Part 2 of our interview with David W. Jackson dives deeper into the creation and distribution of your Do It Yourself Genealogy Book.
"My Jackson family identified as Caucasian for the last five generations, but after 30 years of genealogical research I rediscovered a family secret. My great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jackson, was born an African-American slave in Virginia in 1856."
David W. Jackson, founder of the Orderly Pack Rat and author of "Born a Slave," reveals the hidden chapters of his family's past. He has written or contributed to over 60 titles. David shares his unique strategies for structuring his book, the importance of timelines, and the breakthroughs achieved through "cluster research."
Get an insider's perspective on the world of self-publishing as David provides invaluable tips on managing citations, the nuances between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and the challenges of promoting one's work. Learn about his experiences with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org. Thanks to MyHeritage for their generous support to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen! Follow us on social media and subscribe to HTB with Kathleen in order to enter your name in our monthly MyHeritage Complete Package giveaway starting Jan 2024!
Part 2 of our interview with David W. Jackson dives deeper into the creation and distribution of your Do It Yourself Genealogy Book.
"My Jackson family identified as Caucasian for the last five generations, but after 30 years of genealogical research I rediscovered a family secret. My great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jackson, was born an African-American slave in Virginia in 1856."
David W. Jackson, founder of the Orderly Pack Rat and author of "Born a Slave," reveals the hidden chapters of his family's past. He has written or contributed to over 60 titles. David shares his unique strategies for structuring his book, the importance of timelines, and the breakthroughs achieved through "cluster research."
Get an insider's perspective on the world of self-publishing as David provides invaluable tips on managing citations, the nuances between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and the challenges of promoting one's work. Learn about his experiences with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.
Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org. Thanks to MyHeritage for their generous support to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen! Follow us on social media and subscribe to HTB with Kathleen in order to enter your name in our monthly MyHeritage Complete Package giveaway starting Jan 2024!
John:
Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the Mighty Mo, welcome to Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. I am John, your humble hubby host, welcoming you to part two of our interview with David W Jackson, author of Born a Slave and founder of the Orderly Pack Rat.
David W. Jackson:
So let's start Hittin' the Bricks. But you know whether or not I've removed the second. You know how citations on the second and subsequent listings are split to just put IBID or whatever. Don't do those, because then if you go back in later and add something in, I do the same thing.
Kathleen:
I keep them there. Very seldom do I use the IBID, unless it's some last read and I'm getting ready.
John:
I'm like okay, I said this four times.
Kathleen:
Let me just do it. Let me do it yes.
David W. Jackson:
So nobody's going to. Nobody can fault me. I'm not using Chicago manual of style, Forget it. So any error, what I'm getting to is that any error in my books are on me. But if you have the resources, like I said, to have somebody read every word of your book, if you think you're going to make your money back on that, you go for it.
John:
But now they even have. You can go with AI.
Kathleen:
Yes, you can.
John:
Yeah, there's some interesting programs and subscriptions now that'll have AI. The only one I'm thinking of is AutoCrit. It comes to mind where it'll actually go through and do some form of assessment. I don't know how.
David W. Jackson:
There are a lot and there are more that are coming online that are doing that. So there is also a question that you have to fill in as you're setting up the structure of your book on KDP whether or not you have used AI in the production of your manuscript. So it's just a yes or no type thing. I don't think you have to describe all the different ways that you've used it. So that's going to become more interesting, I think, as time goes on with that. Also, I would, at this stage in the game with AI, I would caution people against trusting anything on AI that has to do with genealogy.
John:
You know like ask an.
David W. Jackson:
AI, tell me all you can about my ancestor, arthur Jackson, and you think it's going to come back with anything truthful. You know, just fantasy.
Kathleen:
No, it might be great for grammar corrections or reading through and realize you have two tutus there or something.
David W. Jackson:
It'll come back with a fictional story about Arthur Jackson. It will.
John:
So let's get back to nonfiction.
David W. Jackson:
So you upload your manuscript, you have a cover created, you've got your ISBN, everything that's there, and you just click a button, set your market. You can have it available overseas to other Amazon. You know wings, or whatever you want to call them. Set a price. Set a price and Amazon will tell you the base minimum price that you have to charge in order to even just print the book, and that's basically your cost when you buy the book for yourself.
