Personville Press

Author: Robert Nagle

  • Introducing Buy-Direct

    Payhip etc

  • Vague Plans and the Folly of Predicting the Future

    Unlike my personal blog, the Personville Press website does not update that often. That is intentional. My blog is more free-wheeling and informal (and probably prone to grammar and spelling mistakes), while this website is supposed to be more polished and official.

    But I have been busier than ever working on writing and publishing stuff. But I avoid mentioning upcoming plans for various reasons: I don’t want to mention anything until I am 100% committed to the project and have a good idea about when things will be ready.

    Writers don’t normally like to talk about current projects, and I suppose the same applies to publishers. Things are always competing for my time, and often finances and family matters play a big role in determining my schedule. Also when you have no deadline, you can focus on making something as high-quality as possible. A few years ago, I digitized Robert Hillyer’s lost novel My Heart for Hostage , and once I got into it, I decided to write a comprehensive critical study about the novel even though I had never intended to do so. I’m proud of the final result (and it’s a free download!), but it caused publication of the ebook to be delayed by almost two years! This sort of thing happens a lot.

    Sometimes an opportunity comes my way, and I end up delaying all my other plans.

    What I’m Working on

    • I’m almost finished with a 10 part interview with Clay Reynolds. Will publish soon. Update: Hallelujah, it is done.
    • I’ve been making “elevator pitch” videos for some Personville titles and plan to add a few more over the months. (I hope to record 1 or 2 this week!)
    • I still plan to publish my Non-Crappy Things from my Blog essay collection, but it now looks that it will be ready in summer 2026 instead of late 2025. But who knows.
    • I’ve been helping another author with his website and actually writing some content for his website as well.
    • I’d like to publish at least one Personville Modern Classic title ready this year, but I have no idea which title will be next or when it will be ready. (I have one comic novel by a Texan, one literary novel by a midwestern writer and two children’s books which I could consider).
    • I am behind on my Personville Press newsletter (and in fact I need to provide an update within a day or so. The last time I took so long to make an update, the email distribution company shut down my account!
    • I am also working on an unusual promotional opportunity with a new company which excites me (but requires a lot of work on my end).
    • I have dozens of literary friends and acquaintances who I owe a letter to. You would think that it’s easy and relaxing to send book announcements about recent books to these people. But it’s not. It’s really time-consuming, and I am years behind. That’s why I am grateful when people sign up for the Personville Press newsletter; it’s one less person I need to correspond with!
    • I’m trying to write a semi-regular column containing book reviews of indie books. Can’t wait to do it, but I have to clear away several other things first. (I am always behind on reading and reviewing ).
    • I keep in touch with author estates of several projects and am working on future publishing opportunities.
    • I guess I can announce that Personville Press will publish a collection of comic stories by Thurston Borgraves. (and it’s official). But the publication date is up in the air, and Mr. Borgraves has not even settled on a title.
    • I actually want to make a 10-15 minute video on a literary topic; it should be fun. I have a script outline, but I can’t start until I have a workable script and schedule some time.
    • Finally the Personville Press still has a long way to go. I’m gotten a good front page and book pages But I haven’t included basic content and I haven’t transferred content from author websites onto this site.

    ****

    Okay, those are the things I have been working on. Maybe I’m forgetting one or two other things. As described here, many of these things sound sketchy, and perhaps I may end up dropping one or two of the things from my plans. But overall I am committed to doing all these things even though I may have to put things aside temporarily if some new opportunity presents itself.

    Truth be told, I could do a lot more things on the promotional end. Also, whenever I make a book deal with someone, it often take time and effort to draft the agreement and then make the book.

    Making the book consists of many parts:

    • Contacting the author
    • Drafting the agreement
    • Receiving/selecting the content
    • Digitizing and proofing the content
    • Hiring an artist and working with the artist
    • Doing quality control (editing, testing, etc).
    • Writing supplementary material (Preface, Credits, About the Author, etc).
    • Writing book descriptions and preparing the book page.
    • Devising a strategy for attracting reviews.
    • Devising some promotional strategy right for my budget.
    • Sending out announcements.

    Each of these steps can take up a lot of time and potentially be showstoppers. For every book there is usually at least one thing which completely prevents a project from going ahead. Sometimes it may simply be me. Sometimes I don’t have the time or resources to proceed.

    That said, I have produced a lot of books. I know what it takes. There are no short-cuts. AI will not help you with the most critical tasks.

  • Interviews by Robert Nagle

    Robert Nagle is a blogger and editor of Personville Press. Over the years he has interviewed people in creative fields. (At some point these will be collected into ebook form– maybe 2027 or 2028?) Here is a sample.

