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Posts Tagged ‘Self-publishing’

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Selling to the Sellers

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Direct sales to friends/family coupled with online ordering is a decent way to start selling books, but to reach that elusive, lucrative market of “people who’ve never heard of you”, you need to seek out other channels. Amazon Marketplace and eBay are two options, but I don’t believe your book is ever going to be the subject of an impulse buy; for that, you need a brick-and-morter store. There are still independent stores in the UK that will stock indie books (notice I didn’t say bookstores – you need to think outside that box) and even some chains (I’m working on a deal with a larger chain right now, and will report back once I have some news). Getting your book into a store means talking to the owner/manager, and that can be an uncomfortable experience for some people, particularly writers who are just emerging into the daylight with their newly printed book. Knowledge helps calm those nerves – knowing the realities of the retail process before you stat talking frees you to worry about making a good impression. Not everyone has a friend like the awesome Haroon Mushtaq (@theanonwonder) to educate them in the ways of book retail and distribution, so I’m sharing his advice – and the knowledge I’ve gained following his advice – here:

  • Retailers will only take your books on sale-or-return terms. This means you give them X books, and sign a pro forma contract that says in Y months, they owe you X books, or the selling price of your book for each book they’ve sold minus their cut. If no books sell, the retailer doesn’t lose anything other than the shelf space the book was occupying, and you get the books back. This is why you deal with indies and small chains; do you have the cash to ship 1000, or 10,000 or even 100 books to Waterstones with no guarantee you’ll see any return? Do you have the room to store 1000 returned books? I know how much room 100 books takes up – believe me when I say you don’t have room for 1000.
  • Retailers take a cut based on a percentage of the cover price. This is typically 35%. I don’t want to say it’s always 35%, but I’ve not met anyone asking for more or less, so I’m assuming it’s always. I’ve also never felt the need to haggle on that deal; as far as I’m concerned, it’s fair.
  • Retailers will take a quantity of your books based on their opinion of how well it will sell to their customers. They know their customers better than you – it’s their job to know – so you have to accept their appraisal of the marketability of your book. You don’t need to pitch the book like you would to an agent/publisher, but they’ll want to know the setting/target market to get a feel for whether it fits their customer type. As an extreme example, you probably wouldn’t be able to get erotica into a children’s book shop (unless as part of an elaborate and tasteless practical joke).
  • The above point doesn’t mean that you should accept a retailer’s assessment without question; catch someone on a bad day, and they might view your book in an overly negative light. If you truly believe your book could find a market in their shop, ask if they’ll take a single copy and gauge interest based on that. Your book might tap into a market they’ve not found yet. As with all things, however, no means no, so don’t be pushy.
  • Your book has to be able to stand on the shelves next to its mainstream brethren without looking like a dog chewed it. It has to be a quality publication.
  • The retailer hasn’t the time or inclination to read your book, so needs to make a gut call on whether it’s a) any good, and b) well-edited and proofed. Their only way to do this is to look at how you present yourself, and infer the attention to detail you’ve paid the book from that. You don’t have to wear a dinner jacket and top hat; just be yourself, but make sure it’s a clean, tidy, laundered and polite version of yourself. Oh, and I know this seems obvious, but take a copy of the real, printed book along; no one is going to make a call based on a copy of the manuscript, nor on your word that the book is awesome.
  • Get business cards printed, and make sure you have some with you. The retailer needs to be able to contact you to re-order or to return the books, so make it easy for them. Also, when choosing your design, don’t go for glossy cards, or those new “tiny” cards that are the fashion; the one thing most people do with business cards is write on them, so make that possible.

And that’s it. I’ve been following this advice for a couple of weeks now, and have placed the book in three of the five stores I’ve tried (with a couple more in-progress). The two who didn’t take it thought it wouldn’t sell to their market, which is fair enough, and brings me to my final point; the relationship between a writer and direct retailers is more like a partnership than a buyer-seller arrangement. Placing a book in the wrong store hurts the retailer as well as yourself; find the right store and everyone gets paid. Be polite, but remember that you’re in a position to make them money if your book is good and you work hard to market it. You’re offering them a business deal as an equal, so enjoy the encounter, meet someone new, and do some good business.

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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 »

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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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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Are We Having Fun Yet?

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

It’s been a mixed day. My regular coffee-and-internet wakeup routine included reading this post by Mur Lafferty – someone who’s positivity and ideas have always been inspiring to me – being mildly negative about self-publishing. One comment in particular caught my eye: that self-published books “won’t be in book stores”. If I were categorising her comments on her behalf, I’d put that one under “generalisation”.

Next up, the BBC News website offered comments by the author MG Harris off the back of this article on self-publishing. All of her comments were valid, but I’m worried that the general air of negativity was off-putting for anyone considering financing their own print run, particularly the following:

“However, author MG Harris believes that writers taking on the whole publishing process themselves can fail to give their work proper scrutiny.
“It’s all too easy to just end up writing whatever you feel like writing and then just say ‘it’s ready’ with a few minor superficial corrections,” she explained.
She added that real publishers have all the expertise needed to bring sheets of words into a marketable book.”

