Author took publishing road less traveled

Friday, Feb. 2, 2001 | 9:30 a.m.

Las Vegan Geoffrey Clarkson has written a novel, published last month, which could be described as a "financial thriller."

The most thrilling aspect of the book by the former economics professor may not be the plot, but its publishing and marketing.

The self-published "Day Trader" is a tale centered around a computer program designed to automatically make trades on the international currency market. The program quickly turns a few thousand investment dollars into many millions, prompting attempts by an assortment of shady characters to steal the software.

Clarkson, a native of England, published the novel using 1stBooks Library, which allows readers to download an entire book off of the Internet, order a hard-bound copy or a paperback.

For better or worse, virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars and a computer can become a published author.

Clarkson paid $1,200 to publish his book. Twenty years ago, he said, a vanity publisher (those that publish books for a fee) would have charged him $20,000 to $30,000 to print a few books that might be sold -- or might not.

With 1stBooks Library, based in Bloomington, Ind., there is no guesswork on how many books to print -- they are not printed until an order is placed.

"There are no unsold books lying around," Clarkson said. "They are printed on demand."

For his money, Clarkson said he received a book that may be downloaded or ordered as a paperback or hardback book. The price of the electronic book is $5.95; paperback versions are $13.95; and the hardback is $18.95.

According to information on the 1stbook.com website, the 4-year-old company has more than 4,500 books in print, that can also be produced on cassette tapes and CDs.

The company leaves the editing and the decision as to the quality of the book (both content and style) up to the author and the reader.

Robert McCormack, chief operating officer, said in online comments that his company will let the market decide what is valuable and what is not.

"Traditional publishers lament the fact that we're letting books perceived to be of low quality ... to be published, but frankly it's increasingly difficult for anyone to have their books published if there is any inkling they're not going to be a big success," he's quoted as saying.

Clarkson, who has a Ph.D in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says he is following the trail blazed by popular authors Stephen King and John Grisham, who have written "publish-on-demand" books that are available on their own websites.

Clarkson is excited about the potential of this form of vanity publishing, and its simplicity.

"You write on a disk, send the disk to them, they transform it into their format and feed you back a printed galley (unedited copy) and then you go through and make the corrections," he said.

Clarkson, who moved to Las Vegas about two years ago, said he wrote his first financial thriller about 20 years ago, when he was dean of the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University in Boston.

"A real publisher published it and I sold between 10,000 and 20,000 copies," he said.

Semi-retired (he does some consulting and day trading in the international currency market), Clarkson decided he would take the electronic publishing route this time.

Of "Day Trader," he said, "The novel is very simple. A blackjack dealer at a casino in Las Vegas, who is a single mother with one child, can't make ends meet financially, so she replies to an ad for a training course in how to trade international currencies on the Internet.

"She starts trading (it's financially a very dangerous activity that I, myself, do) and starts losing money. A friend of hers, a computer wizard, writes a program (that trades for her) and the program starts to win. In the currency market it is an 'I win, you lose, you win, I lose' situation.

"This lady starts winning big time, though it's really the program (at work)."

Clarkson said the day-trading facts in the story are real. "It's a plain thriller, but at the same time you can learn a little about economics and how to (day trade)."

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