Meet Bill And Teresa Peschel – CanvasRebel Magazine

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bill And Teresa Peschel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bill and Teresa below.

Bill and Teresa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

Teresa here:

Although we work as a team, we are answering this question separately.

It took us years to get where we are now: a tiny, independent publisher of niche books that we love. Let me add: NO SUBMISSIONS PLEASE! We have more than enough to do keeping up with our own ideas.

Going from Idea to Execution takes time and effort and often, you don’t end up where you expected you would. Or you don’t realize how long it will take. There is no roadmap other than the one you discover as you plod forward, day by day, putting out fires, writing every day, editing every day, and learning the importance of record-keeping and positive cashflow. Bill and I are both 64. He’s been working towards writing and publishing his entire life. My journey to becoming a writer and publisher was radically different.

Anyone can become a writer. You need a pad of paper, a pencil, an idea, and the gumption to sit down and finish what you started. Everything after that is details. Writing a good book is harder, but it’s still not that hard as you can tell by walking into any library or bookshop with shelves stacked to the ceiling. Getting paid to write is much, much, much, much harder. Thus, after years of effort, Bill finally got an agent and sold “Writers Gone Wild” to Penguin in 2010. We thought we’d arrived.

They didn’t pick up the sequel, his agent cut him loose, and so in 2011, we had to decide what to do next. By this time, Amazon was in the very earliest days of making self-publishing possible for millions of people like us when they developed the Kindle and eBooks, followed by print-on-demand via CreateSpace and now KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).

Bill self-published “The Complete, Annotated Whose Body?” in 2011 because he’s a long-time Dorothy E. Sayers fan and wanted to do a deep dive into the story, explaining all those obscure and forgotten cultural references. He learned how to do a trade paperback layout, how to upload the files, how to price the eBook and the trade paperback, how to make a cover, and everything else a book needs. He paid attention to Amazon’s Terms of Service. Neither of us knew how to convert a file into an eBook so we had to find and pay someone to do that for us. We began learning about copyright law when the Dorothy E. Sayers estate pointed out that we couldn’t publish our annotated book in the U.K., although we could in the U.S. That was our first cease and desist letter, but not our last.

Bill produced books covering vintage Sherlock Holmes fan fiction; William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner; and annotated the first of six Agatha Christie novels. Meanwhile, I, at age 54, began writing to fill our website’s need for material. My posts on sustainability, resilience, and thrift became my first book, “Fed, Safe, and Sheltered.” I began editing Bill’s essays and footnotes because even though you can self-edit, a second pair of eyes catches more mistakes. Along the way, we’ve learned that passion projects do not pay the bills!

Slowly, slowly, since 2011, we’ve written and published 34 books. Each book is a separate project, even when it’s part of a series. We learned how to design covers since we couldn’t afford to buy them. Bill learned how to lay out the print edition on Word, stretching that program far beyond what we thought possible. He learned how to turn a manuscript into an eBook, saving us scarce dollars for a bit of advertising. We had to learn how to file for our own copyright on our books. Like a real publishing house, we bought 100 ISBNs and have used almost half of them. We had to learn the vagaries of copyright law, how it works in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. We had to learn how Amazon handled our weird blend of public domain and original material books, a process fraught with peril when we made mistakes and Amazon refused to publish us.

We learned we’re slow: no book a month for us! If we write and publish three books a year, we’re moving fast.

We learned that every writer must have a website. Every writer must fill out their Amazon author page. Every writer must do some social media just to let potential fans know who they are and where they’ll be. We learned that indie writers must perform every task a publisher does: layout, eBook formatting, covers, editing, art, and marketing which is the hardest part of this business. We learned how to do podcast interviews; being interviewed and interviewing other people. We learned how to do direct sales at book events and craft shows which is an entirely different skill set from writing. We met hundreds of local authors and our local bookshop owners. We learned something from all of them.

Most of all, we learned that while plenty of people talk about writing a book, very few people are willing to put in the work to finish one, followed by editing it. Even fewer people are willing to continue writing when their first book sells 5 copies to relatives and no one else. The streets of Book World are not paved with gold. Telling a great story guarantees nothing. If you want to succeed as an indie writer and publisher (every indie writer is their own publisher), you must finish books, turn them into eBooks, trade paperbacks, and even audio books, and put them up for sale. You must learn how to market books (the hardest part of the business by far). You must learn to accept that your stories may not resonate with readers. You must understand that writing to trend (dark bully romances are hot right now and military sci-fi always sells) may not be what you want to write or can write. Your idiosyncratic stories may never find an audience. Accept it and move forward. Tell the best story you can, work on telling a better story the next time, and try to find the audience for your story.