Kathleen:
So one of the things I did also, david, to promote it because I wanted my books in the library. But I went through the Library Association, I think it was, or one of those kind. It was a state and there's a federal. Of course they're all up at Library of Congress because it has the ISBN and I submitted my copy. But I am still getting orders from the Saline County one, let's say, and I wrote that years ago. I still get orders from it and I do allow people to download. They can purchase from me to set up a download for them. Do you do anything like that?
David W. Jackson:
KDP offers softcover and hardcover books. I've never done a hardcover with them, but they do it. They also offer services. You know proofreading and editing services too. I've never done that, and they also offer an ebook elective, which I also have not.
Kathleen:
Yes, that's what I do.
David W. Jackson:
Because, with my books, which are usually visually intensive too, I really work hard to integrate visuals into the text. With e-books you have to strip all that out and for a 99 cent royalty. I'm not going to do it.
John:
Yeah, that would be for Born a born a slave, which has lots of photos.
David W. Jackson:
I just uh, you know I'm the ebook thing does not appeal to me for that reason, so I just skip that step. So I'm afraid I can't talk about that. I have no experience, okay, no, no that's fine.
Kathleen:
I I do it through. I literally do it myself. They can send the money. I send them the link to my download that I have. That's how I send out that.
David W. Jackson:
Yeah, when you go through KDP though you don't know who is ordering your book you get a little royalty at the end of each month, which is the royalty is probably slightly less than what it costs them to print the book, of course, and you don't know who it is. You just know that on a certain date somebody ordered that book and you get your $3.50. I don't even pay attention to those royalties they're so small and for myself. I'm just not in it for the money. But if you go to a local author's consortium, the MidCon library often has local author events where they've got, you know, a huge conference center set up with all local authors, which is really amazing to see all the different types of people doing different types of genre books here in Kansas City and I was on a panel with a couple of them a couple months ago and they are just really go-getters. They were really focused on the end step, which is after you've done the researching and the writing and the editing and the proofreading and the you know, uploading the design and layout, all of that stuff which just comes, you know, to produce the book.
David W. Jackson:
Once the book is produced, then what do you do? You know how do you let people know about it? Of course you have your website and your blog and your you know you've got lots of venues that you put your materials out there, kathleen, so you're a really great marketer of your brand. I admit I am not, you know. I just put my books up online. They're there if anybody wants them and finds them, and I'll talk about them and I give presentations about some of them occasionally.
David W. Jackson:
I'm just not a huge marketer myself and I think it'd be a great market for someone who loves marketing to latch on to this in Kansas City, in the Kansas City market and help local authors to market their book. You know we all hate the marketing part, and if somebody loves marketing and loves local history, that'd be a great service that they could offer to people like me to. You know, allow us to have sort of a distribution point or something, because Barnes and Noble and any of the other local bookshops will not carry books, self-published books because we don't have a distributor that they deal with.
Kathleen:
And we've had another author ask about that, Angela John.
David W. Jackson:
If you talk to any local self-published author, they're going to tell you the same thing.
Kathleen:
Yeah, I think so. It's just not a hat that most of us like to put on.
John:
So I have a question for, let's say, I'm doing my research, my genealogical research. I have a question for, let's say, I'm doing my research, my genealogical research, and I don't have the ancestor that swept the floors in Kitty Hawk when they were building the first plane, so I have a very boring story. I would think, well, there's no reason to tell my story because nothing happens in it. Right, they just they came here and you know they got a job. So if you don't have that story, that hook there, what do you tell people about the value of their histories and their stories, and telling them in, let's say, the format of a book?
David W. Jackson:
Do you need a book? Well, I mean, I think if we're talking about strictly genealogy books, most people are going to want their books available for their families. That's the first audience that people are going to have, so you can't manufacture stories that aren't there. So if you think your family story is boring, so what I mean it's you know they, they lived their lives, they contributed in their communities and probably without judgment I say this you probably haven't studied each of those person's lives in detail enough to to tell an ordinary life story, because most of our lives are ordinary, most of us are.
