FAQ about Stepping Out in Cincinnati

Why did you write a book about the subway?
Was The Cincinnati Subway always the title? It seems so uninspired.
Where did you find all those pictures?
Where did you find all the information?
How long did the whole project take?
How much did you pay to get it published?
How did you find the publisher?
Tell more about the editing job.
Then what?
The Aftermath
Do you work in transportation? Or are you a history and/or railroad expert?
Will you speak to our group?
The Subway book was so interesting! We want more!
Will you give me free copies of your books?
What’s next for your book efforts?
What’s with all these books on Cincinnati history?
Is there anything else besides Cincinnati history you’re going to write about?

Why did you write a book about the subway?

It hadn’t been done. I have been writing for most of my life, and like many other Americans, I wanted to have a book of my very own published. In 1997 I saw a TV news feature on the subway, and I wanted to learn more about it. I started looking for information and couldn’t find any. There was nothing on the web about it, and I could only find a few magazine and newspaper articles about it. Since I was a writer, I decided to write a book about the history of the subway. I asked other people what they thought of the idea, and everyone said that it was a book that needed to be written.

Was The Cincinnati Subway always the title? It seems so uninspired.

My original title was Hidden Tunnels Under Cincinnati. And I still like this title better. But Arcadia’s Images of America series has a specific format for its books. The titles of the books in the series state the subject matter, so my title didn’t work. I suggested titling the book exactly what the book was about, hence The Cincinnati Subway. Maybe it’s not the most exciting title, but it works.

Where did you find all those pictures?

They mostly came from private collectors. When I began my research, the local PBS station channel 48 showed a program called “Red Devils,” a show about the Cincinnati and Lake Erie interurban railroad. In the show was an interview about the subway with “local interurban historian” Earl Clark. I looked his name up in the phone book and gave him a call. I told him about my project and asked him for information. As it turned out, he had compiled a massive collection of photographs over many years, and was willing to share them with me. He introduced me to the members of his street railway club “The Cincinnati Railbuffs,” who were all enthusiastic about my project. Through Earl I met other wonderful people, including Cincinnati broadcasting legend Bill Myers, and street railway aficionado Larry Fobiano.

A great deal of construction photos and information came from the files in the Engineering offices of City Hall. I also used photographs from the Cincinnati Historical Society.

Where did you find all the information?

Much of the information came from newspaper research at the public library and the municipal library in City Hall. I consulted a lot of different Cincinnati history books for any reference that mentioned the subway. I also researched other areas I wanted to cover in the book, including the courthouse riots, World War I, and World War II. The municipal library had a scrapbook that someone had made a long time ago comprised of old newspaper articles about the rapid transit project. This library also contained all of the original reports Cincinnati had commissioned from the 1910s through the 1940s. Using all of these sources I put the story together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

How long did the whole project take?

When I started on the project, I was working a full-time job and had been married a year. It took about two years of research and writing, editing, rewriting and more editing. This all began early 1998 and I finished the first draft of the manuscript later that year. I edited and revised for more months, and Bill Myers further proofread and revised the manuscript. I sat on the project until about 2002 when I found the publisher, and had to go back to work on it for about three more months with more revisions and more editing. It was amazing how much editing was still required. More on this part in the next section.

How much did you pay to get it published?

I have actually been asked this question. Contrary to some popular belief, book publishers will consider unpublished authors. It depends on the publisher, what the author has to offer, what the publisher is looking for at that time, and many other factors. At the same time there exist a multitude of vanity presses, and other publishers who call themselves “traditional publishers,” but are disguised as vanity presses. These companies typically use the POD model, publish on demand, to print their books. With a vanity press, you pay the company so much money (from several hundred up to several thousand dollars) to print your book. The target customer of the vanity press is the author himself who buys copies of his book and then attempts to get bookstores to stock them. Problems with POD and vanity presses include higher cover prices, poor (if any) distribution, no returns, poor discounts to retailers, and many other dilemmas. A chief problem is that real publishers and agents do not consider an author published by a POD or vanity press as being published at all. This is a stigma that can be damaging to an author’s future career. They feel that if you had to pay to get your work published, then something must have been wrong with it therefore doesn’t hold the same respect as having been traditionally published. Fortunately, I found Arcadia Publishing.

