Best source for self-publishing

The Self-Publishing Manual

Dan Poynter’s utterly reliable self-publishing advice, The Self-Publishing Manual, has been a perennial oasis of sanity in a sea of hype for over two decades. Now in its 16th edition, it’s more useful than ever. To Poynter the technologies of cheap — if not free — duplication are an outright opportunity, rather than a dreaded disaster. If you want to know how to publish (especially on paper), this is the man. For how to e-publish, see Guy Kawasaki’s APE, below. — KK

• The new book-publishing model is not strictly self-publishing. It is a trial run of 500 books that allows you, not only to sell them, but also to approach some agents and publishers with a book rather than a manuscript. You can also send out review copies, approach distributors, wholesalers, book clubs and make other sales.
• Don’t just write – build: Today, authors build their books; writing is just part of the building process. As an author, you know your subject. You can describe it, explain it and teach it. The eBook simply provides you with more visual aids to help you get your point to your reader. Now, in addition to the printed word, you have photos, graphics, animation, color, dimension, motion, sound and hyperlinks to more information. Your pBook (paper) will have static words and b/w photographs but the eBook version will be far more versatile.
• Customizing and special versions: Because your books can be printed in short runs and since the new print engines print two pages at a time, you may customize your book for your customer. If you make a premium sale to a company, it will cost just pennies to bind in a letter from the CEO or to add the company logo to the cover. This is called “Mass Customization.”
• Since the laser printers are driven by computer, books can have several versions of some chapters, each aimed at a particular type of reader. These are called “Module Books,” as the book can be assembled for a particular reader.

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Best manual for making ebooks

APE

This poorly named ebook costs all of $3 and is by far the best guide available to teach you how to make ebooks. We spent an entire summer trying to make electronic versions for all my past work; it was a supreme hassle. Lots of wasted mistakes. Wish this was available then. Save yourself hundreds of hours, and countless dead ends by following the hardto- find information in this dense, to-the-point book. Guy Kawasaki is an ace communication (he has a large following on social media). His ebook is not just about moving text to the screen, but also introduces “agile publishing” — fast, hi-tech, multiple mode publishing. He tells you how to wrok in cloud apps, crowdsource design, use fans to copyedit, select formats, get it on Amazon (and the right part of Amazon), and print premium paper copies on demand. Little is missing, and believe me, this knowledge is hard to find online. He covers writing a book from start to finish, with all options of formatting, distribution, and actual publishing attended to. If you are pursuing publishing of any sort, this would be the best $3 you could spend. — KK.

• Try this simple model: Assume that most of your revenue will come from Kindle ebooks, and you’ll make $2.00 per copy at a $2.99 price point. This means you need to sell approximately 2,500 ebooks to break even, not including your time.
• (A service called Kindlegraph enables an author to “autograph” ebooks by inserting a personalized message and digitized signature. It claims that 3,500 authors of more than 15,000 ebooks have signed up for the service. Still, this isn’t as compelling as seeing an author and getting an autograph on a printed book.)
• To my amazement, 241 people completed the form in twenty-four hours. I sent them the Word file of the manuscript after turning on “Highlight Changes” so that it was easy to find their comments. (Again, to do this, use this sequence: Tools menu, “Track Changes,” “Highlight Changes,” “Track changes while editing.”) Over the next ten days, more than a hundred people returned the file with comments. These were the results: Sixty-seven suggestions for how to make the book better (not counting duplicates of the same suggestions). These suggestions were closer to content editing than copyediting, which is why I crowdsource copyediting before using a professional. Twenty-seven factual errors (not counting duplicate reports of the same issues). These errors are also closer to content editing than copyediting. However, most editors from traditional publishers would not have caught these errors because detecting them required extensive expertise in Google+. One hundred and forty-seven grammatical and spelling errors (not counting duplicate reports of the same issues). To make this kind of crowdsourcing work, you need at least five hundred followers.
• For marketing purposes, a better order for ebook front matter, tradition be damned, is: Cover Blurbs (more on blurbs below) Table of contents Foreword or preface (but not both, and neither for fiction) Chapter 1… You can stick everything else in the back because most of it doesn’t matter to most people.
• Pros: Inexpensive. All you need to self-publish an ebook is a computer, word processor, and Internet access. If you start distribution through other channels, you may need more professional tools, but you can worry about this later. The best case, Kindle Direct Publishing, prides itself on a forty-eight-hour turnaround. Amazon and Apple also enable you to launch your non-translated book in dozens of countries at the same time. Lucrative. You can make up to 70 percent of the selling price of an ebook from online resellers. Making $2 on a $3 book is a sweet deal if you can achieve a large volume.
• Many bookstores will not sell self-published books. Authorservices companies may tell you that they can get you brick-andmortar distribution, but they are shading the truth. Bookstores can order your book from them if someone requests it, but this doesn’t mean they will buy your book for stocking in the store.