Bill here.

Moving from an idea for a book to pressing [PUBLISH] is a combination of planning and improvisation. It demands combining ideas which seemingly come out of the ether, with using the part of the brain that’s highly critical and demands corrections and changes. It also means suppressing your ego when you get critical feedback that could make or break your project.

Over the course of publishing 34 books, I’ve also learned I have a weakness for mission creep. After annotating and publishing the first Agatha Christie novel, I embarked on the second. “The Secret Adversary,” set in 1919 and featuring a pair of her third-tier characters, was a conspiracy thriller. I dove into the historical research and came up with essays about how the soldiers were demobilized after the end of the Great War, the status of women in British society, and the popularity of conspiracy novels and how they influenced Christie. I threw in cartoons from the time that reflected those themes, and added a story about Christie’s 11-day disappearance, told in the voice of a certain Belgian detective.

When I pressed [PUBLISH] on “The Complete, Annotated Secret Adversity,” it was over 500 pages long, double the size of the novel. It was a ton of work for a story that, while popular at the time, is almost forgotten today.

It was so big that I published it in two editions: full-size (the deluxe edition) and a smaller version. Not a good idea.

That was bad mission creep.

But not all mission creep is bad. When Teresa started reviewing Christie movie adaptations to be published on our web site, I told her that if she did enough of them, I’d put them together into a book.

I envisioned a small book.

Nearly three years later, what appeared was a coffee-table book, 425 pages long, with more than 200 reviews, ratings, cast lists, banner photos, locations, and cast mugs.

It became our best-selling book. It earned Teresa an invite to speak at the 2024 International Agatha Christie festival. It spawned ideas for a potential series for an audience that we can reach with our marketing.

This is good mission creep. If you can learn to control mission creep, recognizing what will help you and avoiding what will bog you down, you’ll do better.

Bill and Teresa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Bill here.

Peschel Press grew out of an obsession that began early in my life. In college, I was drawn to journalism, typesetting, art direction, and computers. I loved fonts, and would redo them to label my wargames (another passion at the time).

At one university, where I had the run of the production room, I published a tabloid magazine about art and politics, partly to fulfill my reporting itch, but also to design the look and lay out the pages. At another university where I earned a degree in journalism, I reported stories, edited copy, and wrote headlines.

I went on after graduation to work for a game company (Avalon Hill), where I play-tested games and wrote manuals. For the historical games I researched and wrote supplementary articles for them.

I left that job and moved back into journalism as a copy editor and page designer. After 23 years of that, with a golden ticket in my pocket, Teresa and I moved into book publishing, my first love. Under the Peschel Press banner, we published 34 books. I wrote annotations for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers’ novels. I collected and published vintage Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. I edited my wife’s science-fiction romances, and annotated Victorian true crime biographies.

In short, we did as we liked, and learned a few things from it.

First, passion projects do not make money just because you want to do them. If your passion is on a popular subject, such as Agatha Christie movies, they can be profitable but still not a gold mine.

Second, you must develop a business mindset. An entrepreneurial mindset. You must treat this like a business, which means negotiating with your artistic mindset.

This creates problems when the artistic goals clash with the need to maintain or increase cashflow. Or when the time to devote to a project is drained by the need to maintain records, create ad campaigns, and update the website. It’s a hard reality to accept, but a compromise has to be found or else the company goes belly-up.

But when it works, you get the best of both worlds. You get to make the art you want, and get paid for it. And it doesn’t get any better than that!

Teresa here:

Although I’m a lifelong reader and always told myself stories, I never envisioned being a writer. Never. Procedural manuals and Christmas letters were the extent of my non-fiction and fictional forays. Bill was the writer. As a supportive wife, I was thrilled when he wrote and sold “Writers Gone Wild” to Penguin in 2010. When he didn’t get a second contract, I was thrilled when he wrote and self-published “The Complete, Annotated Whose Body?” That sold great in eBook and trade paperback, right up until we got the cease and desist letter from the Dorothy E. Sayers literary estate. Everybody has a few of them in their filing cabinet, right?