How did you find the publisher?

By the time I started the project, I had already read a variety of books on writing and publishing, so I felt I was pretty educated on the basics of the business of book publishing. With a nonfiction book, you can send out query letters to publishers while the book is being written, so after I had written about half the book, I started researching viable publishers. Since my topic was so narrow, the larger New York publishers weren’t going to be interested, so I targeted smaller history and university publishers. I think over the course of the year I sent at least five queries, and none of them were interested, mostly because of the narrow topic. One publisher told me that they had just recently released a book about a Cincinnati subject, and didn’t plan to do another very soon. Another publisher told me the topic was too narrow and suggested I turn the manuscript into an article for a magazine like the Ohio Journal (the kind of journal that most regular members of the public don’t read). This process continued into the months after the book was completed.

I still believed enough in my book that I knew I would eventually find the right publisher, but in 2000 my wife and I bought a house, so the book project was set aside. Sometime around this time I was visiting a website called Forgotten Ohio, whose author was a modern “urban explorer” who visited abandoned locations around the central Ohio area, including the subway tunnels in Cincinnati. This author had a page on his website for his book Forgotten Columbus, which featured abandoned buildings and other locations around Columbus. In the description was a link to the publisher. In 2002 I finally clicked on the link and started reading about the publisher Arcadia, who published books on regional history topics. I sent an email to the Midwest office, describing my book, and saying it was kind of similar to the subject matter in Forgotten Columbus. The editor wrote back and said it sounded interesting, and requested I email the manuscript. So I did, and he liked it, and after a couple of weeks gave me the thumbs-up and mailed me a contract. My book was finally going to get published.

Tell more about the editing job.

My manuscript was 55,000 words, and I had over 200 pictures, maps and diagrams I wanted to use. Most of Arcadia’s Images of America books have a very specific format: light on the text, and heavy on the pictures. I had enough pictures, but I had too much text. The publisher wanted to work with me on this, so revisions were required: I had to cut at least half the words out of the text. And to a writer, this is like cutting off his arms. The editor said to relocate as much text as I could into the captions, so that was my first task. He set each chapter at a certain word length, so I had to cut words, lines and complete sections out of the text. I first cut the last chapter completely, which covered what had happened with the light rail issue in Cincinnati during the 1990s. I condensed this chapter to a single sentence. I cut out much of the information covering the 1970s and 1980s, condensing that information into small chunks. For the rest of the manuscript I relocated text into the captions, and rewrote them as necessary. Then I spent every evening and weekend through October poring carefully through the text, deleting unnecessary words and sentences and fixing problems I had never seen before.

By November, I was finished. What I finished with met the guidelines given by the editor and as a bonus, the manuscript resulted in flowing much better and was much tighter than before; plus, the story of the subway was focused more, and the topics of the 1970s through the 1990s weren’t discussed in so much detail.

After submitting the manuscript, it turned out I wasn’t finished yet. The editor told me I needed more pictures for the World War II and the 1950s chapter, as well as a couple other sections. The Cincinnati Historical Society provided me with some of the photos and memorabilia I needed (at a price), and I was able to get some other last minute pictures from a private collector. After I did this, everything was OK.

Then what?

The book’s release was set for May, 2003. In February I contacted the columnist Cliff Radel of the Cincinnati Enquirer and told him about the upcoming book. He interviewed me and wrote a very flattering article, which ran one week before the book’s release. This article then kicked off the book sales all over Cincinnati—people immediately began asking for the book before it came out.

