanks to that "success,"; John and I found ourselves in debt about a quarter of a million dollars. Visions of Samarkand and Machu Picchu faded, to be replaced by a sea of outstretched hands.
The biggest hand belonged to the bank from which we had made a big loan to cover the unanticipated extra costs of producing the book. The second biggest was attached to the credit union at which I had arranged, for the same purpose, a second mortgage on our home. The most stressful fact in all of this mess is that I had no one else to blame.
I had met the enemy and he was me.
I vividly recall a night back in 1998 when I waited for the decision of the judges as to which book would win the City of Vancouver Book Award that year. I really wanted to win that award and the $1,000 that went with it. The Greater Vancouver Book did win, and the very next morning I rushed to the credit union with that $1,000 cheque, just in time to pay my mortgage.
With three kids to support, and besieged on all sides by creditors, john had to make a decision. He declared personal bankruptcy. Goodbye to family trips to Disneyland. (He's out of bankruptcy now and doing well in unrelated work. And, astonishingly, he and I are still friends. In fact, we've just produced an offshoot called Vancouver Then and Now.)
I decided not to go into bankruptcy because I knew virtually all of those writers. I didn't want to go through what's left of my life having to look aside in embarrassment when I met one of them. I've been told I could have declared bankruptcy, got some relief, and still paid them off down the road. But I just couldn't do it.
Just before I started writing this article, an event occurred that convinced me it had to be written.
It was Wednesday night, September 5, at a Bard on the Beach performance of Taming of the Shrew (for which we had complimentary tickets). One of the book's contributors was also in the audience, and when our eyes happened to meet there was a little flash of anger and contempt from her. What was painful about that particular occasion was that she was one of the really good writers, and had sent me a letter shortly before beginning her assignments complimenting me on the pay scale I had set. We offered writer an average of about $400 a page. Contrast that with the payment I got for writing three articles in the Canadian Encyclopedia: $45. Total. That is not a misprint.
As a writer myself, one who has often been paid less than the work warranted, I wanted to do the decent thing. Now that angry writer is still waiting four years later for her money. She has lots of company. How many other contributors are out there, convinced we made a killing on the book?
Some of the writers, knowing my financial situation, wrote me to say forget what I owe them. Such generous and compassionate responses are gratefully acknowledged, and will be resolutely ignored. I commissioned the work, they did they work, and I'll pay for it. I would expect nothing less from someone who owed me money.
I still await the day I can start sending out letters that begin, "Please find enclosed a cheque for...";
Centre spread: Wait for me Daddy
Canada's most famous war photograph is a heart-stopping moment captured by the Province's chief photographer Claud Dettlof on October 10, 1940. As the British Columbia Regiment, Duke of Connaught's Own Rifles, are marching off to an uncertain future in the European theatre of the Second World War, five-year-old Warren Bernard breaks away from his mother's hand and rushes to grasp the outstretched hand of his father, Pte. Jack Bernard.
The photograph, taken on 8th Street in New Westminster, was flashed all around the world within days. It appeared in Life Magazine, and has papered in newspapers, magazines and books beyond counting.
It is a great photograph. And it was a happy ending: Jack Bernard returned from the war unscathed. He's gone now, but his son Warren - 'Whitey' to his friends - lives and works today in Tofino.
--Vancouver Then and Now (Magic Light $450
Right Sidebar: Exit from Nightmare Alley
Following the Greater Vancouver Book, Chuck Davis worked for a local dot.com company, Stratford Internet Technologies, until it crashed. A second internet firm he worked for crashed. Then the city of Port Coquitlam hired him to write its official history, Port Coquitlam: Where the Rivers Meet (Harbour $39.95). The monthly installment of his fee exactly matched his monthly loan repayments to the bank. That book was published in 2000. Now he's in trouble with the bank again. His former partner has arranged to have complimentary copies of the GVB distributed to schools. "That won't help the writer and other contributes,"; Davis says, "but it'll get the book into more places where it will do some good."; In October, an Ottawa firm released Davis & McQuarrie's collaboration Vancouver Then & Now (Magin Light $45), a 208-page, picture-rich look at physical changes in the city - printed in Hong Kong. Davis still hopes to write The Big One, the definitive book on the history of metropolitan Vancouver. "I won't publish it, I promise."; - Ed.
Quote from Davis: "I used to give slide-illustrated talks on local history at schools. At the very first school I showed a picture of the statue of Captain George Vancouver. I explained to the kids that this was a statue in front of Vancouver's city hall. 'Anyone know who that man is?' I asked. And back from a hundred kids' voices shouting as one, 'George Washington!' I laughed the first time I heard it, thought it was an aberration. Later, I stopped laughing. I visited more than 40 schools, and heard the same thing at all but one of them. Thousands of local kids believed that the first president of the USA is honored but a statue at Vancouver City Hall.";
Submitted on May 18, 2012 in By David.
