Lboeckl.net Leo Boeckl's personal site
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Lboeckl.net is my website, me Leo Boeckl that is, where I have information and resources for self publishing, a book I am writing, my personal art galleries spanning the last four decades and a very interesting pictorial family tree. I am also a member of several webrings which are related to these activities as well. Please feel free to check it out if you have some time. Thanks, Leo.
Description
Self publishing for first time authors
Ok so you have finished your book. It was an enormous amount of work and effort but now how do you get it published? As soon as you begin to research the issue on the internet you will be confused. There are so many choices and if you don’t know any of the detail relevant to the choices then you will still be confused and fearful about what to do next. This article outlines your choices and the pros and the cons for each of three potential ways you can have your book published. The reason there are specifically three choices for you is results from the seismic changes which have occurred in the publishing industry.
There were two major changes which hit the publishing industry over the last decade. The first was Amazon.com. By using the internet to become the goliath of all the book resellers they have changed the pricing models which had existed in the publishing industry forever. With their volumes they are able to squeeze discounts where no one else was able to in the past from the traditional publishing industry. This change effectively removed an unpublished author to get their book published from those publishing giants which have been out there for over half a century. At the same time a new technology appeared called print on demand (POD).
The POD technology enabled book printers to print less expensively and enable printing books in only the quantities which were needed at that moment. They do this by taking your book and reducing it to an electronic file which they can print and ship a week. Your second choice for getting your book published used to be going to a small publisher or in some cases a vanity press company. With the POD change you can now start your own small self publishing company using a POD printer to print and ship your book for you. The pros with this approach are essentially in the flexibility category. You can price your book for the appropriate retail channel to sell your book and market your book exactly as you would like to. The cons are the extra work, upfront investments to start up your company and the amount of time it will take you to get all of this done. But make no mistake many people are taking this route.
The third option out there is to find a POD publisher who will publish and print your book for you. If you adhere to the book standards for Amazon then you can get your book published and for sale all the way to Amazon. As a result of this choice there are hundreds of POD printing and publishing companies out there willing to work with you. You can spend thousands of dollars or you can get your book published for nothing. Most POD companies typically in the hundreds of dollars range. If you go the for nothing route then you will find that you can’t sell it on Amazon. It will only be available from the POD publisher’s website. Most POD publisher’s however charge something upfront. But for a very few they charge nothing.
The trick is to find a POD publisher who will publish your book for nothing. There is only one POD publisher that I have found to date, named Lulu, who takes this approach and allows you to continue to own the contents of your book. If you pay Lulu $100 for a distribution package then you can have your book for sale on Amazon as she will assign you an ISBN number. The cons going this route is you must put you book into an electronic format, including the cover designs, for Lulu to work with you. That means you must know how to do that work. It is not as complicated as it sounds but there a several steps involved with self publishing in this manor.
If I have time I will return and add in an overview of the process, tools and tricks involved with self publishing your book through a POD printer. For the record I am not affiliated in any way with the publishing industry. I am just someone who wrote a book and was looking for how to get it published. If you want to read how the process works and see a step by step method for self publishing then go to my website as I have documented this information, which I have made available to the public as a free resource.
Good luck with your book. Thanks, Leo.
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