Arcadia is a smaller publisher and doesn’t print 50,000 copies at time. Typical of their other titles, the subway book’s initial run was 1200 copies. In one month, all copies had sold out of the publisher, and they had to issue a second printing. After the second printing came out, in a couple months they had to issue a third printing. After three more months, they issued a fourth printing. Currently the book has been printed four times, and has sold over 3,200 copies since its May, 2003 release.

The Aftermath

Needless to say I was thrilled with the book’s success. Many people in Cincinnati had known about the subway, but nobody had ever heard the entire story. And many people didn’t know at all that a subway is in Cincinnati, built in the 1920s and never used. Thanks to urban exploration and the web, adventurous and curious people all over the world are interested in the old subway. And the audience is not limited to Cincinnatians or urban explorers. People who love streetcars and early transit all over the country have been enthralled with The Cincinnati Subway. It continues to sell very well in stores around Cincinnati.

Do you work in transportation? Or are you a history and/or railroad expert?

The answer to these is no, I have a degree in broadcasting from NKU. I simply have a huge interest in mysterious, abandoned tunnels, streetcars, railroads, things of this nature. I am a part-time writer and work full time at an investment company doing data entry.

Will you speak to our group?

Certainly, just tell me what the group is and what you would like me to talk about.

The Subway book was so interesting! We want more!

That’s why I wrote Cincinnati on the Go. I find early transportation in Cincinnati so fascinating and wanted to expand on the images seen in The Cincinnati Subway. In that first book, my main focus was the subway project, but I included images of other transit methods that would have affected the subway in one way or another: streetcars, interurbans, inclines, etc. I thought a whole book with just illustrations of mass transit would go over well, and the publisher agreed. Cincinnati on the Go did not take as long to create as the subway book, but it was a lot of work in my allotted time. Thanks in part to the editorial contributions of Bill Myers, I was able to create an awesome book on mass transit in Cincinnati. Its release date was October 25, 2004.

Will you give me free copies of your books?

Here’s a sticky question. Free copies are generally reserved for contributors (of photos or information), family members, the occasional nonprofit organization, or anyone I feel deserves a free copy. However, a book is an item of value. I have to buy my own copies of my book, which I will resell or give away as gifts at my discretion. But if I buy a case of books and give copies away to anyone who asks for one, then I’m out a big pile of money. So, I ask that those who ask for free copies, please realize that you should respect the fact that I am the author who put a great deal of time and effort into creating the book, and that you should treat the book as you would any other saleable item. Instead of requesting free copies, you should support the work of the author. Would you ask a painter, who lives on the sales of his work, for free paintings? Would you write Stephen King and ask for free copies of his books? Would you go to the grocery store and ask for free baskets of food?

What’s next for your book efforts?

I’m in the process of researching a book about entertainment in Cincinnati, 1900 to 1950.

• Locations of the entertainment hotspots around Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky
• Entertainment on board the riverboats
• What famous musicians and music groups passed through the Queen City
• What it was like being a traveling musician performing for these visiting bands
• Vaudeville
• Radio and Television performance
• Speakeasies

What’s with all these books on Cincinnati history?

It really just started with the subway book, and when I wrote that, I didn’t know what direction my writing career would be going. I figure that if I’ve found something that I enjoy writing, then I’ll continue doing it. I happen to have a great interest in transportation history; old entertainment is fascinating, the 1920s and Prohibition was a unique and magical time, and overall I think Cincinnati is a cool city despite many claims to the contrary. If I can turn my interests into books that people enjoy reading, then I can stroke my ego and make some money too. AND, if I can show that Cincinnati is not such a bad place to live and work, then I have contributed to society in a positive way.

Is there anything else besides Cincinnati history you’re going to write about?

Like any writer, I have lots of ideas and projects I’m developing. I’m gradually writing a horror fiction book about a scary doll and an old murder house, and a collection of funny and true stories from the world of radio broadcasting. I have other projects in mind that I would like to pursue, but those could be years down the road.