Recipient — 2009 SLPA Affiliate Scholarship

Butch Drury of Riven­dell Books received this year’s affil­i­ate schol­ar­ship to IBPA’s Pub­lish­ing Uni­ver­sity, which took place right before Book­Expo Amer­ica in New York City, May 26–28. “The whole expe­ri­ence,” stated Butch, “was pretty intense, but very reward­ing. In those 2½ days, I learned what will prob­a­bly take me months to imple­ment. ‘For we are in the midst,’ if I may quote the first keynote speaker, Rudy Shur of Square One Pub­lish­ing, ‘of the biggest par­a­digm shift to hit the pub­lish­ing world since the 1920s.’”

While Butch hasn’t been in pub­lish­ing that long, he has been a mem­ber of St. Louis Pub­lish­ers Asso­ci­a­tion for a long time, since 2000 when SLPA itself was in the throes of a par­a­digm shift to stay alive. Hav­ing just pub­lished his first book, Close Encoun­ters of a Very Spe­cial Kind, prior to his find­ing that SLPA even existed, he wishes he had known then what he has since learned from SLPA and its members.

Even though he had read the Ross’ Com­plete Guide to Self-​​Publishing, Butch had no idea how, nor the means to mar­ket his new book. And to make mat­ters worse, he got stuck with a book that had been poorly pro­duced, though, luck­ily for him, as part of a very short run. Shortly there­after he fell on finan­cial hard times when his luck had run out on him too.

“How you think about and cre­ate a book,” pro­claimed the sec­ond keynote speaker, Dominique Rac­cah of Source­books, “has never been more impor­tant. The title and cover make a big dif­fer­ence in posi­tion­ing your book in the mar­ket­place. To become a leader in your cat­e­gory, you must cre­ate a must-​​have title—your book must mean some­thing to your readers.”

As he attended SLPA meet­ings, month after month, year after year, and now one IBPU ses­sion after another, he couldn’t help think­ing about the par­a­digm shift in his own life. He had just released, back in March of this year, a com­pletely revised ver­sion of his first book, now enti­tled A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Sen­tinel, that is one who can inter­pret, cor­rectly, the signs of the times.

“Most of us oper­ate under the mis­guided notion of HAVE-​​DO-​​BE,” states the speaker at one of the last ses­sions Butch attended, Dave Math­i­son, in his new book, BE THE MEDIA. “It goes some­thing like this: ‘When I HAVE (more time, money), then I can DO the things’ (pub­lish a book) ‘that will enable me to BE’” (a suc­cess­ful pub­lisher), when, in real­ity, it’s the other way around.

“It all starts with BEing, or BE-​​DO-​​HAVE,” pro­claims Dave. “Once you focus on who you want to BE” (an author/​publisher) “then you can DO things” (write/​publish a book) “that will allow you to HAVE what you want” (suc­cess as an author/​publisher). “What you are BEing will grow and man­i­fest itself in your life.”

“First I had to be the book,” con­cluded Butch, “then the pub­lisher. Now he’s telling me I have to be the media if I want to bring this whole story to a suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion. If that’s what it takes, so be it.”