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Posts Tagged ‘Printing’

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The Business of Creativity

Friday, January 1st, 2010

After a long Christmas break, I’m starting to think about my next steps in marketing the book. A large order from one of my retailers has forced me to look at my supplies and printing plans earlier than I’d intended, and that situation has a number of side-issues tied to it:

  • I need to maintain a stock of books for the fulfilment of web and direct sales.
  • I need to maintain a separate stock of books for potential retailers, as the last thing I want to happen is for a new retailer to place an order and not be able to satisfy it.
  • One goal for the next few weeks is to submit review copies to local publications; I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t think I was going to generate sales off the back of the reviews (thinking positive…) so I have to keep a stock of books for any sales spikes reviews cause.
  • I’m going to contact a larger retailer who may require ISBN barcodes printing on the books. A block of ISBNs takes at least two weeks to order, then I need to amend the artwork before resubmitting to the printers. I really want to avoid using ISBNs, but this is potentially a big retailer.

It all comes down to timing – making decisions and taking steps in the right order to make sure new print runs arrive just in time to avoid both running out of stock and having to sit on a new shipment (and invoice) for longer than necessary.

That second part is the main problem I’m facing as try to plan this out; even though the first print run has broken even, I’m not significantly into profit yet, certainly not to the extent that I can fund a second printing from the profits from the first. On paper, I’m in the same position I was when I started: I have to pay for the books up front. The issue this time is I don’t have a large number of pre-orders to satisfy, so I’m ordering the full print run with no guaranteed sales. It’s more risk this time, but I knew this point would come, and I’m committed to seeing it through.

So that’s where I am, and the tasks ahead of me. I know I can work through this transition by focussing on one thing at a time within the framework of the broader plan, and by working efficiently, but that doesn’t solve the other problem I’m facing: I need to start the next book.

I know that by deciding to self-publish, I’d always be fighting to balance the business with the creative process of writing, and I hope that the successes (or failures) of one endeavour will inspire the other, but it could go horribly wrong. I guess that’s why, traditionally, authors have a marketing team working for them while they write. Whether I ever land a book deal or not, it seems those days are over, so my only choice is keep working, keep generating ideas in both areas, and keep having fun.

2010 is going to be a busy year.

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Posted in Printing, Publishing, Retail, Writing | No Comments »

The Break-even Point

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Make a Move broke even today; the income from the book passed the cost of the print run for the first time. This is a HUGE THING, and I wanted to write to thank everyone who bought the book and supported this endeavour. It took three-and-a-half weeks from delivery of the books, and the numbers include direct sales, online orders and retailer copies. I’m a very happy writer/publisher.

The risk in doing your first print run is hard to quantify, as you don’t know how family/friends/acquaintances will respond when they see your finished book; buying in principle is one thing, but laying down a not-inconsequential amount of money is another. The worst case scenario for your print run is you sell zero books and you’re in the hole for a lot of money. The 100-book run of Make a Move cost a lot – closer to a grand than not – and that isn’t the kind of loss I can laugh-off. Okay, so someone is going to buy a copy, but that’s no reassurance. It’s a big risk.

So today, I know that my risk paid off. Every penny I make from hereon in is profit (it’s actually operating capital for the next printing, but it’s not paying off a debt, so it’s all good). It’s a big milestone for me, as I can now focus on the “business” with less fear of failure. The next milestone is going to be selling enough copies to justify that second print run, but I have good ideas – new ideas – on how to do that.

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Independent Preconceptions

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I came to a realisation today – one that is both unsettling and reassuring. But first, the background.

I’ve been out talking to independent booksellers (or trying to) regarding selling my new book, and a friend was doing the same on my behalf further afield. She spoke to one bookshop owner who thought my book was too modern for his clientele, and that it would struggle to sell as it didn’t have a local setting or anything to provide an angle he could push. Fair enough – I’ve learned something there. What he said that set me thinking, though, was that he was very impressed with the finish and design of my book (both the binding and the cover) and that it was refreshing to see an independently produced hardback, as most indie books he saw were in paperback, and were typically of low quality, printed on cheaper paper and with basic or unskilled cover designs. And this is a man who is happy to deal directly with indie publishers/authors; this is not a hostile market.

After my friend had reported back, I was thinking about what I’d learned from the encounter, and that was when I came to my realisation; the perception of my book, in concept, is shaped by the actions of every independent author-publisher out there. Every rushed, unedited, cheap book that someone has tried to sell damages the perceived value of my book with potential readers and retailers. That’s pretty unsettling.