Over time, especially after Bill got his golden ticket on 31DEC2012, I became more and more involved in Peschel Press. I began editing his writing. I began writing myself. I worked out a pen-name for my science-fiction romance, settling on Odessa Moon because my first choice belonged to a porn star. Along the way, I worked on my craft. I got better at writing, although I’ll never be fast. I took online classes via our local library. I got bolder about fixing Bill’s grammatical mistakes and then began making suggestions for footnotes based on my own background knowledge. I wrote reviews for the website. I wrote, an essay at a time, the material that became my first book, “Suburban Stockade.” We quickly learned that was a bad title and a bad cover and retitled it to “Fed, Safe, and Sheltered,” and redid the cover. You rarely get it right the first time.

I took over our social media and write our monthly newsletter. It’s becoming not just a place where I talk about upcoming events and when we press [PUBLISH] on a new book. I’m writing another book, a month at a time, on how to direct-sell books. I learned how to use Instagram and discovered that I really like it. I pushed us into doing events like book festivals and craft shows. I learned that while I can glad-hand total strangers about books, Bill’s far more comfortable hiding under the table. I helped him learn — based on the acting he’d done in high school and college — that selling in public is a performance with a script. Hand-selling books is a role that can be learned, just like you develop an elevator pitch for each of your books to quickly explain it to a potential reader. I worked on our appearance so now, when we attend an event, we’ve got coordinating costumes (our selling uniform), tablecloths, table-runners and banners, and books.

I learned about cash flow, business checking accounts, business expenses, and why you need a CPA. Our writing is a business, not a hobby.

I’m very proud of how I stretched myself to become a writer, a business-owner, half of a writing and editing team, and a performer on a stage. I can talk to anyone about Agatha Christie, books, our books, or the writing business. I’m even more proud that along the way, Bill and I have encouraged other people to take the plunge and tell their story. We offer advice, we make suggestions, and we tell upcoming writers that yes, it is possible to write a book and self-publish it. Getting anyone to buy your book is an entirely separate and more challenging project. I’m honest about that too.

Our interests are varied and so are our books. We strive to make our books as good and as attractive as anything coming out of traditional publishing. We write the books we’re interested in: intriguing, intelligent, and idiosyncratic.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Teresa here:

The worst possible thing that most of us learn in school is “one and done.” I’m 64. Back in the dark ages at school, I’d hand-write the first draft of a report, copy it neatly, and turn it in. In art classes, I learned to do much the same; one and done. Draw the broken cigarettes, make the clay pot, paint the picture, and turn it in.

I did not learn how to edit, to rewrite, to let an idea simmer, to try again and again until the project was closer to what I saw in my imagination. I didn’t learn how much daily practice was needed to become a better draftsman, painter, or potter. I did not learn the value of setting aside a project (any kind) for a few weeks so I could return to it with fresh eyes.

I had to learn to write, rewrite, and rewrite again, followed by giving my manuscript to my two beta readers, and then reading their feedback without taking it personally. I had to learn to let Bill edit my prose. Those are both painful experiences! But they make for better books. Often, the editor’s real statement is “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.” You, the writer, don’t have to agree to every suggestion an editor makes but you should always be aware of the remark behind the remark which boils down to “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

Creativity takes work, focused effort, and revision. It’s not magical.

The other thing many people don’t understand is that there are no new ideas. Someone has thought of your plot before. What YOU bring to the table is not the idea but a new execution of the idea. You make it fresh, different, your own. The more history you learn, the more you see that someone already thought of that great design for a dress sleeve, how to break the fourth wall in a play, or devise a heartrending romantic triangle in a story.

There is nothing new under the sun. What’s new is you and your execution of the idea. What do you bring to that idea?

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Bill here:

I found two books to be especially helpful.

First, “Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business,” which is a memoir by Paul Downs about the year in his business of making and selling high-end office furniture. For those of us who never ran a business, it’s an eye-opening look into the mindset of being the creative force behind a company, while also paying attention to the bottom line and making the tough decisions (e.g., firing people) to keep the company running.

Personally, I found David Allen’s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” a useful guide to organizing my life, both personally and professionally. It teaches you how to keep track of your tasks, both at the project level and the next action level, and decide what’s important to do, what can be dropped, and what can be stored for revisiting. This clears your mind (because you’re no longer tracking tasks) and helps you move through the work day. I’m beset with doubts and neuroses, and at times I’ve abandoned the GTD techniques. But every time I return to it, I’ve been able to clear my mind, focus on the tasks at hand, and boost my productivity. It’s the only book I own that I’ve annotated extensively so I can quickly relearn its principles.

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Bill and Teresa Peschel