And Not Just Non-Fiction, Either

And Not Just Non-Fiction, Either...

Menu The Writer as Owner/Operator

✔ Why Publish? The entire concept of self-publishing has been ✔ What Kind of Books? debated, confused, falsely-praised, falsely-damned, ✔ Author/Publisher and generally misunderstood in recent years, but one aspect of the decision to be your own publisher is ✔ The Profit Part ✔ seldom stated in the endless articles and internet Work your "Niche" bombast--the option of making money from writing ✔ Not Just "Non" with all profits and process under the author's ✔ Now Sell It control. ✔ "The Chart" ✔ Success Stories This workshop discusses ways an author can make money by publishing in a variety of processes and ✔ Resources business models. There are many reasons an author ✔ Confused Terms might self-publish: desire to pay the rent, a platform ✔ Who Is This Guy? to building readership, sheer vanity, or just the fun of it. None of these is anybody else's business: that's what being an independent entrepreneur is all Navigate this document by about. clicking on red links. Menus and contents tables Your opportunity and ability to publish your own are starred, all red text is work is far greater than any time in human history. linked. Click any red Publishing is a writer's tool. And... headline to return to it's home menu. A writer, like any other craftsman, should be Use the controls of your pdf aware of any and all tools available to him reader for scrolling and or her, become familiar with any that seem other movement in the text. to offer an advantage, and learn a great deal about those that offer the best chance of accomplishing self-expression and achieving his or her artistic, financial, or social goals. WHY Be Your Own Publisher?

Don't let's get started on the whole “vanity publishing” issue. The term is clarified in the “Confused Terms” section, but it's safe to say that all self-expression stems mostly from ego, and therefore vanity. For our purposes here, we'll assume there are two reasons to want to publish your writing: ego and profit. And will address the latter.

Because the fact is, you can make money publishing your own writing. It's done all the time, and I'll cite some examples. The situation is not that any given writer can decide to publish any given book and make anything out of it, but the right book, well-handled, can turn a profit.. And what makes “the right book” is not as cut and dried as people like to think. This manual will proceed through a tree of options with an eye to helping you decide if you want to wear the “publisher hat” or if it's even feasible for you. (Or perhaps workable for one book, maybe not even yet written, but not another.)

So who makes money publishing their own books?

A lot of people, actually, including quite a few I know personally. One thing the advent of Lulu.com and POD books did was create a sort of stereotype of self-publishing as some loser popping his failed collection of angst-ridden poems out on the internet and running around writer forums trying to get people to pay twenty bucks for it. (And like many stereotypes, there's so much truth to that cliché that it hurts. Hurts everybody, actually.)

But consider some real-life cases:

✔ Mexican Slang 101, my own book. This title has sold over 100,000 copies. I have made a living off it, currently pay my rent with it in a dozen outlets. It works out of a special niche, and dominates it. Like all of these books, it has no ISBN and is not primarily targeted to bookstores. ✔ Six Figures from tax cheats A friend puts out a book once a year. It sells for $100 a copy and sells out immediately. Lucrative specialized knowledge is probably the best sales niche you could dream of.

✔ Six Hundred a Month on the Internet Two guys I know net this much from books that are essentially sex tourism guides to the Baja, Cuba, and Dominican Republic for horny gringos. Books cost the same to produce as my $5 slang book, but sell for $25

✔ Business Set-Up Manuals A CPA selling books on setting up corporations in each state of U.S. He figured out it wasn't worth doing print books, switched to downloadable pdf documents he makes and delivers for nothing, makes very nice money on them

✔ Cruise ship book I know this guy only from the internet, but have watched him cruise to success with this book about his career working on cruise ships. A wonderful niche: moneyed people with time to kill, gift stores on the ships, websites and targeted mags.

✔ Restaurant Spanish/English A great idea: this book is similar in format to my own, cheap and pocket-sized, but has two “front” covers--half the book is English to Spanish for managers and waitresses, the other half Spanish/English for the cooks and busboys. Sells through restaurant supply houses and jobbers, not book stores. This sort of alternate distribution is usually a hallmark of a successful independent book.

✔ Vietnamese and Cambodian for Police, Fire, and Hospital Workers. Title says it all. In some areas this book was a very hot seller among professionals who needed basic communications. Again, sold through cop gear and uniforms stores, as well as off a website.

✔ Dining Out In San Francisco for Under $5 Okay, that was a long time ago. But same principle and proof you don't need websites and POD to do this. A cheap pocket-sized guide that everybody in S.F. had a copy of in the late Sixties. They were constantly approached to sell ads on the inside covers. ✔ Local Tourist Area Guide Lots of these, and they work. The one I know best was essentially a book that folded out into a map. Fixed amount of ads and they sold out every time. He had a new edition every six months. Exactly the same thing, but that was all your ad money got. Nice wrinkle... pretty girls handing it out in the airport.

✔ This eBook Manual Hey, eBooks are book publishing, too. I do a line of these, all of interest to writers. Cost to produce...zero. Cost to distribute...zero. Net... 100% of gross. I make five times as much off one of these than a $17 novel. And the thing is, they need to be eBooks... the way they're used, and the links make print useless. Which brings up my principle of a book's “appropriate vocation”. Which Books Self-Publish Profitably?

Let's be real: not every book has much of a shot at making money for an author/publisher. Before looking at what types of books do have a shot, I'd like to introduce a term that helps explain the difference. Forget people saying only non-fiction has a chance: that's not the way it breaks. Books that succeed are books with what I'm going to call an “appropriate vocation” for being published independently. What it means is that some books just “want” to be worked by their authors through independent efforts and channels and some just don't. You want to look into publishing your book if it has that “vocation” or “calling” and avoid the hassle if it doesn't. So what is the difference?

One of the big words is “niche” (although that's getting as meaningless as “platform”) and it's a powerful concept. The self-published money- maker will tend to appeal to a niche group of readers that is easily identifiable-- efficiently reached.

That latter word is a biggie, which we'll return to. “Niche market” tends to be seen as a group of readers that is small, and non-mainstream. In fact if can be any sized group (steampunk fans, gay romance readers, actuarial accountants, Latino immigrants, expatriates in Eastern Europe) and defined in many ways from job title to national origin to hobby interests to shared perversions. The niche exists to their degree of identifying with the characteristic of the niche. Ferret owners are more likely to buy a ferret book than people named Cavendish are likely to buy a book on Cavendishes.

And one major of way of not only judging, but using that identification, is in the existence of targeted media or opportunities. This is that “reachable” factor--as good a definition of “niche” as any. If there are a half dozen very active websites for people who like to dress up like fuzzy animals for fun and eroticism (there are) then you are seeing a niche that you can reach. There are magazines for iPhone users, JetSki owners, Jaguar restorers, Civil War re-enactors. Meaning a group of people identifying and reachable. iPhone owners, per-se, might not be a niche. But if they take the magazine or log onto a chat board about it, then there they are, identifying and qualifying themselves.

Bringing up a significant factor: affordable reachability. You can, just by putting in internet time, probably reach ninety percent of ferret fanciers or home-schoolers in the United States for free. But if the qualifying medium for your niche is subscribing to Robb Report, you're going to have to pay big money to reach them. Bringing up another factor: is it worth it? You might not be able afford to sell your book on how to buy millionaire yachts to Robb Report readers, but very easily reach the population of homeless plastic collector/recyclers. And they might be interested in your book on maximizing the dumpster-diving experience: but are they are unlikely to be able to enrich you.

