Yesterday I posted about self-publishing services like CafePress and iUniverse which will print, sell and ship copies of your book for a price without the middleman of an established publisher. Happily, several readers wrote in with notes and suggestions about DIY publishing.
To start, Lifehacker reader Joel Risberg used CafePress to self-publish a book about singer James Taylor last month. Here's what Joel had to say:
I composed the book in OpenOffice and used its one-step export to PDF, the format needed by CafePress. Front, back, and spine images were created in Photoshop and uploaded in TIFF format. The whole process is extremely easy and well-managed on their site. What you see in the PDF is exactly what you'll get in the finished product, so it's not difficult. Since the book's release I've even uploaded several minor revisions which take effect immediately for all sales after that point.
I chose perfect binding, which on my 85-page book resulted in a base price of $9.55. Sale price is set by the author and I chose $12. The end result is an extremely polished book with a thick full-color glossy cover, flawless binding, and exceptionally high-quality inside paper. Color reproduction on the cover (inside pages are limited to black and white) is also excellent.
While my sales have only been in the hundreds, I've been very happy with the low effort required for the book creation, zero monetary outlay up front and zero effort required for order fulfilment. Payments are sent via check approximately 30 days after orders ship. As the author you can order all the books you like at the base price and they also offer deep discounts on bulk orders of at least 15 copies.
For relatively low-volume sales I'd highly recommend them.
My book is here:
http://www.james-taylor.com/book/
However, Owen Linderholm, founder of small publishing company Press for Change says:
Do not use either CafePress or iUniverse for self publishing!
To be fair there are reasons to go to either one, but only for specific things. First off, cafe press is relatively expensive for books - (of course they mostly do other stuff and if you need the whole shebang of book, hat, t-shirt, etc etc) then they are fine.
iUniverse is good if you seriously think it realistic that your book can step up to the big time - and you want it to. In other words, if B&N decide that they want to promote it in their stores. Otherwise, it too is a relatively expensive option.
Lulu (lulu.com) isn't too bad as POD and is even better if you are doing an ebook version. (POD = print-on-demand)
If you want the in-depth detailed knowledge about self-publishing you go to three sources:
Dan Poynter
Tom and Marilyn Ross
and more recently Fern Reiss
These guys have been doing it for years and know just about everything. To give you some idea of what you can do, you can check my small publishing company site - the book will launch in May - Press for Change.
Reader Morgan Davis says:
Another one you might want to check out is Gorham Printing. They have a lot of great useful info on their website under the information section about how to layout your book in different programs, ISBN numbers and such. Been immensely helpful to me.
And William says:
Check out www.lulupress.com. It was founded by the founder of Redhat, Bob Young. I worked there for one summer before I started college. I think it's pretty nifty. Includes all sorts of media publishing - images, music, books. And has lots of collaboration features.
Thanks all!