REF: Hybridizing Book
From: Sharon McAllister <73372.1745@compuserve.com>
Message text written by Cindy Rust
>
Sharon, I can't believe you wrote a book and publishers weren't
interested!!! Why would this be so? There are books that have been
published on Japanese and Siberian iris (I have them and like them).
<
It was viewed as not commercially viable -- and I do have enough background
in publishing to understand their reasoning.
> Have
you told anyone in the Aril Society about your book?
<
Of course. Even offered it as a set of special publications, which would
have made it available to interested parties at an affordable price, with a
production plan that wouldn't have cost ASI a dime and could have earned
them a small profit. Not interested. Compared to the ASI that I joined
about 25 years ago, today's society has about half the membership and
vastly diminished interest in hybridizing. Although the ASI Sale remains a
significant source of plant material, many hybridizers now registering
arilbreds don't even belong to ASI. I no longer consider ASI to be a
viable means for the preservation of information.
> But this is a terrible
shame. There must be something that can be done! Any other iristalk
listers out there with a good idea?
<
When this came up a year or so ago, several offered to write letters in
support of the marketing strategy. I did appreciate that, but the time for
considering commercial publication is past. I no longer have time for the
requisite rewrites or the stock to take additional pictures. For example,
I know of no one in this country who is still growing I. yebrudii v.
Edgecombii. The photo I have of it isn't terrific, and wouldn't make the
cut for a traditional book even though it's the best now obtainable.
But it's good enough to post on the web, so something IS being done! I
started converting the mss to HTML many months ago and publishing the book
this way makes it possible to include far more photos than I could in a
conventional book. Please bear with me. Eventually, you should have the
entire book -- and at only the cost of Internet access.
Most of the stuff uploaded so far is from my various hybridizing notebooks,
because I believe that the specific examples will be the key to really
understanding the theoretical portions and this is the material of greatest
use to currently active hybridizers.
Sharon McAllister
73372.1745@compuserve.com
http://www.geocities.com/~smcallister
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