The ideal self-published blockbuster will tend to meet several of these characterisitics or qualifiers:

✔ Appeal and/or usefulness to a defined, reachable niche market. ✔ Affordable, feasible, targeting possible to market and promote the books. ✔ Based on unique, proprietary information generated or collected by the author. ✔ Can be cheaply produced, shipped and marketed, preferably in small quantities. ✔ Has a great title that grabs interest immediately.

It might be helpful to look at prospective books as falling in a sort of hierarchy of “autopublishability”, with diminishing “vocation” or likelihood to return your investment of money, time, and self-worth.

The first would be a qualifying “niche book” as described above. You come up with an idea, or have specialized information you can get across, or have access to a market, so you write your book up and put it out there. Most successful self-publishers fall into this category.

A variation would be to deliberately write a book designed to publish yourself. Perhaps you just married a guy with a print shop, or want hands on experience in the book trade, or just want a way to make some money from your own home. So you're working somewhat backwards: looking for a market you can tap and what it wants: then supplying it. I know of at least two books that have come into being just because somebody heard somebody say, “There ought to be a manual out for this.” Another motivating comment might be something like, “I have this pier shop with all those people laying around in the sun...I should be able to sell them something to read.” Talent is not that much of a requirement: you could even hire people to research and write it.

The bottom of this totem pole would be whatever book you can't flog and think you'd like to have it in print even if you have to do it yourself. Your chances of making money with this sort of thing is almost zip, sorry to say. There may be somebody out there who wants to read your 600 page, angst-choked, symbolic historical novel, but not enough to buy you cigarettes and you'll spend too much money trying to find them. Just put the thing out on Lulu, order copies for your friends and see if they stay friends.

But there is a chance you can make it work it you're smart and lucky enough to identify a market. Maybe nobody wants your book about your VietNam experience (a common experience). But you Google around a little and discover that there is a forum for members of that unit or combat arm, and they have yearly reunions. And there is a “survivor's association” for those who gave their lives. So you gear up to present your book to that market. You've basically discovered a niche for an existing dog. And it would only work for self-publisher.

“Format Vocation”

While not quite the same thing as a book's propriety for auto-publish, this is a very useful concept and extremely important decision level: your book might “want”, or even demand, to be published in a certain format, and have little chance of succeeding in other formats. You need to figure this out and go with it. If you're lucky, the “desired” format won't be printed books., because they're expensive to make and ship. A perfect example of that is the pdf manual are reading, and even more so my manual on making book videos. The user will be sitting at a computer to use them, toggling back and forth from the manuals to the internet or video editor or whatever, and clicking on resource links. It would be totally pointless to have a paper version of the book propped up by the screen, copying web addresses.

My Mexican Slang 101 book, on the other hand, "wants" to be in a backpacker's pocket or the beach bag of some retiree. It's not intended for studying at home, it's a carry-around, flip-through sort of book. I see little point in doing an eBook version of it: though it might work on an iphone app: we'll see,

The accountant who dropped the print versions of his successful books on creating LLC companies because the pdf's were selling so much better is in the same situation...the user will be sitting at a computer filling out and filing forms And lucky him because his cost of production/distribution is virtually zero and he keeps the whole gross..

Most books lie in between, including fiction. eReader ownership is growing, but still less than paper book readership. The thing is, reading a romance novel in book form versus on a hand-held screen is a matter of reader preference, not a quality of the book itself. So if you sell it both ways--find out which does better. If it flies as an ebook, you're in luck. Bad luck would be trying to flog a long fantasy novel, for instance: the reader will probably want to read it on paper, not sitting at a computer.

A glance over the books mentioned in the first section--and in the Success Stories section--is a good glimpse at the quality that makes money. Part of the “vocation” can be that big publishers wouldn't be interested. Who is going to publish a sex tourism guide? Or a book that will only sell 3000 a year? (Not worth it to Schusters, might be twelve, fifteen grand to you.) Not only does recognizing this mean you don't waste your time trying to sell your book through agents, it also means less chance of competition as you move to exploit your niche-- often a niche that exists only because you recognized and/or created it. Author/Publisher

Anybody thinking of profitable self-publishing needs to have a very clear-eyed realization of one thing: as soon as you become your own publisher, you will not only be a writer, but an entrepreneur known as a publisher. You'll be in business, and will succeed to the extent that you are a business person. You'll be wearing two hats and need to keep them separate and give each its due.

I'm not a great businessman, and will let you seek your own business wisdom from those who are. I rely principally on writing talent to overcome those shortcomings. Others rely on their business acumen to overcome their shortcomings as writers. (They do better than I do.) The “Marketing” and “General” lists in the Resources section of this manual have a lot of good advice from various experts, and there is no shortage of business advice around your local library or the internet.

Like any business, publishing follows the hard-nosed, boring, Ben Franklin-type rules of money and we do best when we observe them. But there are some specific characteristics of self-publishing that I'd like to touch on, largely because they are not always widely observed in popular discussions on the topic.

You are your own system. That's only a slight exaggeration that emphasizes something important--that once you publish a book that is sufficiently unique and targeted to do well as an independent project, you have stepped out of the normal channels of distribution, marketing, sales, and supply. You are an explorer and pathfinder whose route is determined by the relationship between your book and its readers, which may be completely different from any other book.

Bookstores are the worst place to sell your books. That very telling quote from self-pub guru Dan Poynter and seconded by John Kremer along with many other experts in this field might seem hard to swallow at first blush, but note that of the list of successful books I mention at the opening of this manual, none are or were sold primarily in bookstores. Book shops account for a one-figure percentage of my sales. Only one of those books has an ISBN. It stands to reason when you think in terms of the “niche” designation. The niche is your system. You distribute to the readers within that niche according to the way that works best for them and for you, not what makes sense for the entire mass book industry. My best outlets are tobacco shops in resort hotels, walkup/takeout food places, and my own website. A novel about romance and danger in a popular Catskills resort might derive almost all its sales out of that one gift shop. And the distribution system might be the author stopping by with a dozen books in her backpack as she heads out on her weekly bicycle jaunt. The sex tourism books I mentioned sold from a site whose only feed-ins were three rather unsavory male discussion forums. Neither was available for sale in the countries they were written about and no bookstore would touch them. So they had to make do with twice the profit.

Your most valuable relationship and asset is your readers. Not Ingrams distribution, amazon.com, Library World, or any of the institutions, venues, and services that the major publishers work. You don't need the “literary/industrial complex” any more than they need you. You might or might not find it profitable to tap into that system as suits your needs or your desire to experiment. Would it be worth doing a POD, ISBN version of your book in order to put it on amazon and give up 65% of the gross revenue? Is it worth having it on Smashwords, where people can get it for much less than your print price? Are there enough potential readers to be worth the trouble and expense of trying to crack bookstore chains?

