The history of THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE series began in the summer of 1980. Although I have always had a personal love for books and the joy of reading, I had never given one serious single though to producing books myself. Until one day . . . I was having coffee and donuts with Gregory Frazier, a book designer and a good friend. First, I must explain that I had known Gregory in the mid 1960s when he was working for Troubador Press. Troubador was a San Francisco-based press run by Malcolm Whyte, with whom I had co-authored the 1966 game book THE GREAT COMICS GAME, a novelty item published by Price/Stern/Sloan of Los Angeles. Although we enjoyed only a modicum of success with that title, Malcolm had gone on to stupendous success publishing the "Fat Cat Coloring Book" series through Troubador, with Gregory at his side.

Troubador would continue to expand and ultimately release hundreds of novelty-book titles through the '70s and '80s, becoming a leading provider of offbeat publications. Malcolm and I had come together again in 1974 to co-author THE MONSTER MOVIE GAME (a modest quiz book similar to GREAT COMICS GAME) that Malcolm released under the Troubador imprint. Again, it was a book with a limited print-run and achieved only modest success.

So there we were one morning as I told Gregory my difficulties in getting my CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE manuscript published by the establishment New York publishing world. I had been working on the manuscript off and on for years, adding new titles as the films became available in theaters or to television. (In those days the VHS and DVD formats were but a dream.) House after house had turned me down, and I was beginning to think the book would never see print.

I had especially begun to feel it had some importance in my life, as one year earlier I had begun to host the CREATURE FEATURES TV show at KTVU Channel 2, an experience you can now read about in some detail in my new autobiography I WAS A TV HORROR HOST, available on this website. (See this site for more about the book, and for more about the history of the TV series CREATURE FEATURES.)

"Look," said Gregory that unforgettable morning, "you're the host of Creature Features, one of the most popular shows in the San Francisco-Bay Area. You've got some reputation now. You should publish the book yourself. There's a lotta people who're doing that nowadays, and they're very successful. It's called the Small Press Movement. I think you could be successful too if you gave it a shot."

I knew nothing about self-publishing so I boned up on the subject and by year's end, with Gregory's continuing encouragement, had the pages laid out with scores of photographs. And I had selected a major press back east to do the "short-run" printing. My good friend and collaborator Kenn Davis, with whom I had written the private-eye thriller THE DARK SIDE (Avon, 1977) and BOGART '48 (Dell, 1980), had done an original sketch for each letter of the alphabet as well as a brand-new cover.

Ten thousand copies of this trade-paperback size book arrived in my garage in late 1980. Despite my inexperience, and the overwhelming feeling that it was going to be impossible to sell that many books myself, I was able to place the book with Bay Area wholesalers, and began selling it all over the country as well as overseas. "Small press," as it was being called, was a movement across the world by independent publishers to get books into print that were being turned down by the mainstream book industry. This grass-roots explosion of the 1970s and beyond should not be confused with so-called "vanity publishing," which is when an author pays a firm to have his book published. The vanity press does nothing or very little to promote or sell the book, and in most cases, these books die an immediate death.

In the case of a small press publisher, he controls everything - from the creation of the manuscript, to the laying out of the pages, to the choice of who will print the books, and ultimately the hardest task of all, getting the book into chain bookstores, libraries, military PXs and other normal and not-so-normal outlets. The small-press publisher should always know there is a specific market for each book, and how to locate that market at the time of the book's release. It's a tremendous amount of work, especially for a one-man press, and one should expect to devote many months, if not years, to just one title. It is definitely a labor of love. One has to educate oneself constantly, as technology is ever changing. Computers, printing presses and everything between.

Looking back through the spectrum of time allows us to see where doors open or close for us. I am happy to report that my friend Gregory continued to browbeat me during the next few years about a follow-up second edition in THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE series. And he would help to open a door that had previously been closed to me, and I probably wouldn't have opened it without his help. Gregory was constantly calling me and encouraging me, not so much to do a second self-published edition, but to see if there was a New York publisher who would take up the mantle. I could spend more time, he said, reviewing the films and writing the manuscript than worrying about how to market thousands of copies. So with Gregory's help we sent out many review copies to publishers - and finally in 1983 I hit pay dirt again.

Warner Books in New York City wanted to do a follow-up edition so in October of that year my wife Erica and I had lunch with the editors and began making plans for a second edition. (We had flown to New York to be part of the movie-critics junket for a new movie version of Stephen King's THE DEAD ZONE. In those days I was donning one hat as a TV reviewer at KTVU and another hat as an entertainment writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I had been employed since 1960.) This trade paperback, which is long out of print, sold an estimated 15,000 copies. It was all great from my point of view, but apparently not enough books for Warner. I was never successful with any of my sales pitches for a third edition and found myself once again without a publisher.

