Self publishing a book has had a bad rap since the idea was first invented umpteen years ago. Those publishing companies which indulged the desires of writers who either could not get published (for a million different reasons) in the traditional manner - or those who simply wanted printed evidence that they could write something, were commonly called "vanity presses" They still are called that, in quite a few circles, and writers were warned that if they ever wanted to be published by a "real" publishing company they should stay away from self publishing. "It's poison," said the pundits. At one point this was no doubt true, and those of us who even considered the possibility of self publishing had nightmares of being branded as heretics and outcast from the writers world.
I thought I had escaped that scene when my book "The Lilibet Logs" was published by a traditional publisher in New York. I thought I was home free and started serious work on finishing my new book in progress. Cool!
After spending six months mailing the manuscript of my little self help guide book "A Few Last Words" (my second actual finished manuscript) to at least a hundred publishers and writer's agents, and receiving back perhaps 75 decent rejection slips, I decided to check other options. What I discovered was a couple of general options - true vanity presses being one option. Vanity presses seem to be publishing companies that will take your manuscript and for a really large amount of money, build your book and sell it back to you for more large amounts of money. You have to buy a minimum number of books and this means the author has to fill up his/her basement with these books while he/she is pounding the pavement trying to sell them. The cost is considerable and sometimes these companies retain the rights to the book, which makes it hard to approach anyone else in hopes of re submitting the writing to the publishing world. Like, what would happen if by some strange circumstance a movie production company wanted to make your book into a film? Guess who would make all the money? Right - the vanity press would clean up, and you'd be left out in the cold. Given this scenario, it's easy to see why vanity presses have a bad name.
The other option I found was something called "print on demand" publishers. This was something new a couple of years ago, (directly related to the advance of electronic technology) and while I don't know the exact facts, I'm guessing that because book writers had multiplied like rabbits and traditional publishers were becoming swamped with manuscript submissions - and lots of books don't have the mass sales appeal that it takes to pay for the editing, design work, printing, binding, sales and marketing, shipping and storage - someone came up with the idea of "print on demand". Wow! In addition, most of these places are connected to Amazon.com, so the writer gets a sales listing on the world wide web. And, best of all, you don't have to purchase a pile of books. You can buy them one at a time (at a nice author's discount) or you can order a couple of hundred or even a thousand - depending on what you need.
Being old fashioned and ever-so-slightly computer challenged, I puttered around with this concept and finally hooked up with a print on demand publishing outfit. Essentially, what happens with this system is that you, the author, are responsible for writing, editing, setting up the page sequence and font style and spacing etc., designing the cover according to an electronic template, providing and inserting artwork, choosing the retail price of the book and lots of other stuff. When you think everything is perfect, you make a pdf of the file and upload it to the publisher. The publisher prints one proof copy and sends it back to you.
It took me six months to do all that with my little how-to book "A Few Last Words".
When the proof copy arrived I was initially thrilled to see my book between a shiney nice cover. When I reviewed the text however, I was amazed at how totally screwed up my copy editing had turned out. I was bummed out and spent another month and a half re editing the writing. This is where I should have listened to lots of well meant friends and relatives who said, "Ya know Jack, you really should get a real copy editor involved here." No truer words were ever spoken - but did I listen? No! I resubmitted my latest copy edition and waited with baited breath for the new proof copy in the mail. I'll talk about the results in my next electronic gig, here. Thanks for reading.
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