The irony is that so much of the discussion of self-publishing on internet writers' venues is about that very sort of thing: how to crash the majors' party. The reason for that is that most of them are trying to sell books with no niche or targetable readership--and want to be “real authors”. And it doesn't matter if they're on amazon or in Borders...they won't make any money. Meanwhile, your cheap, self-produced book of self-guided bicyclist/rollerblader tours of the Los Angeles coastal areas is doing quite well at a dozen rental places along the Venice/Santa Monica boardwalk. A guy used to sell a pamphlet that was essentially a guide to the exact locations of specific bronze stars in the sidewalks of Hollywood and Vine (take your picture standing on Elvis or Marilyn or Gable), and a book/map to addresses of movie stars' homes. A similar book that sold a lot of cheap copies to tourists was a guide to death scenes of the famous and glamorous around Hollywood and Los Angeles. Could they sell more by being on amazon or in Walmart? Get real. International distribution doesn't help a local book. That principle can be exapanded to realize more of the idea that you are your own system.

The important thing isn't the store, the distributor, the “way things are done”. The important thing is understanding who wants your book, how to show it to them, and how much they will pay for it. My slang book was knocked off by a “real” publisher and produced in a slick edition available on amazon and stores and such for ten bucks. I outsell the hell out of them. And make more than I would if they weren't screwing me out of my royalties.

Cooperation, not confederation. There are other independent writers around, and you can probably associate with them either in local groups or on the web. It can be helpful. Not just for tips and crosslinks, but perhaps for cooperative efforts, such as four local authors giving a bookstore/library program, or sharing a booth at a book fair. But it tends to work best at that neighborly, log-rolling kind of level, not joining, signing up for, or buying into organizations. And if it works, it works because you and they share the same approach to or pool of readers, not because you joined the same guild. As one example of that, you can join groups that allow you to get awards and recognition for your books. Your question shouldn't be, “How much will that cost?” it should be “Are the people who want this book going to be impressed by having that badge on my site?” Or by a simple quote from a reader saying, “This guy really knows what it's like to try to have a relationship when you're working airport towers.” The Profit Part

We've been getting at this question all along, but profit is our topic here so it should be discussed directly. But first a kind of digression, though a significant point: is it easier to make money publishing yourself, or with somebody else doing it for you? You read statistics on how few books self-published writers sell (stats which don't include books with no ISBN, by the way) but if you look into it, you find just as dismal numbers for published books--the majority of books put out by publishing houses sell less than 200 copies, lose money, fail to repay the advance, or are in some way written off as failures.

Profitability is naturally of less concern to self-publishers than to traditional businesses., who have overhead, payrolls, and irritable stockholders. And the owners are generally stockholders. If the company is in the red, or falling on the market, they are losing money, not gaining it. So their profitability might actually be negative. Whereas it would be rare to run into a truly self-published POD book (as opposed to books put out by "services" like xLibris, etc") that runs in the red: it's a big appeal of on-demand.

Now look from the author's viewpoint, or rather a perspective I'm kind of forcing here: how many authors published by traditional houses are making a living? Most percentages I've seen on that are single-digits. There is no way to get anything approaching numbers on how many self-publishing authors make a living at it, of course. But I know a dozen I could call up right now and chat with, all making significant income, perhaps a living: two of them net six figures a year before taxes. Higher than the number of authors I know who make a living on company-published books.

Now obviously this is not stats, nor even "anecdotal evidence". But it leaves this question, that I think has a certain validity to it: Is it possible that there are more self-published authors making a go of it than traditionally published authors? So how do you become part of that sliver of people who make money? One major key is to have that as your goal. Not being cool, not building your brand or reaching people with your message or doing something reputable with that memoir nobody wants to read: but making money.

This is a profession, a vocation that rewards those called to it and/or dedicated to it. That doesn't mean you have to kill yourself at it. Or even have talent. The best thing to have might be pure luck: you happened to think of a book that people might want and you can produce and sell to them. You happen to come up with the perfect title. Your niche happens to be a large, growing one. But luck, as we keep hearing, favors the bold and definitely favors the prepared.

Your vocation as a publisher is best served by a book with a “vocation” to be published, as discussed above. If you want to make money, you won't be trying to sell a treatise on the black plague's influence on socialist thought. Or your memoirs as a housewife in Scarsdale. You will be coming out with a book with a niche, with an edge to insert, with a reason to be self-published. I've said it doesn't have to be non- fiction: but it does have to be something unique that is wanted by a group of people you can identify and reach out to.

The book will also have an appropriate price. I mentioned two books that cost the same to produce: my “Mexican Slang 101”, selling at five bucks and the guide to sex tourism selling at twenty-five. These are the appropriate prices--or the books wouldn't sell. I could raise my price, but prefer not to--but if I raise it to twenty-five dollars I won't sell any at all. An anecdote on that: I once went over to Mazatlan from the Baja. I had little money and could no longer, once I'd crossed the Sea of Cortez, afford to get back the the States. My book had been selling well in Cabo at five dollars and I anticipated doing well enough with the Spring Break crowd in Maz to at least get up the cost of a ticket home.

I sold nothing. I was getting desperate. I approached a guy who had stands in Maz and Cabo--pretty girls doing press-on temporary tattoos for college knuckleheads. He told me flat out that my price was too high. It was a different market: kids came to Mazatlan because it was cheaper. He sold his tattoos for less there. I took a deep breath and took all the covers off my books and tapped the small funds I had left to print up new covers with a price of “Three Gringo Dollars, Amigo” instead of five. And they immediately started moving. I ended up staying there for three months, supported completely by selling books on the beach (not a bad job during Spring Break) and in restaurants, as well as hotel shops. I made enough to get home before the season was completely crashed. The lesson is obvious, and not exactly a business revelation. But a few points:

--First, I was able to lower the price and squeak by because my costs were low. I ran the pages at the cheapest copy shop in town, collated and stapled them myself. I was making under a dollar a book when I wholesaled, but the stores would buy ten at a time: and ten bucks was what I was paying for my hotel room. The lesson: keep your costs down. If you're paying seventeen bucks for POD books your margin for profit is virtually nil and you can't respond to the market. Unless you're selling something people will pay a lot more for. The ones I've seen do that seem to involve sex or biz cheats.

--Second, I controlled my own distribution. So not only was I not paying a middleman, I could also retail, thus doubling my gross. Any book I sold myself brought me a profit of over two dollars--identical to what I'd been getting wholesale in Cabo. Lessons: Make your own distribution networks--this is a big part of a book's “vocation” for self-publishing. And retail directly when at all possible. Maybe you can't wade through bikinis on a beach selling your book, but you can sell it off your own website with a PayPal button and keep all but a half dollar for yourself. The right book could be sold in your front yard by your kids. I met a guy selling a guide to the San Juan Islands on the ferryboat, sitting in the coffee shop on every trip.

--Third, I controlled my own production. I understood every element in producing the book and could do most of it myself if it came down to it. Changing the cover took me a whole evening. What would it take to change the cover of a book you just ran off 3000 copies of? Could you put your own labor in at some point to save money? Could you reduce the size of type to make the book cheaper if you had to? Obviously not all books lend themselves to being produced locally by processes and people you know, but there should be a reason not to, is my feeling.

--Fourth, and this is not as minor as it sounds, I was using very cheap covers. Most of the books I mention at the opening don't have full color covers, but one or two colors of ink on color paper stock. This is very appropriate for many non-fiction and poetry books, and can work for almost any book with the proper design. Changing covers might not ever come up, but there is no reason to spend unnecessary money on covers. If you're using digital process you might find a color cover costing as much as the rest of the book, thus doubling your cost.