But I’m looking at that situation another way now. I’ve flipped it around. Every one of us, by doing the best job we can to produce a quality product, can reinforce the reputation of indie books as an alternative, rather than a second-rate option. That’s pretty reassuring. With the tools and technology now available to everyone, both in production and communication, the time has never been better for us to work together and create a new market – one where an indie book is judged on the quality of its content rather than its cover.

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Posted in Opinion, Printing, Publishing | 2 Comments »

Letting Go

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Just a quick post after the monster that was Typesetting 101, but I wanted to capture this feeling while it’s fresh. I was skimming my print-submitted text to find a page to screen grab for that post, and I noticed a typo. And I freaked. Now, I know that this print run is small (110 copies) and that I can resubmit the files for the next run at a small charge but, man, did I feel bad. I felt bad because all of the people who have bought the book now have a “defective” copy, and they are the people who are supporting me now when I need it most. I felt bad because I pride myself on my attention to detail. I felt bad because my proofreaders (Mark and Julie) also pride themselves on the quality of their work, and I know they’d feel like they let me down.

Basically, I was freaking out and very pissed at myself.

Turns out it wasn’t a typo, and I’ve just been staring at this screen for so long I was seeing things. In my defence, the word “eighth” does look damned freakish if you stare at it long enough (never mind that my spellchecker would have caught it – thinking that was just adding to my sense of failure).

So, now that my heart has stopped hammering, I can reflect on the situation. I know there’s going to be at least one typo in the printed book. There has to be. I’ve seen them in traditionally published books, so I know that even professional teams of proofreaders miss things. The point of this post, and the question I want to ask is, at what point do you say “I’ve done everything I can to ensure I’m shipping a tested, quality product?” How much proofing is too much?

At what point can you let go?

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Posted in Publishing | 5 Comments »

Typesetting 101

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

There are plenty of websites offering advice on typesetting a book, but there’s always an element of experimentation when you don’t have the final result to view. I took a long time checking and typesetting Make a Move, but I was still nervous as I unpacked the first Make_a_Move_Page1shipment of books; until you can see the results, you can’t be sure you made the right choices. I’m writing about my experiences now so you can compare my layout decisions with an image of the final text – the first page of the book, to the left – and hopefully that will make your choices easier. I did all of my typesetting in Microsoft Word, which does everything an amateur typesetter needs, and doesn’t cost anywhere near what Adobe InDesign (the accepted industry standard) does. Just to add a caveat at this point: I’m an amateur typesetter writing for an audience of amateur typesetters; if you spot something in my process that could be improved, or disagree entirely, please wade into the comments and let me know.

Bear in mind that all of my layout decisions were made with one eye on the cost implications, which is something you’ll understand once you’re self -funding a print run, so if my decisions ever seem conservative, that’s probably why. For example if your margins increase, so will your page count and, hence, your unit cost.

One warning based on my own experience: there’s some difference in page measurement between Word for Mac 2008 and Word for Windows 2003, which caused the text to reflow when I moved the file between versions. I had to use Windows to gain access to Adobe Acrobat, and I ended up having to layout the text again. If possible use the same version of Word from start to finish.

Step One – Page Setup

Setting up the page size in Word is easy: just enter the page dimensions based on the size of paper you’re going to print the book on. Most standard book printing sizes aren’t offered in Word, so you’ll need to set up a custom size. Go to File > Page Setup, and then select Manage Custom Sizes from the Paper Size dropdown. In the Custom Sizes dialog, click the + icon and enter the Width and Height into the Paper Size fields. Double-click on the Untitled entry in the list and name the new size (use the name your printer uses for easy reference). For example, Make a Move is printed on Royal paper size, 156 x 234mm. Click OK, and then click OK again to close the Page Setup dialog.

You don’t need to worry about bleeds on your text. The files are centred and the pages cut equally on all sides, so just enter the exact pages size.

Step Two – Page Margins

This is one of the harder choices to make, as you’ve no way of predicting how the book will behave, in a mechanical sense, once it’s printed: how wide will the reader need to open the book so that the left-most text is visible? How much will the pages curve, obscuring that margin? My printer suggests a minimum of 10mm on all margins, but that doesn’t take the number of pages into account, which can effect the curve as the book is opened. I chose 18mm for the Left, Right and Top margins, and 30mm for the Bottom. I set the Footer to 18mm (which left my page numbers a comfortable distance from the text and the bottom of the page) and set the Header to 0mm as there isn’t any header text.