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Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities was Self-Published

The authority of a book — still today — is astounding. Take text as it appears on your screen, print it on paper, bind between covers, and those words will get more attention and respect than they would on a website or stapled as a report. We don’t know exactly why this works; it may have to do with the extra expense of printing. And we don’t know how long this cultural bias will prevail, but as long as it does, you can take advantage of it by printing a book with ink on paper.

Getting something printed today is quite easy. Getting it some attention is much, much harder. I recommend three outfits that will print single copies of a book on-demand: CreateSpace, Blurb and Lulu. These companies will walk you through the process step by step, including providing you a bar code, and an on-line shopping cart so you can sell your book if you care to. A once complex, intimidating process that drove away all but the most obstinate is now a simple and easy matter of clicking through some web pages.

But printing is not publishing.

Let me tell the story of this self-published book. This book is self-published primarily because publishing companies are too slow for me, and I always wind up doing most of their work anyway. So after making a PDF of the designed book we printed 10,000 copies of Cool Tools for the first edition. That number was guestimated by several pros in the small press world who figured that was the number of copies I might sell in the first year of the book’s life. This is an oversized book (11 x 14 inches) which severely limits the number of printers equipped to print it. In fact one big US printer reluctantly recommended that we go overseas to print this large. Printing costs in China are about one third of the estimates provided by the one US printer willing to bid on it. However, in calculating the cost of shipping the books from China, one Chinese printer figured 10,000 books this size would fill more than one container, and they asked me if I had a loading dock at my warehouse!

Here the dream of self-publishing meet the realities of dead-tree flesh and pigment. As a self-publisher, it is easy to create a book using an off-the-shelf laptop and some consumer software (see Tools Used to Make This Book, p. 5) It is easy for a self-publisher to send a digital PDF to a printer anywhere in the world, including China, and to order thousands printed. It is easy for a self-publisher to make and distribute e-books (see APE, this page). But when a self-publisher returns to paper, the dynamics that formed the old system around moving paper also returns. Where would a selfpublisher park a couple of shipping containers of books? Once parked, how do you get the books inside to book retailers, or to Amazon or Barnes & Nobel? It’s a logistical headache.

Small publishers (and self-publishing is just nano-scale small publishing) often hire a distributor, such as a big publisher, to distribute their books and deal with shippers. That’s what I did. I partnered with Publisher’s Group West (PGW), a California based outfit that I knew from Wired magazine. I pay PGW a percentage of each book’s sale to deal with their mass and weight, and to get them into bookstores around the world.

The 10,000 copies were printed by Book Art Printers in Hong Kong, China. We hired Meadows/Wye, a transport agency to pick them up at the printing plant in China, and to load them on their once-aweek departure of a container ship. The ship takes 26 days to cross the Pacific ocean, cruise down to Central America, cross the Panama Canal, head up the Mississippi River, dock at Memphis, where the books are unloaded to trucks to complete the last 200 miles to the PGW warehouse in Jackson, Tennessee. Once a week Amazon picks up a load of books from PGW to take to their warehouse where they enter the slipstream and make their way to you. — KK

02/17/25