Handling Your Costs

I'm certainly no business expert. Many of those MBA-type rules apply to small publishing and people who are good at business will, of course do better...if they understand books and readers. There is one factor in book production that while not unique, is a major issue to be confronted and solved before you can make any money. Call it POD vs Print, digital vs offset, long vs short run, whatever you want, it's a major trade-off and can be an agonizing decision. (The less agonizing, the more likely it is to make the wrong decision.)

There are lots of ways to make print books: letterpress like Ben Franklin, silk screen, diazo or blueprint plotters, mimeograph, even rubber stamps. But the two contenders are offset printing and digital copiers.

The offset process is used to make most bookstore books, newspapers, most print reading matter. Rolls of paper run though drums wrapped in plates that apply ink to the paper before it is cut, folded or otherwise prepared for shipping and reading. Digital copiers--and that's all “POD” is--are glorified, high-speed Xerox machines using laser-directed toner to create the image on paper, generally driven by a word processor, image or pdf file.

These completely inimical process both have advantages and disadvantages that need to be understood. The best way to understand offset printing, for the cost standpoint is something I originally heard from an old printer when I was running off underground mags in the sixties: “Every copy of your rag will cost two cents, except the first one. The first one will cost fifteen hundred dollars.” That sets the stage immediately: you have to pay to make those plates, rig those drums, man those stations--but after you do, you get your copies really cheap and want to get as many as you can since you've already bought the expensive one.

An analogy might be renting a motel room or renting a car instead of buying your own house or car. The daily rate of staying in a hotel is frightful, but to do otherwise you need to invest some capital. It's like saying, “Every night in a hotel costs sixty bucks. Every night you sleep in your house costs you three dollars...but the first night cost you $350,000.”

So, is it cheaper to stay in a hotel? Is it cheaper to just walk in with the change in your pocket and get a book produced for five bucks, or to have to invest three grand to get them for a nickel? Aye, there's the rub.

And there isn't really any one answer to it. If you don't have the money for a print run, it's an easy decision, but one that will grind you down on every sale. If money is no object, why not just spring for a run of 3000 books? But what if they don't sell? Or contain errors, have a cover price that doesn't work, have something inside that turns out to be legally actionable?

One advantage of working locally, or at least with a full-service printer, is that you can straddle this divide to an extent. Most people fall in between. And one thing that you learn from the printers who have both offset and digital (a little Chief 360 tabletop press and a new computer-driven Xerox 2101, for instance) is that there is a cutoff number. It will vary from job to job, shop to shop, but tends to be between 1000 and 1500 copies. Below that you're better off going digital. And when you walk out of the shop, you've just done a POD book...no need for websites to go digital. So you may as well do as few as you need, because running 600 instead of 101 isn't going to save you anything.

And if you are going for more than that, you want to get as many copies as make sense because you've paid the freight to have your job on a press--all additional copies are costing you pennies.

And at that point, you might want to look around at bigger printers with lower rates. But if you're starting out, you probably want to curb your initial investment. Sell some books to see how they go, uncover any screw-ups before committing to long runs.

TALK TO THE PRINTER FIRST!

This is a cardinal rule in any kind of reproduction project. Don't design something then go tell them to produce it. Online POD publishing simplifies this whole process by confining you to template choices, and showing you cost increases as you go along.

But if you're producing it yourself, you want to come in with the cheapest job design, or at least the optimal value. Some of this seems obvious--if you spec a page size too big to copy on standard paper, it will cost you more. And the “right” size for an offset roll is not the same as letter or legal sheets you can choose in a copy shop. Sometimes you run into things like a job that can be reduced slightly in size and run double up on a larger paper to produce savings. You can run two 6 x 4 inch books on legal paper, for instance, and the cost gets cut in half.

You might be at a point where running spot art in standard ink colors (cyan, magenta, icky yellow) or a “duotone” of two colors saves money over separating full color just to get a slightly different blue. And the cyan might look better anyway on a paper color they have in stock. Do you need glossy cover paper? Instead of just printing a layer of lacquer over it? Which is UV-proof to prevent ink fading, by the way.

Without getting into great detail, I would strongly recommend that your first planning step be a search for printers and as you narrow it down, take advantage of their expertise in the job to settle on the best possible size, color, and number of books you produce. Even bringing the job in as a pdf or jpg file instead of a word file might save you money.

The Finishing Can Kill You

One problem with books is that they aren't just sheets of printed paper. And what happens after the printing can greatly affect the cost of your book. The pages have to be cut, bound, trimmed to size, all time- consuming processes. There are machines around that just spit out completely finished books, but they are locked into certain binding systems and might cost more than doing it piecemeal with other systems. These kinds of decisions are often of the “would I rather pay that or sit around for two hours banging a stapler?” kind. Or maybe something like, “Do I really need for 96 page book to be perfect bound, when I can just have it folded and stapled?” Or, “Those plastic comb bindings are cheap, but won't people just despise them?”

Look Good... Or Earn Good?

Don't let your ego finesse you out of profits. Many writers want to be “just like the real authors”. They pay for flash websites, set up slick blogs, produce fancy color covers, pay extra to be on international distributor networks. But is that money coming back to them?

Most of the authors I mention at the beginning of the manual make no pretense at being “real” publishers. In fact, many (like myself) favor a pirate image and are even anonymous. Some prefer to have no image or identity at all, just receipts. Working The Niche

Conventional wisdom has it that a “niche” is necessary or highly advisable for self-publishing and that it works best for a non-fiction niche-market book. And the niche concept tends to be viewed as a narrow, special-interest market. Firefighters, home-schoolers, Mormon strippers, and such.

I would say what it more meaningfully refers to is a number of readers that can be reached easily and efficiently.

I have sold six figures of "Mexican Slang 101": the niche is pretty much defined by the title (and a title that intrinsically makes the niche and audience clear is a valuable asset to any publisher). I know a guy who sells a book called "Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic": same instant recognition. You immediately see what the audience is, the audience immediately sees the book is pertinent to them, and you can even get a quick glimmer of the general layout of promoting and marketing either book.

The potential readership is cleanly defined, they can be reached through a few easily utilized channels, and the books are fairly unique. Actually mine isn't quite unique enough: there are some big publishers that publish competing titles (not worth your serious attention, I hasten to add). The Dominican book is even more classically a niche-defining title, if even less noble.

So one way to slice the niche question is to approach it coldly from the aspect of accessibility. If there is a significant magazine called "Custom Golf Carts Monthly", then you reach all those buyers of your book on customizing golf carts through that single ad medium.

You could probably reach 85% of the English-speaking transsexual romance readers in the world through posting on about three websites. You can reach most of the people interested in the Del Coronado Hotel by having your book for sale in a gift shop in the hotel and a boutique bookstore nearby. The better defined the niche, the easier it is to fully exploit. The downside is, there's nowhere to grow. What should I do to sell more Mexican Slang books? Bring out a Cuban Slang book? Bring out Mexican Slang for Cat Lovers? Mexican Cooking Slang?

The upside is, I pretty much dominate that niche. And dominance of a niche can end up being almost the same as a "platform". When you have a reporter or MTV producer call you for a quote, then what are you? I know a guy who did a "definitive" biography of Bruce Springsteen and if The Boss even peeks into the news, they get hold of Charlie for his view of it. The question would be... how can you use that platform to sell another book?

But I'd like to make it clear that niches are not entirely a property of non-fiction. It's harder to have "niche fiction", but it exists and can be done. What if I write a romantic thriller about a couple staying in the Del Coronado Hotel? Think it would sell in the outlets I mentioned?