David W. Jackson:
So I think that it goes back to the intention behind your publishing interests. You know you want to publish it just to get it out there, for your cousins, for instance. You know you're at a family reunion. You want to have these group of family charts available. Let's just compile them, throw them on KDP, produce a book, and it's available. You know. And if nobody else beyond the family ever buys it or sees it, so be it. It's there and it's available. So you know, I think.
John:
The value is in, really like so many things, the value is in the existence of that and the extraordinary thing is that, even though you're in your family's life, that's boring, let's say.
David W. Jackson:
Is that, even though you're in your family's life, that's boring, let's say. The extraordinary thing between you and maybe the other hundreds of people, let's say thousands of people, who are watching this, is that there will be a very small percentage of people who actually do that work. I, I try to encourage people to to write life story, but not I was born in first grade or when I was one, when I was two. No, I tell people all the time in almost all my lectures, I try to get them to realize your life is probably ordinary and mundane, like mine, but the extraordinary thing will be the one person in a thousand or maybe more, who will actually do something to put something down for the future. And then I start talking about just recording your favorite memories you know from your life. Because if you don't tell your story, who's going to tell it, don't? You wish that your grandparents? I wish that my great, great grandfather would have been asked for his story.
David W. Jackson:
You know and I heard this all the time at the Historical Society. I was there for almost 15 years. Everybody who was recently retired and had time on their hands started to get sentimental, would come in to you know, do some research, you know, see what we have there. And they all lamented that they wish this, they wish that, they wish they'd listened to grandma, they wish they'd written their parents' story. You know this and that. So I asked them do you have any kids?
David W. Jackson:
Yes, so don't let their, don't let your kids, don't let your grand or great-grandchildren lament when they retire that they didn't listen to you, because you will have taken the extraordinary step to record a memory, one favorite memory. If you don't do anything else and you've got, you can hand down and pass down. But I've done this. And when you finish, before you finish the first favorite memory of your life story, you'll already have another one in mind that you'll think oh, I should tell this, I should tell that, I should write this, and so you have to start then making a little list so that you can catch up with. Eventually, in a short while, you'll have a collection of 12 or 20 stories random life stories and those are real stories, right.
Kathleen:
Like you said, it's not just date, age, place, it's a story that tells a mundane life?
David W. Jackson:
I'm afraid not.
Kathleen:
I was just going to say back to your question. You're also adding to a community. So your little town of where that was in Iowa, that your family's from the Brants.
John:
Des Moines. Oh no, you're talking about Polk County.
Kathleen:
Yes, Polk County Valley Junction. You writing even about your part of Valley Junction that is connecting to other people in Valley Junction.
David W. Jackson:
And then publish it, John.
Kathleen:
So it brings back a. Yes, john, it is part of the community, right? So you're adding to a larger community.
David W. Jackson:
And then geeks like me, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years later we'll find your book and use it in whatever they're producing. You know, they need those firsthand recollections of what it was to grow up in the 1970s or early 80s, I'm guessing, in that town, you know.
John:
Really when you get down to it. So the takeaway here that especially our listeners should get is that your story is not boring. You haven't framed it right. You're looking for Saturday night TV, and that's not where the excitement actually is. Well, and also.
Kathleen:
Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes I get where the wife beat the husband, knocked him on the head because he had been out gambling and drinking, and I mean, there's these little small things. But you are adding to a community story and it normally tells you about what was going on during that time frame. You can even see shifts, gender shifts, you can see racial shifts. You can see all these little shifts through that community that you're in. But we need a lot of stories to be able to create that and to analyze it or synthesize.
David W. Jackson:
You definitely have to get beyond the names, dates and places, Exactly, Try to tell the story of your great great grandparents who you never met, and try to tell their story from beginning to end. You know, with some anecdotal something, Even if you can pull from some other person's recollection, you know, you frame it that way in your narrative. You know, like I don't know the specifics of my great-great-grandfathers, this or that, but other people in that community I know from this one other person that this is what they did and so maybe mine did the same thing.
John:
You know this is what they did, and so maybe, maybe mine did the same thing. You talked about books that informed your understanding of really slave life, and I mean talk about a good listing of books to read. You pointed out this it tells about the horrors, basically, of being a female slave, and you went through a series of books like that that would be background reading to understand, to really fully understand circumstances, definitely.