Step Three – Justification

Select all of your body text and justify it (aligning both left and right margins flush to the edge of the printable area). Your intro pages will probably look best centre-aligned, but the rest should be justified. Just look at any published book for confirmation.

Step Four – Fonts

You may want to mix fonts in your text, either using a different font for intro pages, or maybe to highlight a particular scene in the story. Whatever you decide to do, apply your fonts as they are going to appear in the final book now. Font changes later on can push your text out and leave you needing to layout the book again.

You can use any font you want within certain rules, the most important being that is has to be easy to read. That seems obvious, but try reading a page or two with your chosen font to make sure it’s not tiring or just confusing after a while. There are plenty of suitable fonts in a standard installation of Word on Windows and Mac, so just choose a serif font that you like. If you’re using any unusual characters in your text, read my post Font-slapped: A Cautionary Tale before you start. As for font size, 12pt is a good starting point for most serif fonts. Remember that larger print is more readable, but it increases your page count and your unit cost, but don’t go too far the other way and produce a cheap, but unreadable, book. Make a Move uses Times New Roman in 12pt, and I’m very happy with the readability and appearance.

Step Five – Hyphenation

Hyphenation is the process whereby Word breaks long words over two lines to avoid spacing a line out to much, leaving lots of white space. You can hyphenate manually, but Word does a surprisingly good job with some tweaking.

First, select all of the text in the document, then go to Format > Paragraph and deselect the option Don’t hyphenate. You can reselect it for specific paragraphs later if needed. Next, go to Tools > Hyphenation and select Automatically hyphenate document. Click OK, and inspect your text. You should see words broken with a hyphen pretty soon, if not on page one. You need to decide how much hyphenation is acceptable to you. I looked at a lot of books, and decided that three hyphenated words per page was my limit, and that I didn’t want to see more than one hyphenated line in a row. In the Hyphenation dialog, set the Limit consecutive hyphens to option to your chosen value (1 in my case) and click OK. From here, it’s a process of trial an error. Read from page one until you find a page with more than your upper hyphen limit. When you find one, go back into the Hyphenation dialog and increase the Hyphenation zone setting by a small amount before clicking OK. Start reading again until you find the next page with more than your limit of hyphenation, then repeat the process. I think it took me six runs to get the hyphenation to within my limit.

Step Six – Widows and Orphans

Widows and orphans occur when the first line of a new paragraph begins at the bottom of a page, or the last line of a paragraph begins at the top of a new page. Word avoids this by default, moving lines around to join these isolated chunks of text, but this leaves pages with one or two blank lines at the bottom, which looks bad. Disable this automatic behaviour by selecting all of your text, then going to Format > Paragraph and deselecting the Widow/Orphan control option (you can do this earlier, but it should affect your hyphenation much, if at all, doing it after). You’ll now be stuck with (hopefully) a few widow/orphan lines. There are two ways to deal with this.

  • As you’re the writer, and have creative control, you can look for lines with only one or two words, or that miss breaking onto a new line by one or two words, and rewrite to force the addition/removal of a line. This sounds flaky, as who would place the needs of typesetting above the integrity of your text, but it can be valid if the change is small and yields the results you want.
  • You can adjust the line spacing for a few lines near the bottom/top of the page in question. This is the “proper” way to do it, but you need to be careful to make tiny changes to just enough lines, so that the difference in spacing is invisible to the reader. To change the line spacing, just select the lines you want to change, then select Format > Paragraph and add a point of spacing Before the selected lines.

Summary

Again, I want to reiterate that I’m not a professional typesetter, but I achieved great results using these techniques. Most self-publishing authors can’t afford the services of a professional typesetter, and might see this phase of production as an insurmountable obstacle. I want to dispel that myth, but I’d also love for any pros with advice to comment, even if they shoot down my techniques. I learned by experimentation and got to where I needed to be, but I’m still ready to learn more.

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The Economics of Fair

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

A couple of people – friends of friends – have commented that the £12.99 cover price of my book is a bit steep. I understand that people place different values on material objects, and that the low book prices they see each week in the supermarkets has conditioned them to expect more for less, and I also understand the market forces at play in the supermarkets offering books at those prices, so I wanted to take this opportunity to open up my business model by way of explaining the cover price I set. My model is actually pretty simple:

No one was shat on in the process of getting my book to market.