And a curious thing here is that if you have access to a marketing niche (you live on Cape Cod, you have a popular website about noir films, you operate a newstand in the Empire State Building, you're a ranger in Yellowstone, a cabbie in Nashville, whatever) fiction might be the easy way to exploit that proprietary niche, compared to a non-fiction book. Quick, think of a good infobook to sell to those niches--compared to writing a sexy thriller in the setting you have marketing access to.

Think you could do a better job promoting a novel based on home- schooling than a civil war novel? You could, because it's a niche that is there for you to attempt to fill it. A lot of very ordinary detective novels sell because they are billed as set in Cleveland or Seattle or some such place. Nobody is going to say, "Hey, a PI novel in New York...I'm a Yorker, so I'm interested." But if it's Key West? Or Nashville? What if its the Star of the Seas cruise ship? What if the characters are speech therapists or air traffic controllers and highly involved with job-related issues? Yes, Fiction, Too. Poetry, even.

One of the first things you hear about self-publishing is “it can work for non-fiction, but not for fiction.” Which has some strong reality behind it, but is by no means a hard and fast distinction. The real distinction is what I mention above as “appropriate vocation”: and a novel can “want to be” self-published, and perform well, just as many non-fiction books fail to cut the mustard.

So what hopes does a fiction writer have publishing his or her own work? Trying to salvage a book that has no niche or appeal and nobody wants to publish augurs poorly: although in the Success Stories section you can find accounts of multi- rejected people who published novels independently and did smashingly well.

The “next best” scenario would be assessing your novel and deciding that it does have a niche where it can be successfully marketed. Is there a group you can reach that would respond to it. Obviously, there's your family and friends. Next would be your neighbors and alumni club, your workplace, your group associations. Is the book set somewhere special? Involve certain groups of people with a strong identity? Involve some sort of sport or activity or hobby? Then those are the routes you should be approaching rather than trying to spam the world to buy it on amazon.com.uk.

A very good bet is to write the novel that wants to get out there and get sold by you. Let's say you live in Niagara Falls, or near a romantic hotel resort. And you write a romance novel or murder mystery set there. Honeymooners in peril. Think the hotel gift shop and some local stores would carry it? The same can be said for many existing or self-created niches and is discussed more under the sections on niches and profitability. If you don't already have a novel on hand, but want to succesfully self-publish, it's not a bad bet to write one that fits those plans.

Oddly enough, poetry is one of the easiest areas in which a writer can make a little money. Not much, of course, but can publish and show a profit. One of the main reasons to publish a book is to have something to sell when a group has gathered to hear you. If you do poetry readings and open mics, you are very possibly in a position to sell a poetry collection. Especially if you have a following of any kind. Or if people ask you for copies of your poems after reads. An advantage of poetry is that is works well as a cheap, straightforward print job. I once published a line of eight titles by six poets. The books were pocket sized (fold a sheet of typing paper in quarters to see the size I mean. They had simple black cover designs on the same shade of red card stock. They were all between 32 and 48 pages in length and stapled on the fold (saddle-stitch, as they call it).

The thing is, though poetry might produce fine, hand-crafted artwork books, there is also a strong tradition for the simple, content-pure book or chapbook, as well. This is the format used by City Lights Books--the way Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” and other beat classics originally came out. And completely hand make-able. First you need to make a “dummy”. And here is “Dummies for Dummies”:

The dummy is a mockup of your book with the same number of pages--solely so you can get your pagination for paste-up or conversion to pdf or graphic file for reproduction. This is how it works for the quarter size mentioned.

Set the page dimensions in your word processor to 5.5 by 4.25, the size of a quarter page. Paste in your poems and massage them around until they fit: adjusting font size, stanza breaks, etc, until you get something that looks right. Remember to have a title page, then a blank page (for the back of the title), and table of contents at the first, perhaps another page of bio or acknowledgements at the end. The total should be in multiples of 8. You can have a few extra end pages, or perhaps add another verse to make it come out.

Once you have the page count, divide it by 8 and use that many sheets of paper. A 40 page book will be five sheets. Cut or tear them in half, bottom from top, giving you ten sheets 8.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches high. Stack them and fold them horizontally. There's your book contents. Now go through and number the pages. At that point, you have a dummy. The numbers are not the final page numbers, but when unfold them, you see the pagination: Page 1 beside Page 40, with Pages 2 and 39 on the other side. Your centerfold page will have Page 20 opposite 21, with 19 and 22 on the back.

Once you know which pages fall where, you can produce your original document for printing or copying. Remember that each sheet of letter-sized paper you print will have 8 pages on it, not 4. You can arrange the original so that the second have of the book is on the bottom half of the pages from the first half, so that once printed and cut in half, you can just stick the two stacks together and produce a complete book interior. Or you can double them up, so that a sheet would have two Page 1's, one above the other, and so on with the other three pages. This way the whole book runs at once and can be stapled before trimming and cutting.

If you have a publishing or “pagemaker” program, you might be able to set that up, although it makes page numbers hard to do. You can also just run off 40 pages, each with a book page on a quarter of them, then cut them out and paste them up to produce “signatures” that when copied on copy machines or photographed for printer's plates will be in the proper orientation.

Or you can save your pages as a pdf or html page, allowing you to move them into a graphics program like Paint, or Paint.net or GIMP and end up with a jpg image file which is the easiest, cleanest way to run copies these days. Take the file into a Kinkos or other reprographics shop or printer on a USB memory stick or CD and let them run them.

The cover will, of course, be on heavier stock. Most modern copiers will run a card stock, but if not, have the covers printed at a quick print shop. Make extras. You can use them as posters and hand outs. Copied pages are “POD”, you can make as many at a time as you want. Covers will require running some numbers, but since it's only one sheet, it's cheap. You can even use color xerox machines to produce color covers, but be careful of having dark colors fall on the fold where creases and staples will show the white underneath.

Once printed, cut and stapled (by you or the shop) the books are complete, but will have a taper or pages extending out the open end, the so-called “shingle”. This should be trimmed for a neat look, and it should done on a professional shear, not a “guillotine” hand-cutter, probably. This is something a xerox shop might not be able to do and printers charge high to cut the shingle, but it's worth it for the look of a flush pages. At this point you should have a booklet with colored cover, saddle-stitched and ready so sell and read, for under a quarter a copy.

Next time you do a reading, make sure you read some poems from the book, displaying your published status as you read. You can mention that you have copies of the book and/or display them where you are sitting. It's not uncommon for coffee shops (the old kind, not the sterile Starbucks kind) to sell books like this on consignment, and perhaps some local bookstores will carry them.

Setting up a “Press” that publishes other poets' work is a snap if you can produce the books and find places that will carry them. And voila... you're earning money writing poetry. You're a cultural hero.

The overall principle that applies in self-publishing non-non-fiction is this: Be very careful about assessing your chances and controlling your upfront expenses, but don't let anybody else write off your chances for you. Marketing And Sales

This is as about a good a place for a cop-out as any. I'm not really going to offer a lot of sales and market whizzbang here. One reason, it's so available: you can hardly get near a writers site anymore without runing into a barrage of information about social networking, blogs, twitterpation, affiliates, book signings and guaranteed number one on some list or another. I am not a marketing or sales expert: there is better advice elsewhere. (Isn't it refreshing to meet somebody who is not a marketing expert?)