But now that I had two editions in print, I began to consider the impossible: Maybe I could get a third edition into print. But how? Self-publishing? Finding another publisher? But even thinking optimistically, I would see four years pass before I would jump back into the movie-guide business again. I was slightly delayed by choosing to publish a book of short stories by Robert Bloch first (LOST IN TIME AND SPACE WITH LEFTY FEEP), and I discovered that fiction is always harder than nonfiction when it comes to selling. But once the Bloch book was marketed I was determined to forge ahead with the third edition. This time I laid the pages out myself, pasting down the type and even cutting the photographs to fit. In early 1988 I returned to the same printer that had done my first edition, and by April was once again selling. It was a good time for the U.S. economy. Everyone was buying the book, REVENGE OF THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE: bookstores, libraries, military PXs. I went through the first 10,000 pretty quickly, and was completely stunned. I went back for a modest second printing - but underestimated the need. I finally decided after 15,000 copies that I had to get on to other projects. I should have done 20,000 because orders continued to pour in for the next year. This book is also now out of print. (I also printed 250 hardcover deluxe editions, which are long gone.)

For the next two years, I devoted my time for self-publishing almost exclusively to revising and editing a manuscript by John Mitchum, brother of Robert Mitchum. (The book was entitled THEM ORNERY MITCHUM BOYS.) As a result, the next movie guide waited in the wings. I would not fare so well with this Hollywood-oriented book. Nor would my good relationship with John Mitchum hold once the book was published. He stopped co-operating with me after we had a falling out. It took me ten years to unload the 5,000-copy print run. But that's the way it goes in the world of books.

The fourth edition, which was to be my biggest effort as a small-press entity, was not easy in coming. In the early 1990s, once THEM ORNERY MITCHUM BOYS was behind me, I was again beating on the doors of numerous New York-based publishers, hoping for a return to the mainstream. I met disappointment after disappointment. My old editor at Warner Books considered the idea for a while, then dropped it when movie critic Rex Reed came through the door one day with his own movie guide. It later turned out to be a selling disaster, but by then all the doors at Warner had been closed to me. Next, I approached an excellent agent, Richard Curtis, in fact one of the best literary agents in New York when it comes to representing sci-fi and horror authors. And although he loved the idea, and complimented me on my sales pitch, he had to turn me down because Leonard Maltin, who published a yearly book of movie reviews, was already his client. And both felt it would be a conflict of interest to bring me into the fold. That was a major disappointment, for I sensed that had Curtis taken me on, the movie guide series would have flourished as never before. I will always consider it an opportunity lost - a major disappointment. One of those forks in the road. . . if only it had turned out otherwise.

When I realized that selling through an agent was not to be, I decided in the autumn of 1993 to do the fourth edition myself, and was in the throes of preparing the book when my job at the San Francisco Chronicle came to an abrupt end in December of that year. A buyout had been offered, and in light of the fact that I wasn't getting along very well with a newly appointed entertainment editor, I felt it was a good time to depart. It was the smartest thing I ever did, as hard as it seemed at the time.

The year 1994 was not an easy one. I adjusted to earning unemployment for the next six months, then faced a health problem: tendonitis, caused by too many years on the computer. Meanwhile, I settled in at home with plenty of free time on my hands as I laid out a massive edition and saw as many horror and sci-fi movies, old and new, that I could. Jim Rose, an old friend from the Chronicle who had helped me to lay out the Mitchum book, again helped to get the pages ready, and again my old pal Kenn Davis came up with a new cover design and a sketch for each letter of the alphabet. In all I counted 5,614 reviews. A whopper of a book. I really went whole hog this time, printing 15,000 trade paperbacks and 1,000 hardcover deluxe copies. Somehow, even though the economy was slower than it had been in 1988, I managed to move thousands of books over the next two years. By 1998 I had sold off all but a couple of thousand, and decided to try for a fifth edition. But I had no future plans for self-publishing - I felt my income wasn't as stable as it had been in the past, and I needed to seek out a publisher in New York.

I got lucky again. Kenn Davis, with whom I had authored THE DARK SIDE, the first in a series of novels about San Francisco private eye Carver Bascombe, had landed a new agent in New York and recommended me to that agent, Richard Henshaw. I submitted a proposal. Richard liked the idea of selling a fifth edition and connected at Berkley Books. I loved working with the editors there and a mass-market paperback was released in early 1997 across the country.