David W. Jackson:
And I started globally with the bigger picture of slavery and those issues. But then I wanted to know a little bit more about, well, what was it like in Missouri where Arthur lived as a child? And then specifically, were there any Franklin Countians who were you know, who left their story behind or had other people do research and write something about other slaves in Franklin County where he was a slave, Even though my Jackson family didn't do it, you know there are other families who had left some records. Yeah, Very good.
John:
And allow that overview.
David W. Jackson:
And I'm hoping that readers will pick up on what you just said and realize oh, and I'm hoping that readers will pick up on what you just said and realize oh, I can extrapolate the same for my family. You know what my ancestors went through, endured, overcame, that kind of thing.
John:
Well, that was one of the things I noticed in your timeline as well Not the timeline, but the structure is that occasionally you'd have blank spots in the timeline. However, you would have something that happened historically at that time. So you reference something going on, not every year, but something that was occurring with somebody else at that time, so kind of a touchstone to what was happening in the country or in Missouri, or at this particular courthouse or whatever about contemporaneously with the time you're talking. Yeah, that tied things in really nicely. We don't live in a vacuum.
David W. Jackson:
Today we're affected by events beyond us, as were our ancestors. So, yeah, that's why I really wanted to include some of those things I felt he may, or his family may or may not have been aware of or participated in, I know, in the second edition of Born a Slave that'll be out in a couple of years. I found an event in 1919 here in Kansas City where there was a big event at the convention center I think it was the 200th anniversary of 1619, basically is what it was and I was like, wow, yeah we just heard that recently in the 1619 project.
David W. Jackson:
Yeah, and they had this huge event in Kansas City in 1919. And I start thinking, I wonder if Arthur knew about this. You know, going on in Kansas City, he was here, he was, you know, blocks away, and where did he go, you know?
John:
how many other?
David W. Jackson:
former slaves were there at the convention center that day.
John:
That's blowing my mind and the idea of the concept of 1619, we think is a relatively recent conversation. But it's not.
David W. Jackson:
That's obviously not not Somebody put the effort forward to compile you know the history of this and put it into some context and try to get people thinking you know how. How have we changed? Where do we have yet to go? You know what work do we have yet to do?
Kathleen:
I love talking to David because he really is a producer of these books and I mean this world. We've only talked about one of his books, but I know there's a lot of other titles that I have seen. Is there anyone that you want to mention, david?
David W. Jackson:
Oh, I mean, you can? No, I don't think so. There's so many.
John:
And you know we'll link to Orderly Pat, brat and Amazon.
Kathleen:
I'm sorry. Does Midwest Genealogy Center have most of them?
David W. Jackson:
I think they have most all of them, yeah, except for the last one or two that have just recently come out. You know, my website has a detailed kind of a pictorial bibliography, if you will, of each of the books that I've worked on.
John:
Okay, perfect.
David W. Jackson:
So it kind of shows you whether it was an actual book that I did all myself on my own, or if I collaborated with somebody else, or if it was a book that I wrote a chapter, or ghost wrote, or yeah thank you.
John:
Thank you, David W Jackson. Not the musician but the prolific author. No, seriously, david, thank you so much for taking time to do this. I've been excited about this, this. This has been my favorite thing to look forward to for basically all of June, and so I was really, really happy to get a chance to uh talk with you.
David W. Jackson:
It's so nice to meet you too, John, after all these years.
John:
After all these years indeed. And and Kathleen, thank you uh for um, you know, you know the whole thing, you know All the things. Thanks so much.
David W. Jackson:
All this stuff, you are so silly John, you too, you too, you're really cute, thank you, and so, david, thanks for being on and joining us.
Kathleen:
Thanks for the invite.
John:
Kathleen, Thanks so much. We'll see you again. We'll see you really soon.
Kathleen:
I'll talk to you soon, all right, cheers, bye-bye.
John:
Bye-bye. Well congratulations, you've made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to David W Jackson, author of Born a Slave and founder of the Orderly Pack Rat. Thanks to MyHeritage and Legacy Family Tree webinars. Thanks Chewbacca Brand, our part-time vectorist and full-time greiser, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hittin' the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fistknuckle and the Shrewdness Watch for their next appearance at the Ratskeller behind the student union at Harris Stowe State University. You can find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Do you have a genealogical question for Kathleen? Drop us a line at HittinTheBr.