Which comes to the other reason: different strokes. One guy will tell you he's killing them by piggybacking videos and tweets, the next guy will say that's all jive and what really works is going around to groups and libraries and bookstore signings. It's a jungle with a different path for everybody. One major rule of thumb: be everywhere. Try anything that looks good, especially if it's free, and so much of it is. Sign up on all those author/book lists and sites, planting links to your purchase point everywhere you can. You are trying to create a cloud of light around you and your book and it's hard to argue with the idea that those who work the hardest and smartest will get the most results.

A second powerful principle: work your own 'hood. This often gets overlooked as writers obsess over whether their book is available to bookstores in Burma or whether it's breached the 500 barrier on LinkedIn or if three blog posts a week are enough, but it's strong, common-sense, and free. It's amazing how many authors you see walking around without a copy of their own book in their hands. Seriously, why would you not want to always have your book with you? I was taught this by the greatest ad salesperson I ever met (totally horrible human being, but incredible at sales) and it works. Always have your book there to be seen, with the cover out. It's on your desk in the office, on your table at the coffee house, visible when you read on the bus or the beach. (You can tuck your tacky romance/spy book inside it.) People might ask you about it. They might buy it right on the spot: people like contact with writers they read, and personalized copies. This actually works better with novels and other such non- niche or wider- niche books. But it's free, a good conversation piece, and might impress some potential writer groupie. Moving out from that easy and obvious step, why not have a sign on your car? If a plumber or realtor can do it, why not you? Your teenagers are going to be embarrassed whatever you do, so what the hell? What about a sign in your yard? Why don't you have cards up on every bulletin board in your ecosystem? You can set up an account with CafePress or Zazzle (see the Resources section for a list) and get a T-shirt or mug or cotton shopping bag that displays your book, cool slogan, and web address to anybody you run into. You can make a calendar for your office, a mug for your favorite coffee spot, even a bikini if you've got the goods to make it a positive (or shockingly negative) eye-catcher. A good tool even if you just do one-offs for your own use and promo, but you can also--especially if dream up a really cool slogan or graphic--end up turning this sort of gear into self-liquidating advertising (sold at cost) or even a cash flow.

The next step out would be your neighborhood, your town, your region. Doing a reading or talk (perhaps a collective with other local writers) at a library or bookstore usually warrants a mention in the local newspapers. Would your career-oriented book warrant a “job day” talk? Would your boring book about local battles move after a lecture at the local museum? Did you notify your alumni magazine that you have a book out? All easy, all free, all adding to the aura of “author” around you, all potentially fun. And frankly., if it's not fun, why bother? There are other ways to earn.

Beyond that (or even instead of it if your niche is sufficiently specialized) is the “neighborhood” of your niche. If you are selling a book about actuarial accounting, or a romance involving speech pathologists, you won't run into many around your local jogging track. (Hopefully you have already tracked down those folks in your area and made them aware, anyway.) So your niche is your backyard and you need to refine it, court it, become a fixture. And you do that by whatever mix of citizenship (such as being active on a forum), promotion, and advertising works best. Work the free stuff first. Before you buy an ad in the Speech Path Monthly or Popular Actuary, sound them out about a story on your book. How many sexy romance novels about those professions are out there? If you've written a guide to restoring the luster to oak flooring, you're probably good for a mention in magazines on antiques and home restoration. Keep in mind that, to an extent, you are a “niche” and “platform”. You live somewhere, have family, work somewhere, play somewhere. And you're an author. Spectrum of Publishing Possibilities

FINANCIAL PUBLICATION SAMPLE HOW IT ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES COST MODEL MODEL COMPANY WORKS

NON-FEE Traditional Random House, St. Buy rights, pay Positive cash You give up your No cost PUBLISHERS Publishers Martins, Schusters royalties (and flow, they do all rights, editorial except your often advances) production, control. Hard to get promotion from sales. design, accepted. Long and publicity, take time-lapse. submission all risks. expenses.

Small POD Bewrite, Whiskey Buy rights, often Positive cash You give up No cost. Presses Creek, Samhain for short-term flow, they do editorial control. Some contract, pay most Requires pre- charge set- royalties from production, formatting up for sales. design, take all manuscript. Need paperbacks risks. to get accepted. Long time-lapse. Author handles all publicity.

"Instore" CreateSpace, Kindle Works (often Quick Limited to one No cost to Programs eBooks, short turnaround. outlet (such as writer. fiction, or pdf's) Direct sales, no amazon) and often are contracted middleman. to non-paper for direct outlet format. sale.

SELF- "Vanity" Houses Dorrance, Vantage, You pay them to No acceptance High costs of books, $1000-4000 INVESTED Author House, design, print problem, fast no distibution, no PUBLISHING xLibris, Tarrant and publish turnaround, prestige or reviews. your book. they handle Extra services everything. by fee.

Lulu.com Lulu (unique You submit MS, Free to cheap. High book prices, Free for service) they print and Easy to get a no prestige in lulu basic book. make available book out, and imprint. ISBN etc, for purchase. on amazon. $100 and up.

POD "Publishing Lulu, Aventine, You pay them to No acceptance High costs of books, $200-$1600 Services" Booksurge design, print problem, fast no distibution, no and publish turnaround, prestige or reviews. your book. they handle Extra services everything. Fast, by fee. web-based. POD Self- LightningSource, You pay, they Cheapest POD No ISBN, not Varies per Publishing Replica . Paw Prints produce a prices, no quality control, no project...mu book. All prep, minimum runs, hand-holding. ch cheaper marketing, fast turnaround. than POD publishing is "service" up to you. companies aries per project...mu ch cheaper than POD "service" companies

Press-Based Self- Bethany, Courier, You send them Lowest costs Requires purchase Varies by Publishing your job per unit. of long runs of project. As (camera-ready books. Requires low as a or on pdf files), preparing original, dollar a they print it on all quality control book. But web presses. is by author. that still means thousands of dollars for job.

"eBooks" Many. Or self- Books created Easy, dirt cheap, Limit to prices, not Can be created. on word- easily sold. yet a popular way produced processing or to read books. free on any publisher computer. programs are CD's cost "authored" to pennies. disks or specialized files for eBook readers.

PDF Downloads Self-created. Word processer Free to produce. Limited popularity Virtually or publisher Easily for pleasure free. files are distributed by reading. "printed" to pdf download. Can files which can contain be read on any elaborate computer. artwork at no cost.

LaserPrinted Self- Kinkos, Office Book is Fast, almost High unit cost, low Under a Publishing Depot xeroxed, and overnight. No quality look. dollar for a cheaply bound. minimum runs. 100 page Little learning pocket curve. Local book. availibility.

"PodCasts", mp3 Self-created. Oral version of Almost free to Requires voice Almost free. Downloads book are produce. Not recording, not produced for difficult to popular for many listening on produce. Easily types of book. computers or distributed by mp3 players. download or CD. Self-Publishing Success Stories

Kremer Hall of Fame These lists by John Kremer, a major self-publishing guru, are the most famous compilations of great authors who Kremer Best-Sellers self-published, or made NYT Best-seller lists. Hereare some recent, illustrative cases of self-publishers making it big.

KJA Wishnia Wishnia's self-published first novel, "23 Shades of Black" was nominated for an Edgar Award. When it was revealed as self-published the committee started to withdraw the nomination, but by then the novel had been picked up by Putnam. Wishnia has since won 2 Edgars, as well as Harlan Ellison, Hugo, and Nebula awards.

Brunonia Barry Self published, “The Lace Reader”, which ended up getting a $2 million advance from Murrow, garnering many prizes, and hitting the NYT best-seller list.

M J Rose Published the much-rejected “Lip Service” off her website for $9.95. After selling over 2500 copies became the first e- book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club and first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publisher. Now has ten novels and is an international best-seller.

Stephen Wolfram His first self-published book, “A New Kind of Science” sold 50,000 during its first week of publication. It hit #1 at Amazon.com even before Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times reviewed the book. By the end of one year, the book had sold more than 150,000 copies.

Amanda Brown Originally published “Legally Blonde” as a POD book, made into musical and major motion picture, then realized on Plume, along with a sequel.

Steven Dunne Self-published "The Reaper" in 2008, sold 2000 copies, put it up on Authonomy, and got picked up by Harper Collins

Christopher Paolini A mediocre, fifteen year old writer, originally published “Eragon” as POD, has made New York Times best seller list and a major motion picture.

Jill Keto First published “Don't Get Caught With Your Skirt Down: A Practical Girl's Recession Guide” on Create Space, and within four months was picked up by Simon and Schuster. Self-Publishing Resources General Publishing Links Publishing POD Books Publishing eBooks Publishing Printed Books Marketing Your Books

General Self-Publishing Resources

Dan Poynter These are information and tutorial sites by John Kremer experts and gurus of self-publishing. Most have books for sale, but their sites provide extremely Aaron Shepard comprehensive insight and facts on all aspects Foner Books of producing and selling your own titles. Leo Boecki If you are thinking of investing your time, How To POD money, and prestige in your own books, you owe it to yourself to study these guys.

SelfPub Review Forums These are discussion forums for producing print AbsoluteWrite books--everything from printing to total vanity scams can be found here, with comments. Ask BMN SelfPub Group your questions, share info, self-promote, get Published Authors smart. PA on Linked In Lulu.com Forums

Self Publishing Today Resources, news, and links about self-publishing. A sort of industry journal for indie publishers.

Self Publishing Review The “site of record” for self-publishing and one of the most respected review sites.

Copyright Office (U.S.) For $30, it worth doing to protect your writing. ISBN Standards For U.S. Publishers, these are the source sites for Bowker ISBN numbers. Or call 800-521-8110. Print On Demand (POD) Publishing

Lulu.com This is a unique business site that can produce books on demand (“POD”) and lets you sell them off their site and your own site. Pros and cons, for which see the discussions in forums listed below.

Lightning Source These are firms that actually produce “POD” Paw Prints books. All the POD presses out there are just middlemen to LSI (Lightning Source) or—to a much lesser degree—Paw Prints, which runs all the books for Whiskey Creek Press.

Create Space Another unique solution with upside and downside: allows immediate publishing of a POD book on amazon.com

Writer Beware POD A very good survey of POD publishing, including what to beware of.

The POD Forum These are forums and comparative sites for POD POD Sites book publishing.

Pod People Sites about POD books, including reviews. Podbram

eBook Publishing

MobiPocket These are the main sites for publishing your own Smashwords eBooks. Find much more into on eBook publishing in my companion manual, “eWriting: New Routes to Publication”. fictionwise This is a rather exciting store: you can get your ePub format books on here for sale, including eBook versions of your existing books.

Lulu.com Little Lulu isn't just about paper books. You can publish an eBook with them for free and sell it off their store or your own. Or publish it on a CD to be sold in stores or as gifts. And now, for $25, you can produce a phone app of your book here. Open Office Allows you to publish directly from the free Open Office word processor to an eBook format. OpenOffice eScape OO has “export as pdf” built in: eScape allows direct to ePub format. So if you prepare a manuscript in OO, you can go to pdf and ePub versions with by pushing two buttons.

CafePress Make CDs of your eBooks! Sell them in cool WTS Duplication cases, with the logo or cover printed on them! Discmakers Cafepress allows you do that on an “on demand” DiscLogic basis--with the same no investment/higher price Mixonic factor as POD books. The others are short-run producers that can get you out a hundred CD's of your eBook with printed CD and case for as low as under $2 apiece.

ebook Forums

MobileRead Forums The major forum for all forms of eBook and Kindle Boards mobile read devices. Nook Boards For Kindle writers and readers eBook 88 This page lists a dozen different eBook sites and forums.

ebook Directories

Free eBook.biz Only lists free ones books. Possibilities for writers using eBooks as promo tools. eBooks Just Published A great concept: submit an eBook published in the last 18 months and they list it. They screen out all the scam/spam hype eBooks. Must be DRM-free.

EPIC The “Electronically Published Internet Connection” is an professional association of publishers and authors, chiefly concerned with ebooks. They run an award contest and have lists of eBook publishers.

Hardshell Word Factory A publisher of eBooks and print editions... a commercial embodiment of the “escalator process” we're talking about here. My eBook These are essentially publisher/stores of ebooks Kobo Books an exiting development which basically allows Lulu.com you to upload your eBook and have it on sale Shareware eBooks with a link instantly. Smashwords qualifies Smashwords because of its catalog association with Stanza, the Mac app “iTunes of reading”. Sniplits These are “eShorts”... short fiction sold as mini- ebooks for under a dollar. A good replacement for the defunct amazon.com shorts program, these could be used as serial installments or leaders for an eBook project.

Stanza These are online eBook stores. Stanza is of eBook.com special note since it's kind of the “iPhone Feedbooks amazon” for eReading. ebook is the retail outlet Fictionwise for Shareware eBooks. Feedbooks is just one of eReader many, many sources for free ebooks. Note that “free” can be of use to authors: for reviews and critiques, to build readership for later books, and perhaps as a means of delivering shorts and sample chapters.

Book Maestro These exe “bundlers” create one-file eBooks exe Baler from html websites. Total control, amazing WebSitePacker power—hard to sell. Maestro is free or $20, Baler WebExe is $20. Natata, at $40, is my personal favorite, Natata HTML Exectuable at around 35 Euros is the “Cadillac” of the breed. HTML Executable eBook Readers These are lists of readers, formats, and eBook Converters converters from one of the bewildering thicket eBook Formats of formats to others. fictionwise This is a rather exciting store: you can get your ePub format books on here for sale, including eBook versions of your existing books.

ebook Forums

MobileRead Forums The major forum for all forms of eBook and Kindle Boards mobile read devices. For Kindle writers and readers eBook 88 This page lists a dozen different eBook sites and forums.

ebook Directories

Offset-Printing/Book Distribution

List of Printers This is a good list of offset printer/binders. Scan Poynter's list for solutions to virtually every EC Printing book production/editing/distribution/promo task.

EC is a source of printed books--tailored to small publisher needs--and their information pages on self-publishing are an excellent resource. Biblio Distribution Distributors, including online retailers that will Baker & Taylor accept your self-published titles. IPG Amazon Advantage Barnes & Noble

Marketing Your Work

Bauu Marketing List Perhaps the most comprehensive online list of places to market, promote, and press-release your self[-published book. Platforms, library sales, directories, media kits, awards... and much more.

Ning.com Networks In addition to the sites mentioned on the Bauu list, and well-knowns like LinkedIn and Among many ning book sites: FaceBook, it's very much worth knowing about bookmarket.ning.com the ning networks. Not only because there are a community.writersdigest.com great many networks for book promotion and pumpupyourbookpromotion.ning.com genres there, but because you can start your own theauthorssociety.ning.com network, which can be handier than a FaceBook writeitpublishitmarketit.ning.com fan page and even serve as your home website. newwriting.ning.com It;s a good idea to get a “ning ID” so you can sign morganjamespublishing.ning.com into many book sites quickly and easily. romancewriterandreader.ning.com coffeetimeromanceandmore.ning.com swordandlaser.ning.com

Book Pleasures These sites review books. Including independent Fore Word Reviews books, ebooks, weblit novels, the stuff they tell Podler Review you nobody will review. Podler is for POD books. POD-dy Mouth Reviews Mrs. Giggles LL Book Reviews Best Reviews Huntress Review Indie Pubs Awards Awards for independently published books. EPIC Awards These can be entered by independent authors, Podbram Awards some acccept eBooks, some accept POD books. Writers Digest SP Awards Fore Word Book of the Year Written Art Awards Axiom Awards (Business) Moonbeam Award (Children) Eric Hoffer Awards Creative Arts Council Indie Excellence Awards Living Now Awards (Inspire)

The Indie Reader Sells books by independent authors. A market and community for indie writers.

CafePress Merchandise, promo gear, swag. For “walking Topatco advertising”, self-liquidating promotion, or Zazzle additional cash flow. These outfits are “POD for LogoWorks gear” and can put your logo/slogan on all sorts of uMadeUp products from shirts to mugs to calendars to bikinis and plush toys. Self-Publishing FCT (Frequently Confused Terms)

It's unfortunate, but the prospective self-publishing author is further hindered in trying to sort out the thicket of options by the misuse of some very basic words and terms--sometimes out of carelessness or ignorance, but frequently out of the cynical goal of exploiting writers.

Worse, this confusion if often applied by what should be trusted sources—like Writer's Digest, the SFWA's “Writer Beware” list,--as well as the innumerable “experts”, internet idiots, and spammers.

This section aims at disambiguation of some important terms so you won't be misled or worse, led into traps.

“Self Publisher”

This should be obvious: an author who publishes his or her own work is a “self-publisher”. Whether you use a Xerox machine, paper-cutter, and stapler to create books to sell at the swap meet or eBay, contract an offset printer to create a run of books, utilize a print-on-demand producer like LightingSource or Lulu.com, employ a “publishing service”, or even pay an out-an-out “vanity” scammer--you are a self-publisher.

But you will see the term used synonymously with “publishing service”. Writer's Digest runs articles often imply that the only decision facing an independent author is deciding among the many fee-based outfits that advertise with them. Almost nobody describes any other form of self- publishing other than POD (generally as run by some overpriced “service” with a possible nod to running off print books.

P.O.D.

This oft-misused acronym means “Print On Demand”. The concept is simple: instead of press runs of thousands, books are created as they are ordered. There is a trade-off between the low unit cost and high initial investment of ink-based printing and the higher cost per item but minimal investment and risk of toner-based (laser-printing, like copy machines) production.

Sadly, we see this term erroneously applied to the business models of some companies that use POD technology and charge authors big fees for producting their books. The fact is POD is a technology, not a business model. This type of book production is used by many, many different kinds of business:

--Lulu.com where authors can produce books with no initital cost and purchase them as needed.

-Lightning Source, a firm owned by the huge book distributor Ingrams and produces almost all POD books—and allows you to have an account to be your own publisher.

--Whiskey Creek, Samhain, BeWrite, and hundreds of other legitimate, royalty-paying small presses.

--Imprints of major publishers, such as Kensington's Rebel Base, and a growing number of big houses who use the lower entry costs initially to test titles. There is a trend towards using POD in early editions, then going to offset if sales warrant. The Espresso Book Machine is a vending machine that creates books from online files on demand using POD technology.

That said, the woods is filling with POD-powered “self-publishers” and “author services” that should be avoided. But easier to do when you don't conflate the terminology.

“Vanity Press”

This is not so much confusion of terminology, but of concept. There was a time when books were hard to produce and there were only three ways an author's book got published: a publisher bought the rights and paid him royalties, he printed books and sold them himself...or he paid a company to print and publish them for him. These days there are dozens of different models. Personally, I think the term “vanity” is misplaced here. If you want to pay somebody to publish a book so you'll have them for your family reunion, or to sell at your seminars, or to flash around to impress people at Starbucks, that's your business and nobody has any call to second-guess your motives. For that matter, it's not hard to think that all art comes out of vanity. Why else would we bother? In fact, the Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:2) says, “All is vanity”.

That said, there are ways to get your own book out that work, and ways that tend to be scams where you pay a lot of money and end up with nothing to show but “being published” (and people laugh at that when they find out it's at Dorrance or xLibris or iUniverse of Author House or some other scamster.)

The difference between a printer and a vanity press is what you pay for. And how much you are paying for it. Look into these companies very closely. The POD forums listed in the Resources section can help. Anybody advertising for authors should be avoided.

Recently there have been a lot of new scamsters who try to avoid the “vanity press” label by pretending to be real publishers. Or “collaborative” “subsidy” “hybrid” publishers who are only in it for the joy of helping you get your dreams. And are certainly not “vanity” because they don't publish everybody who comes through the door. Just certain people who meet their requirements. Or might meet them if they would just get a special package where they bring you up to snuff for a low low price that can be quoted if they get your email and phone number. Or so they say.

It's usually very hard to find out what they actually charge without making commitments, even to include uploading a manuscript. They want to send you ebooks or brochures or lavish booklets “informing you on how publishing works”. A red flag right there--the profit to do that printing, mailing and advertising comes from somewhere. And it's equally hard to find any evidence that they actually publish authors who don't pay. Publishers who don't show off their catalogs or want you to know who their authors are. Now I ask you...

Paying somebody to “be your publisher” may suit your needs. If so, don't worry about the “vanity label”, just do it. After getting as informed as you can get--and not just from their literature--make your call and hang with it.

But if they are not forthcoming, or try to present themselves as something they aren't, don't waste any time on them: move on to the next possibility to study. The new criterion isn't “vanity”, it's “stealth”.

A major rule of thumb that simplifies much of this: If a “publisher” is spending money to advertise for writers... RUN! My Publishing Experience

I have published my own writing since grade school: using toy print sets, hectograph, mimeograph, xerox, offset, and electronic modes. I have started, run and sold several publications, worked magazines and catalogs for hire, and consulting to publishers of periodicals and catalogs. I started and ran two lines of books, one specializing in poetry. I have supported myself entirely by self-publishing books and have at least paid my rent by publishing my own work for almost twenty years.

My work has been published in many forms, from major national magazines to small presses to imprints of national presses. But, even though most of my writing is currently novels and screenplays, I still keep a finger in self-publishing, including Mexican Slang 101, the book that pays my rent and occasionally my entire income.

I know a lot about print publishing of many kinds, a bit about Lulu and LSI, and less about other POD services. I and have worked with quite a few publishers of various types ranging from backseat entrepreneurs to people who put out millions of copies a year and know a dozen people who make substantial income from publishing their own writing.

Developed for a Workshop at the Southern California Writers' Conference