I’ll explain by way of a couple of examples.

  1. If you buy cheap meat from a supermarket, the animal who provided your food was subjected to the absolute bare minimum living conditions for its entire pitiful existence. Outdoor-reared, humanely-kept animals cost more in upkeep over the duration of their life, so you pay more for the meat. Of course, both are killed and eaten, but that’s another discussion. Relatively speaking, it’s the battery chicken getting shat on. Literally in this case.
  2. If you buy your kid a cheap school shirt from a supermarket, you’ll save a few pounds that you could maybe put towards Christmas, or a day out, or some sweets, whatever. The person who made that shirt got paid so little that they can barely afford to feed their kids, let alone buy them a bar of chocolate. I know that this is another situation where the politics are complicated (if you paid more, would they get paid more? Probably not…) but the balance of the equation is that they get shat on so you can save a quid or two.
  3. If you buy a book from a supermarket – say the new Terry Pratchett – there’s a good chance that the supermarket is selling it at near to or below cost (the latter tends to be the case with event titles like Harry Potter). You get the book for around £5, and the supermarket gets you through the door to spend your wages on the weekly shop. Have you spotted the person being shat on in this equation? Yes, it’s the owner of the independent book shop who doesn’t have tinned goods to sell and is relying on sales of event titles to keep trading. He/she can’t sell that book for less than cost, and their sales dry up.

Through all of the transactions that I’ve been involved with in the production of Make a Move, I’ve always asked myself this question first: is it fair? My printer was happy with the price I paid, as was I. I’m going to absorb some of the postage and packing cost for my online customers (once online ordering is live) as I want to offer a fair total price for the delivered book. When I found out how long Sam had been working on my cover art, I changed the deal, because he’d been putting in so much time, the original deal wasn’t fair any more.

I’m not trying to be a saint; I’m just trying to have fun, and shitting on people to get what I want isn’t fun. My book costs more because it’s been ethically sourced. You’re not happy with the £12.99 price? No problem.

Just head on over to Tesco and buy yourself a nice, cheap battery book.

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Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Narrative Thrust

Monday, November 30th, 2009

My book’s been in the wild for three days now, and I’ve noticed a theme emerging in the responses I get when people take receipt of their copies – some variation on “oh, it’s a lot nicer than I expected”. Translation: “oh good, it’s not shit”.

It’s flattering that people are impressed with the quality of the product, but it’s also worrying that their expectations are so low. That got me thinking; if customer’s have so little faith in a self-publishing author to deliver a professionally printed book, does that also extend to writers’ faith in their ability to produce one?

Probably, and that’s one misconception that needs kicking into touch right now.

One fact you might not be aware of: you have access to the same printers as the major publishing houses. It’s true; you can deal direct with the printers, and with the publishing industry so downbeat right now, a lot of printers are trying to attract indies and small presses in an effort to adapt and survive. The only difference between you and a major publisher is the order size (which has one minor implication I’ll detail below). Aside from that, it’s a level playing field.

Don’t believe me? Okay – let’s assume you’ve placed an order for 100 hardback books (a typical minimum for digital printing) and take a look at the anatomy of the end product.

  1. Dust Jacket – it’s a sheet of paper. They print your artwork on it, laminate it in gloss or matt for a nominal fee (if you choose) and wrap it around the book.
  2. Binding – fabric-covered cardboard. I guess you could use some expensive fabric woven by Parisian chorus girls in their spare time, but as there’s a dust jacket hiding it from view, it’s not going to add much value. I can’t see any difference between my binding and any of the hundreds of “pro” books on my shelves.
  3. Spine Embossing – this is a nice touch. I thought about saving the money, but I believe it does add value, and it’s useful to identify the book if the owner loses the dust jacket. All the printers ask for is a print-ready PDF with the lettering in black; they make up a “brass”, and use that to stamp the books.
  4. Endpapers – these are the sheets of paper glued onto the inside of the book cover, joining them to the pages seamlessly. You can go for the same colour as your book’s body pages, but I think it looks nicer to go for a different colour – graphite in my case. These definitely add something to the look of the book, but you need to decide if it’s worth the extra cost. The endpapers my printer provided are very cool, with a thick, grainy texture.
  5. Paper – this is the one area where large publishers have the option to go one better. Note that I said “option”; this isn’t a default choice. The papers available for use with digital presses are perfect for the job, but for larger print runs – over 1000 or so – litho presses become cost-effective, and these can handle thicker paper, which some publishers may choose to use. By “thicker”, I don’t mean that each sheet is visibly thicker than the lighter, digital-friendly weights; what I mean is that the paper responds differently when you bend a half-inch thickness of it, and it may be slightly more opaque. This is the kind of difference only a borderline-OCD perfectionist like me would notice, but it’s something you can investigate yourself.

