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Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part 1

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

When I first got involved with the revolution of "desktop publishing" in the late 1980s, the most frequent comment on the new technology was the old A.J. Liebling quote:

"Freedom of Press belongs to those who own one."

The idea, of course, was that being able to create books on your home computer and laser printer was like having your own printing press. That was revolutionary, but as people soon realized, having your own press did not eliminate the high costs of printing and did not solve the distribution problem. Longer works like books still required additional manual steps such as binding, and the quality of home-produced printing was not as good as traditional offset printing.

In the 1990s the Internet came into popularity and suddenly there was a new way to publish. Today millions of people have their own virtual presses via blogs and websites, revolutionizing communication and publishing. But such technology has its own limitations: for longer formats and certain kinds of material, reading online is inconvenient and awkward, and until a cheap and lightweight portable reader is invented (I'm not counting Amazon's horrible Kindle), the printed book will remain popular.

So nothing has really changed: if you want to publish your own book, you're still stuck with traditional publishing channels. You can either hope that a publisher will like your book enough to take all the risks and print and distribute your book for you and give you a slim ten to twenty percent of the revenue, or you can self-publish by paying the offset printing costs in advance and hope you'll sell all the books you print.

Of course because publishing is so expensive few publishers want to take any risks, which is why there are so many similar books out there. (When a book about a boy wizard is a hit, there are sudden dozens of books about wizard children. Yet don't forget that original boy wizard book was initially rejected by dozens of timid publishers.) If you want to target a niche market, forget it: publishers aren't interested. There just isn't enough money in a small market for publishers to bother.

So with all this new technology we're right back where we started. Sure, we can now do the design and layout ourselves, but it does us no good in getting our book published.

Or does it?

In recent years several vendors have come on the market offering "print-on-demand" (POD) services. The concept sounds like a dream come true: each copy of your book is manufactured upon order, eliminating the high cost of entry of traditional publishing where you must print thousands of copies in advance and hope you can sell them.

As a writer I've been tremendously interested in these services, but some of the early ones charged significant up-front fees (too much for casual experimenting) and some had Draconian contracts where they essentially took over your copyright. Newer companies have fixed some of these restrictions, but I hadn't yet tested them with a project.

Now my main business these days is in publishing: I produce a bimonthly magazine, REALbasic Developer. It's definitely a product in a niche market, geared to users of the REALbasic programming environment. For years I've dreamed of producing books on REALbasic programming, but the costs were always too great to justify the small market. However, with print-on-demand, maybe it could work.

Then about 18 months ago I ended up in the hospital with my health scare: pancreatitis and diabetes. That prompted a revolution in my lifestyle. I began to learn about food and promptly lost 75 pounds. Everyone wanted to know how I did it, of course, and I would talk people's ears off with my lengthly explanations. But after the tenth or twelfth person asked me when my book was coming out, I decided they had a good point. Why not put my experience and techniques into a book? I wouldn't expect to sell a million copies or anything: I'd just publish it myself. It would be a great way to test-drive the whole print-on-demand concept.

Over the next few months I began writing the book, revising it significantly as I thought of new ideas and changing the structure occasionally. I did it on the side and it took longer than I expected, as at times my motivation waned. (It turns out it's a lot of work to create a book. Who knew?) The final bits of the process took the longest as I had to make key decisions and learn about the the POD publishing process.

Next Time: Marc talks about the self-publishing process.

macopinion@designwrite.com