Henshaw had made a deal for a sixth edition somewhere along the way, but then he called to tell me there might be a delay - Berkley was in negotiations to merge with Penguin - or was it the other way around? Well, it wasn't until late 1999 that he called and gave me the green light to proceed with the sixth edition, and I began seeing as many of the new films as I could. All had gone well through the spring of 2000, and I had submitted all my new material. No one had discussed with me the writing of a new introduction, so it came as a surprise one Friday afternoon when an e-mail arrived from Penguin informing me my editor wanted the introduction on Monday. Unfortunately, I had planned to be away for a while at a baptism for one of my grandchildren and didn't get back until late Sunday. I spent the evening writing part of the introduction, and was picking up the pieces the next morning when my editor angrily called and sneeringly demanded the introduction right now, today, this very minute. There was the threat of an "Or else" in the voice . . . I informed him he would have the new introduction by Tuesday morning when he came to work at 9 a.m., but he said, "That's unacceptable to my editor. She wants it today." I didn't know what to say other than it wasn't yet finished and I couldn't submit it, but I reassured him a second time that he would have it Tuesday morning, first thing when he got to work.

But no matter how many times I said it, whatever I said was unacceptable. Rejected. It was the most hopeless conversation I have ever had with anybody. I was speechless, and even Richard Henshaw seemed at an impasse. Frankly, I didn't know what to do. You can't give something to somebody if you don't have it, and my introduction still needed some editing and additional research. I went ahead and finished the piece that evening, and submitted it the next morning as promised. It was there in the editor's e-mail when he came to work the next day, but I never heard a further word about it. In fact, I don't think I ever spoke to an editor there again. Why the hell would I want to after that experience?

After the sixth and (to date) final edition came out in the fall of 2000, I stopped writing the series. It was clear to me that the new administration at the Penguin editorial office had no love for me or a movie guide devoted to horror and science-fiction movies, and I decided that any future dealings with Penguin would be useless. I couldn't have been more correct. My agent, Henshaw, wasn't exactly there for me either, taking sides with the publisher and hinting that if I took the book to any other publisher, I might be faced with legal ramifications. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but felt a wave of negativity that told me Henshaw was of no further use for the movie guide series. So I just shelved the whole idea and wandered off to do other things.

Having decided to put aside any more movie guide compilations, I concentrated on new jobs - constructing 13 crossword puzzles every month for TV Guide publications, and teaching entertainment-related subjects to an Elderhostel group operated by David Kleinberg, a long-time friend at the San Francisco Chronicle and a man who had been my boss for 13 years heading up the Sunday Datebook staff. David had asked if I would teach for him and when I asked him why he wanted me, he said, "Of all the people I know, you have more worthless information in your head than anybody else, and this automatically qualifies you for the job." I have now made more than 1,000 appearances before groups of senior citizens. (Click on the Elderhostel icon to find out more.)

Self-publishing is a joy, but it's always a gamble. One never knows for certain how a particular book will do until it's printed and shipped to stores and other buying outlets. Always know there is a market for your book and you will have some success, anyway. Getting a book written, laid out and printed is one thing. Marketing is everything else. Because there is no greater secret on earth than the birth of a new book. You have to get that baby bouncing and keep it bouncing and hope it will have a long and lucrative life suckling on the teat of readers everywhere. And cry and scream loud enough to be heard and felt across the land. Despite the ups and downs of self-publishing, and the financial hurdles it can cause, I feel it's added to my overall enjoyment of life and expanded my horizons as writer-editor-publisher. I remember hearing a story once (an urban legend, perhaps?) about a writer who published a book and couldn't give copies away. He ended up stacking the boxes in the middle of an open field and setting them on fire. At least I've never had to do anything that drastic. (Maybe I should keep some matches close at hand, anyway?)

Today I still have about 40 copies of the very first edition and you can purchase one through this website for $25 plus postage and handling for a total of $30. You can also get the fourth edition trade paperback for $10 plus $3 for postage and handling. If you want the hardcover deluxe cover with slipcase, send me $15 plus $4 for postage and we've got a deal.
In retrospect, the later books now seem bigger and better, and yet without that first effort, there would have been no series at all. By stepping out into an unknown world of publishing, I had begun a recurring industry for myself. Each book would be an experience separate from the others, for the end results for each book inevitably varied. Some were more successful than others. And yet I always felt I was in control of the situation. I knew there was an audience for each book. Reaching that audience is the difficult and, finally, the greatest and most rewarding challenge.

As for I WAS A TV HORROR HOST, only time will tell. But whatever the outcome, it will stand as a personal history, and life can't get any better than that for an author - to leave behind some legacy, whatever its importance to future readers.