So that’s it. There’s nothing else to a book. Okay – so there are custom jobs you could point to; my hardback copy of Rant by Chuck Palahniuk has a crazy image printed inside the dust jacket. I spotted it for the first time when I was inspecting the book as research for my print run, over a year after I read it.

Are you convinced? Are you happy that your self-published book won’t look like the poor cousin on a mainstream-fed bookcase? If you are, that’s one less barrier between you and your readers. If you’re not, just check out some printers and ask for samples; see for yourself.

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Font-slapped: A Cautionary Tale

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I hadn’t considered fonts when I was writing my book; I wrote in the default font for Pages, then later Scrivener. I just liked the readability of the defaults, so stuck with them. When I exported to Word from Scrivener, the end target was a submission copy of the manuscript, so I formatted everything as Courier New, double-spaced, you know the score… It was only when I was typesetting the book that I considered the fonts I wanted to see in the final print.

I asked my friend, Mark, who knows more about books than everyone else I know put together, what font he’d like to see. His response: as long as I can read it and it’s not Comic Sans, who cares? That left me with plenty of choice.

Due to my setup, I needed a font that I had on both Windows and Apple machines. I looked at Garamond, Book Antiqua, Georgia, Palatino Linotype – all common, but perfectly serviceable fonts, and not boring, generic, overused Times New Roman. With the subtle differences from that most ubiquitous of typefaces, I had plenty of fonts from which to choose. I couldn’t lose.

Yeah I could.

Late in the book, I introduced some characters crucial to the story. Characters from Latvia, with Latvian names. And of course, I wanted to show off a bit and choose names with some of the curious accents common in the Latvian language. I set myself a short timescale to finish the print-ready files to send to my printer, as I knew I needed that pressure to stop me from picking over every detail a hundred times and just get it done, so when I found the Latvian names at the end of the book filled with black rectangles – indicating that those characters were unavailable in the selected font – I didn’t have much time to fix the problem. I didn’t want to go back to the research and choose new names – these characters were alive in the book now, and their names had stuck – so I ran through my list of suitable fonts, desperate to find one with support for those crazy accents.

Of course, there was only one serif font on both systems with the character support. Times New Fricking Roman.

The book text looks good – looks great in fact – but I’m a control freak and I wanted my choice of fonts. When you’ve committed to managing every tiny detail yourself, things like this are important. Hell, every detail is important.

So the moral of the story? Keep things simple and don’t show off; it’s the little things that’ll come back and bite you in the ass.

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5 Things a Self-publishing Author Doesn’t Need

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

It seems there are a lot of things to spend money on in getting a printed book to market. Kind of like optional extras on your new car. If you’re going to make any money on a self-published book, you have to keep your unit cost as low as possible, so avoiding any unnecessary expenses is vital. Whenever you are considering whether to pay for something, look at the increase to your unit cost price and compare it with the chance it will increase sales. If you can’t see a guaranteed return on investment, don’t buy it. Here are 5 things I decided didn’t offer enough return:

  1. ISBN Numbers. Most independent booksellers don’t need a barcode to sell your book, and you certainly don’t to sell direct. So who uses a barcode? Amazon, Waterstones and supermarkets. If you can make a deal to supply to those retailers and stop your cost price being higher than theirs, you’re printing in such quantities that the £107 for ten ISBNs is negligible. In other words, if you need an ISBN, you can afford one; if you can’t afford one, you don’t need one. Apparently you need an ISBN to sell an eBook through Amazon Kindle or the other ePublishing services; yeah, eBooks are great…
  2. Author Photo. Before the internet, the author photo (and About the Author section) created brand identity and enhanced the connection with the reader. Now we have the internet. The only thing you need to print on the back cover/flap of your book is the address of your website. If you’ve decided you want an author photo, don’t pay a professional to take one. So many people have digital SLR cameras and photo editing software now that you must know someone who can take that photo for you. Professional photographers turn up and take perfectly framed and exposed photos on demand; you have the time to experiment until you get the shot you want. I’ll post soon with some tips on how to get better portrait shots with a variety of levels of photographic gear.
  3. Website. I’m lucky – I have a good friend who runs a web/graphic design company (Lemonaise) and is happy to help me out with my site, but even if you’re on your own, pre-built blogging platforms and services like WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and so on are more than enough for establishing your web presence. Add a Twitter account and not only will you be expanding your reach, you’ll have access to thousands of people who’ve set up their own sites and offer links to help and advice. You don’t need to pay for a website (although you may choose to if you’re after something unique).
  4. Distribution. If you’re going to make enough money to give up your job, you need access to retailers. But if you have the tens of thousands of pounds it would cost to supply Amazon et al at the cost prices they’ll demand, and you can supply those books on sale or return terms, with no guarantee of sales, you probably don’t need to work anyway. So let’s discount distribution at that level as beyond out reach. Print on Demand (POD) companies such as Lulu allow you to sell to foreign territories, as the books are printed in the country to which they’re shipped when ordered. Access to the US market for a UK author is tempting (it’s not something I’ve completely discounted) but the profit per book is so low compared to printing the books yourself, I’m not sure it’s worth it. If you could establish sufficient reputation in a foreign market to sell a few thousand books, I’m not sure the time spent couldn’t have been spent pushing your book in your home market, at ten times the profit (I’m generalising on the numbers, but I’m not far off). “Local Author” is a brand that can sell books, and you should work hard to maximise the returns on that brand.
  5. Middlemen. We all need more middlemen, right? I don’t know too much about publishing services as I stop reading early whenever they’re mentioned. Forget vanity publishing, misleading branding or outright cons, there just isn’t enough profit on a small print run to leave room for anyone else to take a cut. You, the printer, your retailers; that’s the guestlist, and there isn’t room for crashers.

There are way more than 5 things you don’t need when you’re printing a book (swine flu is one I can advise against based on experience) but these are the main money-sinks I considered and discounted when planning my print run, and upon which I feel able to offer some insight. So what other ways can you suggest to keep that unit cost price as low as possible?

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What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I’m sensing a degree of panic amongst writers. It’s understandable; for so long, the only choice for a new novelist has been whether to submit to an agent or to try a direct submission to a publisher. That choice was hard enough – the time and money invested in a submission isn’t insignificant, and no one wants to waste either by getting it wrong – but look where we are now: the traditional routes to publication are almost gone, and while new avenues are being paved with Print On Demand, Podcasting, downloadable content and the ever-headline-friendly EBook readers, none have gained a cachet yet, and the potential to find your novel/poetry/art adrift in a sea of failed projects is high. So what are you to do?

I’m going to do something utterly pretentious; I’m going to quote from my book.

“You can’t make things better or worse, just different. Make a move. See what happens.”

When I first wrote that, I was trying to encapsulate a character’s attitude to finding himself in a bad place, but it’s become something of a mantra for me since. As I write, I’m waiting on the jacket proof for a small (100) run of hardbacks I’ve ordered, and even now, it’s hard to remember the point at which I decided to print the book myself. I know I’d pretty much given up on the idea of getting a book deal in the current market (Make a Move is NOT supermarket-friendly) and wanted to do something while I wait for the industry to open its doors to new writers again, so I did the maths, found the cash, the technical knowledge and the friends to help, and I placed the order. My break-even point is comfortable, and I’ve got a lot of pre-orders.

But what if it all goes wrong? Well, so what if it does go wrong? Completely wrong. I’m out a few hundred quid, I’ve got a couple of boxes of books to pulp/store and I’ve got a bruised ego to salve. But does it really matter?

No. My biggest obstacle right now – that the publishing industry knows nothing of my book – is also my safety net. I can’t damage my reputation with this project, only enhance it. Even if the run sells out and I reprint, no one in publishing will care. It doesn’t matter. My only goals are to get my book out to people and have some fun doing it, maybe meet some new people and learn something. I can achieve all of those goals whether the project succeeds or not, and I love no-lose situations.

You don’t have to become a print publisher to get your work out there – although I’ll be writing about my experiences and findings to help you if that’s the path you choose. There are many paths available now, and if you’re prepared to do the work, and have modest ambitions, you can achieve success. And if you find a path isn’t taking you where you thought, choose a different one.

What’s the worst that could happen?

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