I’d hope “real” publishers do have the expertise to produce a marketable book, and I know that easier access to the market will allow a lot of unedited, rushed work into the wild, but it’s patronising to suggest there aren’t writers out there with the technical and marketing skills needed to produce a professional, polished product and market it.

It was with those words in my mind that I drove into town to take my first shipment of Make a Move to the Manchester Travelling Man store and sign the paperwork for the sale-or-return deal I’ve arranged with them. Abby, the co-manager, was impressed with the quality of the finished product, and put them out on display, and a colleague from work arrived to buy a copy while I was there having made the trip into the city just for that reason, so I signed the book at his request, thanking him for being my first “real” sale. It was a fun time for me, especially if you compare it to the enforced solitude of writing 100,000-or-so words.

And that, right there, is the whole point that people seem to be missing. There isn’t a lot of money to be made in self-publishing, but if you’re doing it just for the money, as in any endeavour, it’s going to be a soulless task. I’m doing it because it’s fun. It entertains me to do it. Okay – I’ll admit to 5, maybe 10% of ego in the equation, but primarily, I’m putting Make a Move out myself, because meeting people, talking about the story and writing in general, working with printers, working with my graphic-designer friend Sam – all of those things are infinitely more fun than leaving my book to rot on my hard disk while the “real” publishers work out whether the eSky is eFalling at all.

I’m not trying to be a positive voice amongst the doom mongers; I’m just offering my answer to the question that titles this post:

Hell yes.

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Posted in Opinion, Publishing | 2 Comments »

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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Posted in Blogging, Photography, Publishing | 2 Comments »

What is Self-publishing?

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Self-publishing has become one of those umbrella terms used to categorise any rendering of printed (or digital) text that doesn’t come with an advance from the company bankrolling the release (or who would give you an advance if things weren’t so darn difficult in the industry right now). I’m self publishing as I write, and I’ll write more about it as the process continues, so I wanted to define the term as reference now – a bit of background so you know where I’m coming from.

“What is a Publisher? ?The Publisher is generally the person or body who takes the financial risk in making a product available. For example, if a product went on sale and sold no copies at all, the Publisher is usually the person or body who loses money. If you get paid anyway, you are likely to be a designer, printer, author or consultant of some kind.”

I lifted that from www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk – the people who’ll sort you out with an ISBN number (that you DON’T NEED) in the UK. It gives a good definition of what a publisher is, and if we’re extrapolating to define self-publishing, with “self” being you, you need to make sure you fit that description.

I’m assuming you’re also the author in this equation; if you’re not, you’re just a publisher, in which case you’ve got your own problems to deal with.

A self-publishing author, therefore, is someone paying to have his or her book printed. Note “printed”, not “published”. There’s a difference.

So what other acts of publication are routinely lumped in under the self-publishing umbrella?

Print on Demand (POD)
I looked into POD, and on the surface, it’s a great idea. A customer orders a book, it’s printed, and you get paid. Kind of. The returns on POD aren’t great, as there’s essentially a printer, publisher and distributer in the queue ahead of you taking a bite out of your pie. If you’ve written a non-fiction book on a specialist subject that you can sell for £20 or upward in paperback, POD can get you in touch with a large market quickly, and you can make a lot of cash. Otherwise, it’s fine as a hobby.

Publishing Services
I don’t know much about these, as the idea is flawed so I’ve never explored any further. When you send a submission off to a publishing house, you’re hoping they agree to print your book and send you a cheque for a couple of grand, not ask for a cheque and expect you to do all the marketing. Whichever way you look at it, this route is closest to the traditional view of vanity publishing.

Online Publication/Podcasting
This is a great way to get your work out there, and you’re in control. Unfortunately, until someone invents a replicator like they had in Star Trek that can knock up a printed book when you click download, there’s no good way to monetise this, and who wants to give their hard work away for free? EBooks? Kindle? I’ll leave those for another post.

Self-publishing, to me at least, means doing it yourself. You pay to get the books printed, you arrange retail or sell direct, and you handle the distribution. It’s a lot of work – a LOT of work – and there is significant financial risk involved, but – and here’s the important part for me – it’s a lot of fun!

Take control, get involved, learn the skills, meet the people, make a move. If you think your book is strong enough to risk £500-£1000 of your own money, and you have the enthusiasm, then find a printer, become a publisher yourself and collect 100% of the royalties. After tax…

I’m going to write about everything I experience in getting my book printed and into readers’ hands, so maybe I’ll be able to help with the technical aspects of how it’s done – the typesetting, print-ready pdf generation, ISBN numbers, copyright, and so on – but as for that stake money, yeah… you’re on your own.

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