    Abbreviations: W= Wikipedia, I = personal Home Page, FB = Facebook page, BC = Bandcamp, JAM=Jamendo, YT = YouTube, SC = Soundcloud, POP = Popmatters, LIN = Linktree ARCH=Archive.org

    Literature

    Clay Reynolds. Texas author and critic (W, I)

    Jack Matthews. Ohio author of philosophical fiction (W, I)

    Robert Flynn, Texas author (W, I)

    Michael Barrett, Texas film critic (FB, Pop)

    Harvey Havel, Pakistani-American novelist (FB)

    Alberto Balengo, Texas short story writer (I)

    Musicians

    I did a bunch of interviews with musicians between 2010 and 2013. Most offered their music under Creative Commons licenses. Most were done for an article I wrote publicizing artists who put their stuff on the French music sharing site Jamendo.

    Monk Turner, California musician & songwriter (W, I, BC)

    Ant on Wax, Hungarian electronica composer. (I, and I)

    No Really (Hannah Clemens/Hannah Sheehan), Acoustic Singer-Songwriter & from Tennessee/Missouri ( I, SC, Arch )

    Serge Robinson. French jazz piano improvisationalist. (JAM)

    Tryad (Vavrek & John Holowach), A remote musical collaboration project (BC1, BC2 )

    JCRZ (Jose Cruz), French EDM Musician (I, BC, FB )

    Thomas Eccard (of 2 Inventions, Johannes Gilther, Oktafonika). Polish electronica musician(FB, BC)

    Lonah (Eric, Raphaelle, ???) Paris-based musical group (JAM, YT)

    VAE Väinö Ala-Härkönen (AKA Lumeet), a Finish electronica musican. (SC, ARCH)

    2010 Interview with Vae (Intergalactic Tourist)

    Robert Recommends: Favorite Interviews

    I grew up reading the famous Paris Review interviews (and my favorite compilation so far has been the Playwrights at Work volume). Here are two ebooks of author interviews which are frequently discounted: the BOMB interviews is a great collection of interviews with authors I have never heard of. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work is a collection of interviews Philip Roth did with various authors in the 1970s through the 1990s.

    For those who say that my interviews are too long, let me recommend the book length The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje (W) and Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (W, Archive) which I have read only parts of. The Murch-Ondaatje collaboration is an incredible read.

    I also enjoy audio/video interviews. Bill Moyers has interviewed a lot of authors, artists and intellectuals and has conversations with them on TV shows (and then compiles them into very wonderful books). I confess that I started Personville Press to champion the works of author Jack Matthews only after listening to his delightful 25 minute interview on Don Swaim’s Wired For Books (I). Michael Silverblatt (I) has done over 1600+ in-depth interviews with authors in his KCRW Bookworm podcast. Silverblatt has collected his interviews into a single volume called Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt . Book Talk, a Texas Public Radio podcast hosted by Yvette Benavides, has been interviewing authors (both Texan and non-Texan) for several years. Austin Liti Limits (YT) does video interviews with (mostly) Texas authors and is hosted by Scott Semegran (I, More), Ron Seybold (I)and Larry Brill (I, More) . I am a gigantic fan of the Inner Views PBS series by Houstonian Ernie Manouse (W, I,).

    It’s not exactly the same thing, but there is a great collection of author profile pieces by Joyce Kilmer from the 1910s which included a strong component of interviewing. I love this little book.

    Miscellaneous Interviews

    Interview with Milan Kundera by Philip Roth was an incredible interview I came across during college. It appears at the end of Kundera’s 1978 novel Book of Laughter and Forgetting and also in Roth’s 2001 Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and their Work .

    Interview with David Steinberg (Fine Art Erotic Photographer and Sex Columnist) by Hapax Legomenon. An extended discussion with Steinberg (I, FB, ) about erotic fiction, censorship and author Marco Vassi with the author of Erotic by Nature (1988).

  • Reader Comments to Clay Reynolds Interview

    In June 2025 Robert Nagle released a long interview he did with Clay Reynolds in 2021-2022. This interview is gigantic! If you’d like to respond or comment to this interview, you can do this in the comment form below.

    Generally, the first time you write a comment, it goes into the moderation queue on the blog. I will try to approve the comment as quickly as possible. If it hasn’t been approved in say 2-3 days, feel free to bug me (Robert Nagle) so it will show up here. My email is idiotprogrammer AT fastmailbox.net

    Other Clay Reynolds Resources:

    Clay Reynolds Home page. Contains info about buying CR books, biographical info and an extensive bibliography.

    Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Clay Reynolds (prepared by me — Robert Nagle — after his death)

    Clay Reynolds Wikipedia Page. Mostly prepared by me.

  • Video: Robert Nagle talks about ebooks

    I am happy to have produced and uploaded a video about ebooks and Personville Press last week. It is below:

    I have been dipping my feet in the water of video production. But I really wanted to learn the ins and outs of video production and editing. It was something that I had been meaning to do for a while.

    This video is my “learning project.” I really tried to make it look presentable and a cut-above an amateur video. At the same time I recognize that parts of it don’t work very well, and I’m not particularly happy with how I look in the footage. I could have done it more smoothly and with more eye contact.

    I’m going to talk about lessons learned from making this video on my blog eventually. But my goal for this video is to allow visitors to learn a little bit about me and my interest and passion about ebooks. Yes, it certainly had a semi-promotional purpose, but I mainly just wanted to talk about ebooks I liked.

    Despite my relative obscurity both as an author and publisher, I feel that I have accomplished some major things in the ebook world. I have done some pretty sophisticated ebook layouts for ebooks and found a way to recontextualize some older titles so that they still seem relevant to the contemporary reader. The video ended with this thought:

    I know people talk about movies and videogames being more culturally relevant than novels. But finding top quality fiction at affordable prices has never been easier or cheaper. Milan Kundera once wrote that the sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. As much as I love a good sitcom or movie, I am shocked by how often I pick up a novel and find something deliciously unexpected or profound. Reading is a way for people to discover lost worlds, lost truths and lost joys.

    The video includes many recommendations of public domain titles. Some of the links are already included with the YouTube video. I wanted to paste here the content from what I believed to be an incredible slide.

    I had been praising a book of interviews that Joyce Kilmer did in the 1910s (which is found in his 1917 book Literature in the Making, by Some of Its Makers — freely downloadable at Project Gutenberg (PG).

    You can view the ebook completely online here. But I provided an annotated table of contents (which is easier to read than how PG did it). All of the authors interviewed have their own wiki page and books which are often found at PG. Here it is below:

    Table of Contents

    WAR STOPS LITERATURE (William Dean Howells, critic and author of realistic/sympathetic portrayals of American life)

    THE JOYS OF THE POOR (Kathleen Norris, prolific and bestselling author of novels about motherhood and family)

    NATIONAL PROSPERITY AND ART (Booth Tarkington, author of the satirical PENROD and novels about midwestern U.S. life)

    ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN HUMOR (Montague Glass, Jewish author of light-hearted stories about two businessmen named Potash and Perlmutter)

    THE “MOVIES” BENEFIT LITERATURE (Rex Beach, author of adventure novels on the frontier)

    WHAT IS GENIUS? (Robert W. Chambers, prolific author of romantic fiction and supernatural tales )

    DETERIORATION OF THE SHORT STORY (James Lane Allen, Kentucky author of fiction about Southern life)

    SOME HARMFUL INFLUENCES (Harry Leon Wilson on peculiarly American humor)

    THE PASSING OF THE SNOB (Edward Sandford Martin, essayist on modern life)

    COMMERCIALIZING THE SEX INSTINCT (Robert Herrick, author of novels which question modern social institutions)

    SIXTEEN DON’TS FOR POETS (Arthur Guiterman, author of light verse)

    MAGAZINES CHEAPEN FICTION (George Barr McCutchen, author of adventure tales)

    BUSINESS INCOMPATIBLE WITH ART (Frank H. Spearman, novelist about business and industry)

    THE NOVEL MUST GO (Will N. Harben, novelist and interpreter of Southern life)

    LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES (John Erskine, literary critic)

    CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE (John Burroughs, author of nature books)

    “EVASIVE IDEALISM” IN LITERATURE (Ellen Glasgow, whose Southern novels explore social and psychological problems)

    “CHOCOLATE FUDGE” IN THE MAGAZINE (Fannie Hurst, short stories about life of a working woman)

    THE NEW SPIRIT IN POETRY (Amy Lowell, imagist poet)

    A NEW DEFINITION OF POETRY (E.A. Robinson, whose poems are often studies in character)

    LET POETRY BE FREE (Josephine Preston Peabody, dramatist and poet)

  • Newsletter is available (finally!)

    Go to this page to sign up for a occasional newsletter by Personville Press editor Robert Nagle.

    I’ve been trying to run an email newsletter for more than a decade without success. It’s too much trouble and not enough people have signed up for it. It’s also a time-suck trying to ask people to sign up for the newsletter. Even if the person signs up for the newsletter, who really knows if the subscriber is actually going to read it?

    That said, I have lots of content to share and rather enjoy keeping up a newsletter Also, I really like receiving newsletters from authors! I almost always read their news and random thoughts. I recognize that these newsletters have an ostensibly commercial purpose. But who cares? I just like to keep up with what I’ve been missing. Unfortunately now it is hard to keep up with what authors are doing and saying. Social media can help with that, but sometimes these thoughts are miniaturized and not particularly noteworthy. A newsletter tends to highlight the major things, the more important pieces of writing and life news.

    Email newsletters have a technical and financial challenge. First, a lot of these newsletter maker services for businesses are rather pricey (100-300$), and authors often are operating under shoestring budgets. Second, setting up these newsletters requires some understanding of email and web domains and web templates. Some of the mailing services often a free service to people starting out. That’s good, but they can be hard to set up and unexpected things can occur. For example, I use mailerlite which charges $110/year for a growing business and free for a single user. That was a bear to set up (and I felt that I was pretty expert about such things). Then, quite randomly, when mailerlite updated its website, it deleted all the previous newsletters and email subscription information. That should have been reason to leave mailerlite, but it still was the best available service for free users.

    Even if everything is set up successfully, often you can just forget to write the #$#$ update. Sometimes it just slips my mind. I know you can make reminders, etc. But it’s still another low-priority task to add to the To Do list.

    Believe it or not, I used to write nice chatty emails when people signed up for review copies from the Librarything Member Giveaway. And yes, I used to beg people to sign up for whatever mailing list I was trying to start. But these mailing lists always failed. First, only a miniscule number of people signed up. Then, I really didn’t have much motivation to write a witty or informative newsletter. Eventually the free email services died away.

    That said, I really want to make it work this time. For one thing I can republish things I wrote on my blog and elsewhere. And maybe I can write insightfully and wittily in the hopes that someday I will have achieved my goal which right now seems so far away and outlandish.

    That goal, of course, is my dream of having a newsletter with 10 actual subscribers.

  • Pardon Our Mess: Site Upgrade in Progress

    Although I have owned the Personville Press web domain for more than a decade, I haven’t really had a chance to update it. I know how to do websites. I’m an old pro with WordPress and have even made some static HTML websites with varying levels of success. Because Jack Matthews titles comprised the bulk of Personville Press’s catalog and I already had made a website for the author, there wasn’t any urgent need to make a separate one for the press. Also, I didn’t quite know what software was best suited for my needs. WordPress software can be rather bloggy, and I would need to make a lot of customizations.

    In 2020 I made a static front page for Personville Press which was basically a brochure website. I just wanted to make something simple that would nonetheless be viewable on mobile devices. It served its purpose for a few years, but I was eager to move onto something lasting.

    Of course, I realized that hard-coding static HTML is cumbersome and hard to maintain. So I was eager to jump to a content management system. I realized that WordPress core offered a lot more functionality than before; I wouldn’t need to rely on page builder plugins to accomplish what I wanted. Long live WordPress Core!

    The problem with php/Wordpress is long term site maintenance. You have to babysit it and apply security updates. Also, I didn’t want to be dependent on one theme or plugin that would stop being updated. I wanted something headless to avoid security issues, but eventually I decided that dumb and simple was best.

    That meant going with WordPress after all. That meant meeting two requirements: 1)using one of the included themes (2025) rather than a third party theme and 2)making a usable front page.

    A lot had changed with WordPress since I first installed it in 2003. I had managed my own blog and Teleread.org, but honestly, my technical knowledge needed to be updated. In 2023 I learned about using the block editor to make fairly sophisticated site customizations. I also test on tablets and phones, so I know what the typical site visitor will see.

    I had to relearn a lot about things with the block editor and also to learn about content blocks. Some of it is really tricky and confusing. It’s true the content blocks offer a lot of variety and power, but they can be tricky. Two months later, I still don’t know how to use Featured Images correctly and override thematic elements. But I’m mostly there.

    The big challenge was coming up with a front page that let the visitor browse the catalog by ebook cover. I installed WordPress on my local machine, so I could figure out how to recreate the minimum functionality of the static HTML cover. Once I did that, I began working on the front page that you see now (and I love). It took a long weekend to get that done.

    The next step was making a robust template for the ebook page. Luckily I already had some experience doing that on the ripemangotaketwo.com website, but it was still hard to get right. (The page for Minor Sketches and Reveries is what I ended up with — and frankly I’m proud of it.

    Another challenge I faced was whether to use pages or posts for content. I found myself making pages for everything and not using posts anymore. After all, I don’t normally have a lot of bona fide news. Pages are weird in WordPress. You typically have to make a custom page with a customized heading. Then you have to create “patterns” for the content structures you want to insert.

    So I started with the non-Jack Matthews stuff. Then I will make pages for the Jack Matthews stuff as well. It may take a while though.

    The other task was creating a section for the blog/news. That meant creating new template for the News Archive. Here is what I used to make the News Archive Page. This was not easy to figure out! (And I’m still learning about the config details).

    It can be hard deciding whether to put up dummy pages before actually putting content on them. It can look unprofessional. I still haven’t had time to customize the footer for all the templates. On the other hand, a micropress doesn’t normally get a lot of traffic; most site visitors won’t notice these kinds of things.

    Anyway, it’s still a work in progress, but I have already done most of the heavy lifting. I’m still experimenting with things. As a writer and editor, I often don’t allow myself to spend too much time fixing technical issues . I have a hundred other things to do first.

    But progress is coming slowly.