Chris wrote: To really answer that question, you have to figure out what your goals are. Make your dances accessible? Build your reputation and get more gigs? Have a book to put on your shelf to show that you haven't been wasting your time? Share your philosophy and musings on contra-dance related issues? So we can't truly answer "better", for you, without knowing "better for what." So I'll answer for me: If it were me, I would go with website - easy to find with search engine, easy to correct, easy to expand. I think this is the best way both to put the dances into the hands of people who will use them, and (therefore) get your name mentioned in places you haven't physically been yourself, increasing your name-recognition value and doing good for your calling career, while also providing a service to callers who use your dances. If I felt I had to have a book, I'd go with a Print On Demand book. (more below). There's definite value in the kind of book that has a collection of essays, perhaps illustrated by dance descriptions, so it's reasonable that Erik Hoffman's books, Larry Jennings' books, Tony Parkes' book should be books - you want to sit down and read 'em. But I don't think the collection-of-dances-with-a-paragraph-or-two-of-comment book gets any major value from being a book rather than a website. There's no very effective distribution mechanism for books of dances. CDSS will carry your book, but they take a markup on your list price, so the books become unreasonably expensive. (Over in the English dance section, there are ten-page books for $10.25 plus shipping.) CDSS is a wonderful organization, but they have to pay rent and salaries, etc, so small print-run books that are already expensive because there's no chance of economies of scale get whacked again with significant cost increases, and you get things where people who want to buy your book need to swallow hard. So if you want to do traditional publishing, you do a whole book, you print a bunch of copies, and then you keep them in boxes in your garage, run a mail-order business (that gets very, very little action, but every so often people send you a check), and carry boxes of books around to your gigs. (Self-publishing makes sense for people who can expect to sell many copies of a book at seminars or lectures that they run. They have a distribution mechanism pretty much in place, and not too much fear of getting stuck with unsold copies. But I don't think that describes any contra dance caller.) If you want to spend your free time and money on going to dances, calling gigs, writing new dances, etc, then running a sales and distribution business for your book is a waste of time. If you've determined that it ought to be a book, then print on demand (through a service like lulu.com, about which I've heard good things but have no direct experience) solves the inventory and distribution problems, and is in some ways *more* permanent than printing 500 copies of the book to start with, since it remains "in print" forever - you can't sell out, and aren't faced with questions of whether or not to go back to press. HTH! -- Alan -- =============================================================================== Alan Winston --- WINSTON(a)SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056 Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025 ===============================================================================

Book vs. Web on Dance composer's Books I recommend both. -- Print and web. If you really want your dances called, you might mail your book gratis, to the fifty or one hundred callers you know or want to know better in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, and perhaps Europe and Australia. And to give it to people you meet in person, and to future callers and so on. A book will make you get it right. It is good editorial practice, since you can't change those damn books one they're out, until you print more. No need to print a thousand. Even making a hundred or two hundred go out into the world will be an effort and expense. You're not going to make money on those books, by the way. Books cause publicity to the composer and the dances. You want the dances called, and you want to talk to callers and composers, right? Newsletter mentions, and catalogue mentions help via the numerous dance associations own humble newsletters. Sales Catalogues and Newsletter: One USA Example: Country Dance and Song Society for their store and catalog and newsletter mentions: www.cdss.org CDSS's affiliates sometimes review books via their newsletters. A commercial example: Elderly Instruments sells some dance composer books, but not many, probably out of their retail walk-in store: http://www.elderly.com/books/books.htm WEB & BOOK efforts: - Cary Ravitz updates his book of dances regularly, and also puts it on the web. some of us keep track of the dances he drops and changes by buying his book now and again. See: http://ravitz.us/dance/ - Michael Dyke's index to published dances, mostly relies on dead -ree publications. See: http://www.ibiblio.org/contradance/index/index.html A book can travel to a dance, a camp, onto a bus, car, plane and to another caller or future caller, and it can be studied to see what that particular composer's angle is. I know of one prominent New England caller that brings books to the dance, and calls straight from the book. Web locations change and die, and how are you going to get a caller to find your dance anyhow. On a 100 year perspective, the web page will be gone. Books allow you to get the dance, minimally into a dead tree archive, plus all of the caller's dead tree archives, and into the hands of folks not near a web site. Think summer dance camp or weekend festival. Archives: New Hampshire Library - Milne Special Collections. New Hampshire Library of Traditional Music & Dance --> http://www.izaak.unh.edu/nhltmd/ Lloyd Shaw Foundation: apparently their archive is at the University of Denver; see both: - http://www.lloydshaw.org/Resources/Periodicals.htm and at Univ. of Denver: - http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-577270/Denver-University-s-Carson-B… In the UK: English Folk Dance and Song Society: http://www.efdss.org/library.htm There are a couple of other dance archives, non-profit dance associations. Other folks that have done a book might be persuaded because of my humble answer to send their book for posterity to these places too. I'm sure a couple of people will speak up on any "other" archives there are. And then there's the archive of mind, for those of of living and thinking about the current tradition. Tell us what you decide. (And get a graphic artist to do your cover.) ~Mark Jones On 6/11/07, Chris Page <chriscpage(a)gmail.com> wrote: