Tales from the Garage

Rodney Kemerer - Author for Tales from the Garage

Rodney Kemerer is a lifelong automotive enthusiast. His writing has appeared in Garage Style Magazine, Hemmings Classic Car, Rolls-Royce Flying Lady, BMW Roundel, The Petersen Museum Finishline Magazine, Vintage Road and Racecar, Bentley Drivers Club Review, Old Cars Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. He still has all of his childhood model cars as well as (most) of his adulthood actual cars. Rodney lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Contact: Rodney Kemerer at Visit Online!

     

• Talk about your petrol-head past – cars you’ve owned, adventures you’ve gone on. The acquisition of the honda, and what it’s so important to the tales journey. 
• Relationship with GSM; as a columnist
• What is “Tales from the Garage” (the book) all about – share some of the stories, shorter anecdotes
• How can someone get a copy of the book?
• What’s next for Rodney? Will there be a second book? Audible version?

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Break/Fix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder. How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Tonight’s guest understands that car stories can be the gateway to every aspect of our lives. His heartfelt book, Half Memoir, Half the Memoir of Others, is truly a pop culture snapshot of modern society told through the lens of the automobile. Author Rodney Kemmerer’s tales might appear to be about cars, but they are also tales of an American life and the many objects that embody and reflect it.

So pull up a chair and your favorite beverage as you meet a new friend who is happy to share his favorite tales from the [00:01:00] garage. And with that, let’s welcome Rodney to Break/Fix. All right. Thank you, Don. Great to be here. Happy to be invited. Welcome aboard. And joining me tonight is regular co host on Break/Fix, Don Wieberg from GarageDom Magazine, so welcome back.

Thank you! Well, Rodney, like all good Break/Fix stories, there’s a superhero origin. So take us back in time and tell us about young Rodney. How all this came to be before the genesis of Tales from the Garage. How did you become a petrolhead? I don’t really remember a time when I wasn’t. I believe that you are kind of born with a car gene.

I think you just get it. You either care passionately about them or they’re just a way to get you around. So was there any car mark or even decade or period of design that really got you excited, something that pulled you in? It’s really funny. I have never been brand specific. I can remember as a nine year old when the Chevy Impala came out with the cat eye [00:02:00] taillights.

I must have walked 10 blocks as a kid to go see one because another friend said, there’s one in the driveway. There’s one in the driveway around the corner. And we took off because I wanted to see that car. And I remember that car specifically to this day. Those cat eye taillights, those flat fins coming across it.

It wasn’t like anything else. And I think that obsession has been with me my entire life. And so in the book, if you follow along, it really takes you from my first dealings with toy cars. All the way up and through today. Do you think that excitement is still around us today with young people? I mean, do you think they see something from somewhere and they tell their friend, Hey, little Joey’s dad just got the latest whatever, and they go running off to see it.

Do you think that’s still around? I don’t think that exists at all. I really don’t. Cars have become, you know, way too similar to each other. Kids, for the most part, see cars as appliances. Gets them from A to B. It’s not the [00:03:00] same passion, nor do I think it evokes the same excitement. And they speak to me, you know, the way art does.

Cars are the same thing. They’re emotional responses. I go down the street and I see a car and I go, Oh wow. It’s something in me is stirred up and I’m looking at it going, well that’s really cool. I really like that. As you grow up, your appetite grows and changes and you get more interested. And it got to the point where I started writing about cars and found that I had a real passion for doing that.

Part of the book’s Origin Story is actually rooted at Garage Style Magazine and it has a lot to do with your relationship with Don. And so I, I wanted to just bring the audience up to speed into how you guys met. How you work together at Garage Dial, what you’ve been doing and how that eventually turned itself into Tales from the Garage.

You remember where we met, Don? I do. I do too. It was that strip club in LA by the airport. All you can eat steak. It was a great place. And I said, how do I get into this line of work? And you said you’re too small. I gotta look like you to be a bouncer? [00:04:00] Oh, well, okay, great. Thanks for that. That’s the place, baby.

No, it was uh, San Marino show. No, no. No? Go back further. You did the Greystone show in Beverly Hills. Right, right, right. But see, my problem is I don’t remember meeting you there. You remember me there and I was there, but Well, I can tell you where you were. You remember there was a Port Cochere and then next to the Port Cochere was a single car garage at that estate.

And you had your little table set up there. I think we shared the garage with an old Mercedes, if I remember correctly. And you were in that little garage with a little table, and you had your magazine spread out. And that’s where I first met you. But you’re right, it was San Marino when I pitched you a column.

Yeah, I remember that one pretty well. It was hot. You came up and reintroduced yourself again. And you had this idea for a column. Yeah, what did I know? I could write a column. Why not? Yeah, why not? That was gonna say, Rodney, were you an author or journalist before that point, or is it just something inside that drew you to say, I want to [00:05:00] write about garages?

God, what year was it? 2011. I was reading Heming’s Classic Car, and I was sitting at home and I was reading this magazine, and I read this story, and I went, This is terrible. I went, this is just bad writing. And I thought I can do better than this. I know I can. I closed up the magazine. I sat down, I wrote a piece.

I didn’t know anything about how any of this worked or anything. I sent it to Hemings classic car as a cold submission. What was the story about? It’s in the book. It’s the model car story. Oh, that one. Okay. So I sent that to Hemmings, and of course, I did not hear anything back from him. And I thought, well, okay, that’s how that works.

You send it in, and they ignore you like everything else in life. A month later, two months later, I go to the mailbox. I pull out the new issue of Hemmings Classic Car. I’m sitting there reading, and I open up, and all of a sudden, I go, Wait a minute. That’s my story. They stole my story. And I’m looking and looking and there was no byline.

Wait a [00:06:00] minute. They stole my story. They didn’t tell me and they didn’t even give me a credit. I thought, this business is really cutthroat. You know, I thought, Man, these guys, they don’t take prisoners. And then I looked very carefully up at the very top, near the edge, is my byline in the smallest form.

Font they could afford. Less than a sixteenth of an inch. There it was. Probably one thirty second of an inch was my byline. But it didn’t matter. Because what that article did for me was said, You can write this stuff. That’s what they gave me. And then I started submitting to other magazines. And everything got published.

As my wife said, How are you doing this? You know, I said, I don’t know. It was very hit and miss until I met Don. And at that point I’d had a couple things published and so I thought, well I could probably write a column if I could find somebody to run it for me. Did you have a background in writing? Was that what you went to school to do?

No. I’m a theater major. And I always like to say that being a theater major is probably [00:07:00] the best major for anybody because it absolutely prepares you for everything in life. There’s nothing that being a theater major can’t cover for you. You know, writing, I did some writing, college and stuff, but never really kind of seriously sat down to write.

And it was late in life that I started doing this, I mean, really, when you think about it. But really what it was, was Don was incredibly encouraging and incredibly brave to take on somebody he didn’t know. But Don’s instinct was Correct. You sold me when you said you had two Mercedes. I thought, this guy’s got something going on.

I’ll trust him a little bit. You know, two Mercedes, he’s okay. Yeah, one hasn’t run in 40 years, and the other one, say, more rust than car, you know. Yeah, but I didn’t know that. Don was in the same position as the bank manager that gave you the loan for the Honda. He was like, oh, he’s got two Mercedes. That’s collateral.

That works. And he wants to write for me? Bring him on. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit more about the book. We’ve had a lot of authors on this show, right? [00:08:00] Novelists, academics, people that have put together some tomes that are incredible, and I’ve asked them before. A journey of 80, 000 words is an incredible thing to accomplish.

When you set out to put together Tales from the Garage, what was it like going from writing a column to putting together your first book? You have to remember, the book is It’s essentially a collection of columns. So it wasn’t as though I was sitting down to write thousands of new pages. I was taking pre existing material.

The question was how to take that material and put it into a unique and interesting form. So two things emerged in the process. One was I’m a very visual person. I’m very driven by what I see. And that’s the love of cars is always visual first. Then performance, but it’s going to be the visual thing first.

It’s going to pull me in. I like that it goes fast. I like that it hugs the ground. I love all that. You got to get me visually. When I decided to take the columns [00:09:00] and I thought, well, maybe I can make a book out of this. But it can’t just be you open it up and it’s a bunch of text because they said no one’s going to care about that.

They don’t know me because nobody reads the byline of magazine writers, right Don? No comment. For all practical purposes an unknown writer. So an unknown writer says here’s my book of car stories Well yawn, you know who’s gonna care? So I thought what can I do to make it different than just that and that’s when I kind of hit on this idea of combining magazine graphics in a book form.

And I had not seen that done before. I don’t think you had either, Don. Not really. Because that’s what appeals to me when I open a magazine. It’s the graphics that pull me in. It’s the visual thing that gets me. And then I’ll get to the text. So I thought, well, I’ll do a book and I will illustrate it. Each chapter will have its own visual language.

Each chapter will have its own color template. Each chapter will have its own Thought or title pages and so forth. That way you can pick up the book and [00:10:00] whatever appeals to you. Whether it’s the car appeals to you, the image, the color, whatever. So you can pick and choose what you read because it’s not a narrative.

It doesn’t start in chapter one and end with a happy ending and the final chapter. And that’s kind of the way people are today. We’re all members of short attention span theater now. You know, that’s us. His book, Tales from the Garage, when you read it, you get a real sense of all over the boredness, all over that autosphere, as Matt Stone always called it.

But then another one of my favorite stories is Split Second, where you’re literally hitchhiking home and a brand new 63 Corvette is what picks you up. You know, you talk about how much that car was so cool back in the day. These are sort of bite sized stories. Some of them are two pages. The longest, I believe, is six.

So then I took all the stories that I wanted to use. Suddenly, at some point in the process, I went, Oh my God, this is a memoir. These are just stories about me. Here and now, this is what I did. And da da da da. I thought, well, that’s horrible. So [00:11:00] then I took them and I went, All right, how many of them are really about me and how many are about other people?

And fortunately, when I kind of laid them all out, it turned out that half of them were my stories and half of them were stories about other people. And I thought, perfect. I laid them out and I alternated. If you read the book from the beginning, the stories alternate between stories about other people and stories about my experiences.

So it is a memoir in many ways, but it’s not a memoir that you say, okay, now here’s this guy’s life story. It’s really only my life as seen through cards, and that’s really what it is. But, if you’re reading carefully, you will begin to realize that it is in chronological order. So you can run through my entire life, from my first experience with toy cars, up until today.

As Don pointed out, the book is sort of all over the map. And again, it’s partially your memoirs and those of others that you know, and it’s those stories that were swapped in the garage. But there is a car that stands out in the book, and that’s your Honda. Don alluded [00:12:00] to, on a previous episode, the story about how you acquired the Honda and came to be, and then you, now you have a second one, and all these kinds of things.

What’s so special about that hatchback? Well, and I talk about this in that particular chapter, everybody has. The rite of passage as a young adult of buying your first new car is a serious, serious step into adulthood. And most people can recall that first new car. They can recall it in vivid detail, because it’s this rite of passage, it’s this maturity that you don’t have to drive beat up used cars anymore that are always breaking down and are an embarrassment to you and your family.

Suddenly you’re getting a new car of your very own. So because I was such a car person. The idea of buying a brand new car, it was so exciting to me, you know, it was just like, wow, I had no money to buy a new car. I mean, I was just out of graduate school. I had a bunch of loans. There’s no way I could buy a car.

So I had to get a loan, obviously, but I had to convince the [00:13:00] bank that I was loan worthy. But as is in the story. I also had two beat up Mercedes that I was tooling around in. But when you’re going to a financial institution, they don’t ask for a picture of the car. They don’t want to say, are the seats torn?

They just look on the piece of paper and it says, Oh, the guy has a 62 Mercedes 190 sedan. He’s got a 220. There’s a kid with two Mercedes already. Well, he’s doing okay. Well, the combined value of those two cars was maybe 500. They weren’t worth anything, but I knew enough that what I looked like on paper was going to help me get the loan to buy the new car.

It was kind of this long journey to get there. And most people don’t keep their first new car. It goes away in college or girlfriends or wives or rainstorms, whatever. Then as they get older, they go, Oh, I’d really like to find a 78 Accord that I had when I was 21 years old. And then they spend all kinds [00:14:00] of time and money tracking that car down and then getting it and then restoring it.

And what they’re doing is they’re just restoring their youth. They’re capturing their life the way it was. And the vehicle becomes the embodiment of that former self. And I’ve seen people do this where they will chase that car, crazy chase it. And then they find one, and then they spend crazy money restoring it to a condition far beyond what it was when they had it.

But it’s this thing of reaching back and grabbing your youth and having this kind of symbol of it. And I also know that when you get in that car, it makes you feel younger. All of those memories are there. The moral to your story is it’s cheaper to keep her. How does that work out when you keep your first car for so long?

Well, my advice to anybody is buy, don’t sell. I mean, you know, that’s the kind of rule. I would always encourage people to keep their first car because they may not know it now. But they’re going to want it later. They’re going to wish they had it. The Accord was the car that I moved [00:15:00] from the East Coast to the West Coast in, and literally everything that I owned was in that hatchback.

Things have changed. My life has changed. I have a different life now. But I still have that car. And then you ended up with a second one. So what’s the reasoning behind that? Honda Accords were never meant to be collectibles, and particularly the first generation. I mean, it changed the Honda Motor Company completely, changed the trajectory of that company, absolutely.

But they were not meant to be collectible or to last as long as mine have lasted. And the result is There are no parts for those cars. So you have to go online and you’re typing in Honda parts, Malaysia, you know, and you kind of go, Oh, what can I find in Malaysia? What can I find in Czechoslovakia? What old Honda dealer in the back room in a plastic bag has my head gasket.

And that’s what you end up doing. So for years, I would scroll the internet looking for another 78 Honda Accord, thinking it’d be cheaper for me to buy a whole car and store it somewhere and [00:16:00] then take parts off at like the Thanksgiving Turkey five days later. You go, there’s still something good here.

You know, I’m always looking. But, mechanically very well built, but thin sheet metal, and if they are left outside, they melt. Essentially, the ones that I would find online, I’d get real excited, I’d see a picture, then you start looking and you went, there’s no car left! It’s just been sitting outside, rotting away, not worth buying.

I’ve been doing this for years, literally years, looking and anytime one would come on the market, I’d look and I’d say, is this worth getting? Then, I was on good old Bring a Trailer one day, and up pops this 78 Honda Accord LX. And I’m looking at it going, Damn, that looks as nice as mine. Is this even possible?

I’m looking at it. I read the stuff, and it had like 103, 000 miles on it. And I thought, God, it looks pretty good for that much mileage. And then I read the description, and it says it’s a two owner car. And I go, Whoa. And then it says the second owner kept spreadsheets on all the maintenance. Now I’m in, I’m just really excited because [00:17:00] it’s like, Oh, wait a minute.

Here’s an obsessive compulsive guy who has obviously kept his 78 Accord. The thought was that I would get it and it would be the donor kidney for my car. Well, I won the auction as they say, and the car shows up and my jaw drops because it was. It was stunning. It was in unbelievable condition. Much better than my original car.

So now, I’m looking at my car like it’s the donor kindy. Uh oh, when is the day going to come when the new one needs something that I can’t find and the maroon one is just sitting there trying to get small and not be noticed. Very afraid of that day because that would be a cruel, cruel thing to do to the original Honda.

But I also, I have to tell you, when I drive the silver one, the newer one, I still have the same feeling of driving the original one, because it’s the same car. And when I compared the VIN numbers on them, they were a few hundred cars apart on the assembly line, which is pretty cool. You [00:18:00] mentioned in that story the other cars in your collection, so do you still have the Benzes, or have they been replaced?

Nope. You know, like the stock market, I’m a buy and hold guy. I don’t sell a lot of cars. In fact, when I think back, the cars I’ve sold have all belonged to my wife. I have no guilty conscience about selling her cars, but I do about my own. I still have the, uh, 51 220 that’s on the cover of the book. That’s kind of a long story in the book, too, how that came into my life and is still in my life.

Even though I haven’t driven it in 40 years. Most car guys have a someday project. They’ve got something under a tarp. They’ve got something squirreled away somewhere. And in the back of their car fantasy mind, it’s going to be, yeah, I’m going to restore it. I’m going to fix it and dah, dah, dah, dah. If you don’t have one of those, you’re not a real car guy.

A real car guy has something squirreled away somewhere that they are going to get to. Mine just happens to be this 51 Mercedes Benz sedan that I fell in love with for no particular reason when I, [00:19:00] again, had no money, no job, and no place to put it, and bought it anyway. And I’ve been kind of dragging it around and thinking, well, I’ll get to it.

It’s just got an interesting history. It’s a great piece of automotive history for Mercedes Benz in particular. It was the first, after the war, luxury car they built. It was introduced at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 51, and it was a four door, six cylinder car. It was a big deal for them. They’d never imported it to the United States.

They only made about 3, 500 of them, so there’s not that many of them out there. Is it worth anything? Eh, not much. If the top wasn’t on it, or it only had two doors, it would be a different story. But four doors is always two doors too many, and it doesn’t get any love, and it doesn’t have any love in the collector market.

And I always maintain the value of that car will go up the day I sell it. That’s the day that the car world will discover this rare Mercedes Benz, and I’ll go, why did I sell it so cheap? That’s probably how that story is going to end. Do you do a lot of your own work? Do you maintain your own cars in your [00:20:00] garage?

Yes, to a limited degree. I’m not putting on head gaskets. I’m not changing brakes. I have done oil changes. Mostly it’s trim, cosmetic, that kind of thing. General maintenance, but I’m not a wrencher. Part of the premise of the book, and I know Don talks about this a lot as part of the ethos of Garage Style, is the garage can be the sanctuary, right?

It could be our racer’s den, it could be our hideaway, it could be that place you go just to go look at your car, buff your car, just spend time with those memories as you painted that picture. Why the garage and not the house? Try to explain it to people that are going to be picking up your book as that underlying premise of the importance of spending time in the garage.

This is for people who have relationships with their vehicles. I mean, they care about them. They are part of the family, not people who, the car, what’s the car? You know, they’re just, But if you care about your car, and many, many people do, it’s just shocking how many people have relationships with their cars.

So they are a member [00:21:00] of the family, but they are a member of the family that doesn’t get to come in the house. They have to live out in their own little house. They’re in the garage, which is their area. So I know this sounds a little crazy, but it’s like, That’s the place where you can go to spend time with it if you’re not driving, if you’re working on it or cleaning it or whatever.

And sometimes it’s just a way to get away from everything else. It’s a little car churchy in a way. You’re going to hate this word, but there’s a little spiritual aspect to it. There is a certain sanctuariness. To a garage. It’s the place where you can lay down your sword. It’s a place where I’m not a wrench or either, but I love going out there and just bonding with the car.

And for me, it’s detailing. We have a Caprice classic, a 79. If you know the grill on that car, it’s literally a bunch of squares and to go through each one of those squares and clean them out, I mean, you talk about obsessive compulsive and focused on that, but I think for me, my mind, when it gets so focused on that task, everything else that’s going on up here in the brain gets.

to sort itself out somehow. When I come out of that [00:22:00] garage, I feel better. My thought process is clear. Things are just a little better. Even though it’s an inanimate object, doesn’t have a heartbeat or it doesn’t purr or bark at you, you depend on it. You care about it. It cares about you. So I think that the garage then becomes the sort of house of the car.

People get a little obsessive about it. You know, they will give it a nice floor and a paint job and, you know, get really fancy artwork. I can’t tell you how many garages we’ve featured in Garage Style Magazine that literally have a porcelain floor. You know, you kind of look at it and say, wow, you sprung for a porcelain floor.

What’s the story behind that? Well, it’s impervious to everything. Brake fluid, oil, transmission fluid. It doesn’t arm it. A week, a month, a year can go by and you just walk in there and pfft. Wipe it right up. But on that same note, every one of the guys I’ve interviewed with that porcelain floor, they’ve all kind of said the same thing.

I think I’m the only guy in town with a floor that’s more expensive than any floor in my house because it’s the only room that they’ve got with a porcelain floor. It [00:23:00] gets fancier and fancier. Why are you doing that? You say to someone, Why did you just spend all this money decorating your garage nicer than the inside of your house?

It’s because you care about your car. Well, it’s also, there’s something else too in terms of the style of the book. The style of the book, I write in a conversational tone, which I’m sure Don is very aware of. Right. Which is essentially me telling you a story. It’s not always grammatically correct, which my wife, who is a terrific editor, is more than willing to point out to me.

But I say, no, I’m just telling you this story. So this is the way I speak. And so this is the way I write. But I had a person who had read the book said to me, and I knew they got it right away because they said, you know what? The experience of reading that book was like, you and I were sitting at a bar and you were just telling me story.

And that was the experience of reading the book. And I said, well, then it was success because that’s what I intended it to be. Me just telling stories, but they’re stories that have beginning, middles and ends. They have payoffs. Each one. So there’s an added layer of [00:24:00] complexity here. When you were working with Don and submitting columns, you know, month after month, you’ve got an editor behind you that’s looking at your work, that’s critiquing, building you up your strengths and things like that.

And so it’s nice to have that audience, right? That peanut gallery that can give you that immediate feedback. But in this case, you took a new turn in terms of publishing. You went through Amazon and you self published and I’ve only. I’ve spoken to one other author on this show that went down that route, and I wanted to investigate just a little more technically for other people that might be thinking, you know what, I want to write a book and I don’t know what the process is like, and I’m intimidated by Random House and Penguin and all these other places.

What was the journey like when you went through the self publishing through Amazon? Because I really had never done a book before. It was all brand new to me. So I just started asking my friends who had written books. Called all my friends who had written books, not always car books. Some of them are car books, but others are [00:25:00] academics and all kinds of people that write books.

So I’d call them up and I would say, tell me your experience of writing your book and your relationship with your publisher and financially and how does that all work? The basic publishing model is essentially the publisher is going to give you an advance. And then after that, it’s pretty much 10 percent of net.

That’s it. That’s what you’re going to get. Most people will not see anything past the event. You’re going to get paid the advance. Your 10 percent of net is like in the movie business, you’re not going to get it. I kept thinking about that and I kept going, well, I believe in the work and I put the book together in such a way that it is what we call evergreen, meaning There’s nothing in it that’s dated.

It’ll be green forever. You could read these stories 20 years from now and you’ll still react to them because they are about people. They are emotional stories that are about people. So I thought, this book could sell for a long time. Why do I want to give all that money to the publisher? With the Amazon [00:26:00] print on demand model, you participate on the first copy printing.

You get money. And you get money for every copy thereafter. into perpetuity. That’s a much better model. The downside? You don’t have a publisher who’s going to essentially create the book for you. You have to create the book. They’ll give you a template in which you plug your book in, but you have to create it from front cover to back cover and everything in between.

They’re not going to do any of that. Normally a publisher would do it. They’re obviously going to take the bulk of the money too. That’s really became the decision, and also I had a much more control over the design of the book by doing it the way I did it. And Don can attest, when we were doing the column, I was heavily involved in the artwork for the column.

To the point of driving his art director a little batty, because I cared about how things looked. I thought about it, and I thought, you know, I’m probably going to make myself miserable if I have a publisher who’s giving me stuff I don’t like or not what I intended. That was the [00:27:00] other reason to go the self publishing route.

Self publishing has a bad rap, but I believe that is changing, and I believe it’s actually changing with books like mine. Because people are looking at this going, Well, this is a real book. And look, he’s got real quotes from real people in the front of him. That’s a real book. That’s not just some self published ego trip.

I believe if you really think about it, publishing the way it has been is really horse and buggy culture. It used to be the printer would print the books, load them into wooden boxes, and the wooden boxes get loaded into a wooden cart, and the wooden cart goes down the street and unloads into the bookstore, and then they sit on the shelf and they hope somebody buys it.

Look at all the wasted resources there. With a print on demand format, Notebook sits in a warehouse. You’re not wasting any resources. That book doesn’t exist until you hit buy on Amazon. Then it is printed and shipped. Done. Environmentally, it makes a lot more sense. And financially, it makes a lot more sense.

Because the quality of that print quality entails, if I did that in a normal publishing [00:28:00] world, you even said, Don, would be grossly expensive. I learned a lot about the Amazon process just Hiding you as you went through it. And it was very, very interesting. And I think not to pat my own back, but I think one thing that kills me is when we launched GarageStyle, this was very much the way I wanted to go.

I really wanted to get orders from retailers, get orders from the subscribers, print just what we need, plus 5%. Call it done. Oh no, said the distributors and the wholesalers and the resalers. We can’t do it that way. You know, we need you to print this man, especially it started with the printers who had their minimum.

You have to print this many to get out there. Well, if you’re only going to sell that many, the X and the Y don’t match up and you have to figure out, well, how do we make this work? Because if you’re saying, I don’t want this crap sitting around in a warehouse, closet in your house, gathering dust, doing nothing.

No, I’ve talked to writers who would say. Yeah, I, I bought, you know, 500 copies of my book and I moved them around from closet to closet in my house. Yeah. [00:29:00] I didn’t want that. I didn’t want the experience of getting them from the publisher, putting them in the trunk of my car, driving down the street to the local bookstore, knocking on the door and saying, will you please buy five copies?

That seems so awful to me because this way I can promote it online. I can promote it wherever and say, go to the website, click, click. Literally, the book went live on Amazon on a Friday. I had friends who bought it that day. It was printed and delivered by Amazon on Sunday. Think about that. That book didn’t exist Friday morning.

And it’s being read by someone on Sunday. And people talk about electric cars are the future. Yes, they are. But I think the Amazon print on demand formula is the future of publishing. I really do. It makes so much sense. You talk about the expediency of getting a copy of the book, but as you were going through the process, did they send you copies so you could see what the printed version would look like?

Did you work through that process and then iteratively change the book because you [00:30:00] didn’t like the way it laid out? Or were you sort of locked into whatever the PDF is? Is what they’re going to print. We did a chapter at a time because each chapter, they’re elaborate. I mean, these are elaborate graphics and they bleed off the page and they bleed from page to page.

And it’s a sophisticated book. We really tested the limits of the Amazon print on demand process by this book. It really did test the limit of how far they can go currently. I think they will get better and better as time goes on because I think people are going to realize this is the only way to go.

To answer your question, I never had a physical book in my hand until the very end when you can request a proof. But that means you have to have uploaded the entire book. There’s no partial book, so you’re doing everything on a computer screen, you’re looking at all the graphics, you’re doing all that stuff, and because I’m an acoustic guy, I would print out those pages as we created them and do a paste up.

So I have half a dozen paste up [00:31:00] versions of the book where I would literally glue the pages together to create a book that I could hold in my hand and look at, because I wanted to see what the experience was of turning the page. From this graphic to this graphic, did it work? Did it flow? Was there a conflict?

Were these two similar? So there was a lot of decisions that were made about how did the book experience in my hand feel? But the only way I could have that experience was to literally create a mock up, paste up version of my own. And that’s what I did. Very labor intensive. Rodney, how long did it take you to put the book together from stem to stern?

Yeah, I call it my pandemic book. Because, you know, when we were all locked down at the very beginning of the pandemic, when nobody was going anywhere and stuff, I kind of started working on it then. Where are we now? Three years out of the pandemic. So do you think that’s on par with, let’s say, standard publishing?

’cause I’ve heard it takes years to get a book out going through the standard channels. Or is it because of your fastidiousness or your [00:32:00] perfectionism that you wanted it to be as good as it could be in your eyes that it took longer? I think that it took longer because of my compulsiveness and some of those chapters.

There were upwards of. 15 different draft layouts of that artwork. Some of them just didn’t want to happen. You know what I mean? You’d say, gee, this isn’t quite right. And let’s change this and this and this. And some of them just didn’t want to be born. Some of them drew drafts and they were locked. Some of them just came together very quickly.

Others didn’t. It was a learning experience. The thing is, and Don knows this about me, I love a challenge. I just love doing new stuff. I love the challenge of something new. I don’t like repeating things. And the challenge was to create a book that I had never seen before. Visually have it be interesting and exciting to read.

And then we came on this idea of doing it in the shape of a car owner’s manual. So it felt familiar when you held it. It’s funny you mention that. The only other book I’ve ever seen that is designed that way, I have a copy of it. Lynn St. [00:33:00] James’s Owner’s manual for women. No kidding. It looks just like something out of the Ford factory.

And we also went for this shape because cars are horizontal. They’re not vertical. Books are vertical. How are you going to show cars unless you start turning the book sideways all the time to look at pictures? Gotta go with a horizontal thing so when you turn the page you can see the whole car. But I think Don can appreciate my attention to detail in terms of the artwork because as I say, I did drive him a little crazy with some of the stuff that I wanted in the magazine.

Part of this journey is also overcoming technological hurdles. A lot of writers are not technophiles. They’re not IT nerds or geeks or whatever you want to call them. Well, into that category is, but there are limited tools in their tool set, right? It’s like, Oh, I know how to use Google docs or I know how to use, you know, Microsoft word or whatever it is.

What was the Amazon software like? Was it easy to learn? I did not create the master file. I hired someone to do it because. I [00:34:00] don’t have those technical skills and nor did I load it into the Amazon process. We had some technical problems with Amazon which just about broke my heart because we loaded it in and then I got a proof and it was not good.

They blamed us and we’re saying, you know, we did it the way you asked. So we had to actually recreate the master file. I think it was in October. So it cost me an entire month of rebuilding the book. And to this day, I don’t know what caused it or why or whatever. I think it had to do with our pushing the limits of their technology.

But I believe this is all going to get better. I just do. I just think this is the way to print books, to sell books, distribute books. And I just was on the phone today with someone who said they had bought a copy, they really enjoyed it, and now they decided to give it as Christmas gifts. And one of the things I loved about giving it as a Christmas gift, they said, you know, all I got to do is send them the address and they’ll put in a gift card and I don’t have to wrap it or mail it [00:35:00] or do anything.

So I said, yeah, I like that. There’s a lot to be said for that. You read a book and you really like it. You want someone else to share it with you. Click, Amazon, phone, printed, delivered in their hands in two or three days. That’s pretty amazing. So speaking of futures, knowing what you know now, would you do it again?

You think there’s another book on the horizon? Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, there’s two books that are squirreling around my desk right now. One is in the draft called Tales from the Garage Beverly Hills because there’s a lot of cool garages and cool cars in Beverly Hills. The second one has to do with the house that I live in that I’ve restored and has an incredible history that I have uncovered over years of research.

It’s an amazing story that I have now fully documented from raw ground up until today, and the building’s almost a hundred years old. Give it a catchy title like In the Shadow of the Garage, right? In the Shadow of the Garage, yes. So Rodney, not to add more things to [00:36:00] your plate, in the advent of the new all digital version of Garage Style Magazine, are readers going to be seeing more Tales from the Garage columns and short stories showing up there as well in the future?

Mr. Weeberg, oh me. I don’t think you need permission at this point. Well, that leads into our final question, Rodney, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we haven’t covered thus far. John is a terrific editor, by the way, in the sense that he did encourage me constantly on these stories.

You know, I mean, I would say to him, what about this? What do you think about this? He would say, absolutely do that. Do that. Don’t do that. Do this one, do this one. He was incredibly encouraging and supportive in ways he doesn’t even know. For that, Don, I thank you. Oh, thank you. That’s a nice compliment. If anybody was the godfather of this book, it was you.

Because without you, this book would not exist. I mean, it wouldn’t have happened. Because of your encouragement and allowing me to do that column, then I [00:37:00] went, well, okay, maybe there’s a second life for these things. You know, maybe there is an audience for this outside of Car Magazine. And what we’re learning is there is a noise, there is a hunger, because if you look at the reviews that people are writing on the Amazon link, a lot of them are saying, I’m not a car person, I don’t really care about cars, but I love this book.

One area where your book is hitting the nail on the head is it’s a collection of short stories, but what’s even more beautiful about it is you don’t have to be a car guy. These short stories, you can relate to them no matter what walk of life you’re in, if you’re a boy or a girl, if you’re rich or poor, it doesn’t matter.

You kind of become that old man at the beach, you know, every small town on a, in a beach village, they have this crazy old man who sits on the beach and he tells all the little kids stories. That’s really what this book is. This book is your campfire. The car just happens to be the sort of catalyst.

That’s where the story begins. It begins with a car somehow, but it spins off into the human interest beyond the car. You know, I’ve said [00:38:00] this to you a thousand times. One of my favorite tales from the garage, it has to do with the sun. And the father and the father’s dying, it’s called the last ride. And the father and the son don’t have a great relationship, but the father just suddenly utters on his deathbed out of nowhere, I should have bought Cadillacs.

And the son asked for clarity on that. What are you talking about? And he gets into it and you tell it all in the story. I don’t think we need to reiterate it, but that to me always resonates. I just love that story. Here’s a guy in his deathbed. He’s a car guy. He likes his old mobiles. That’s what he always bought.

And he should have bought Cadillacs. And now he’s saying it and it’s too late. There is a car guy thing there, yes, but more so, there’s a human interest thing. Here’s been my experience so far in the sort of 30 days that it’s been available. Still tracking number one new release in the automotive sector.

That says a lot, given the fact that I’m up against a lot of big boys there. What I’m hearing is that people buy one and enjoy it so much that they then buy multiple copies because they want to share it with other people. [00:39:00] And I think it’s because it touches something very human in all of us, these stories that everyone can relate to in some way or another.

You may not have had a Rolls Royce. But you can relate to that story in the sense of the relationship of those people to that car. The website has a lot of information, tailsfromthegarage. com. And there’s a bonus, by the way, on the website. If you go all the way to the bottom of the website, there is a little section called Other Essays.

And I think there’s five or six essays that I’ve written for other publications, including the LA Times, that are not car related. They are on different subjects. It’s like a candy sample at the store. You know, I’ll just try this little piece here and see if you like it. That’s what they’re there for. So if you read all the great advanced reviews and you go, wow, this guy, geez, sounds like the real deal.

And then you can read a couple writing samples at the end on topics other than cars to push you over the cliff. Never had a website until I had this book. Now I can say, go to my website with impunity. Rodney Kemmerer’s Tales [00:40:00] from the Garage, designed with the look and feel of an automotive owner’s manual, is far more than just a car book.

As car enthusiast Jay Leno and Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neal have observed, Rodney’s warm and personal tales resonate deeply, because everyone has a car story to tell. These 30 stories originate as essays in a host of publications and now reformatted with an entirely new and colorful artwork.

You can pick up a copy of Tales from the Garage today on Amazon or learn more by visiting www. talesfromthegarage. com or follow him on social. At Pales from the garage on Facebook and Instagram. And with that, Rodney, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Break Fix and sharing your story with all of us.

As a newly minted author, this is a great wealth of information for those of us that are sitting out there wondering how we’re gonna write the next Great American novel. But more importantly, your book [00:41:00] isn’t just the next Ferrari coffee table book or something that you lay out that somebody might.

thumb through. These are personal stories, and it’s a great adventure. It’s a great read, and I think it’s a lot of fun. And I commend you for doing something different and trying to break the mold. It was fun in retrospect, probably not in the middle of it. I’m very happy with the result, but mostly I am thrilled with the response that it’s getting.

When someone writes you and says, I picked up your book, I was going to read one chapter, I sat down, I didn’t move until I had finished the entire book. I’ve heard that from a number of people, and that’s like the highest compliment you can get. It really is. Well, congratulations, and we look forward to the sequel of Tales from the Grush.

Me too. Yeah, do it again, do it again. Do it again, that was fun, do it again. As they say in the theater biz, encore, encore. Again, thank you Don. Oh, no problem, thank you Rodney. No, you’ve been great Don, you really have. The following episode is brought to us in part by Garage Style Magazine. [00:42:00] Since 2007, Garage Style Magazine has been the definitive source for car collectors continually delivering information about automobilia, petroliana, events, and more.

To learn more about the annual publication and its new website, Be sure to follow them on social media at Garage Style Magazine or log onto www.garagestylemagazine.com because after all, what doesn’t belong in your garage.

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