Thoughts on publishing writing??

[mjr]

I know a few of you in here are writers.

My wife and I are working on something right now that we might eventually want to turn into a book, depending on how it goes. We think what we're going to be doing might be helpful to others.

One of the things we'll have to consider if we decide to move forward is whether or not we want to go with a hard copy "vanity"/self publishing thing, or if we want to go e-book.

I assume an e-book would be cheaper for someone to purchase, and we'd get to keep more of the money, assuming we made any at all off of this venture, but some people like physical books. I don't know that we want to do both options.

e-Books offer the flexibility to also be read on an electronic device, whereas a physical book is a little more cumbersome.

We don't know how many pages this book might be, but my WAG at this point is that it probably won't be any more than 250 pages or so.

Thoughts?

[AnaKhouri]

I have not self-published but a guy in my writing group went through Amazon's Createspace to publish his (very good!) Vietnam War memoir.

He found them to be professional and easy to work with, but it will cost you. I think he sold several hundred copies before he broke even. He did paperback, e-book and eventually an audio book. To date he has sold over 1200 copies.

You can publish on Amazon's Kindle store without working through Createspace, but in that case I'd suggest you hire a professional editor before publishing. Amazon's cut used to be 60/40 but I'm not sure that's still true.

There are also other similar publishers such as Lulu but if you really want to get it out there to a wide audience, Amazon is the place to be.

[mjr]

Thanks for the info.

I'm still not entirely sure which direction we're going to go. This would be a book that I believe would probably be helpful for a number of people within a specific niche, so having it available to a wide audience would probably make it available to that niche. Based on my research, it's less than 1.7 million individuals in the U.S., and I'm not sure how many worldwide. So even if we publish/sell, it's likely we're not going to make a substantial amount on it, because I'm guessing a sales rate of 1% of that, or about 17,000 people. So even if we sell at $10 - $20/book, that's still only between $170K and $340K. I don't even know if we'd sell that many, honestly. I'd probably guess that we'd probably only sell a few hundred copies. I'm sure I'd have to do some sort of "marketing" (I'd probably go guerilla or viral marketing to save some $$$).

Not sure how much I want to spend to get this thing off the ground. I've got OpenOffice, and a couple of other tools (Acrobat, GimpShop, InkScape) to actually put the book together and design the cover.

Though I might really need to research good fonts to use. I could always just go with a Times New Roman, but an e-book would be better with something like Verdana (since it was designed specifically for screens).

Although I did research that I'm going to have to get an ISBN, and possibly a barcode, for the book, too. Especially if I want to sell it online/in book stores.

[houdini]

Some advice that I've picked up from my travels...

- Get anything professionally edited, or at least proofed. You do miss things.

- Publishing through Amazon is the way to go for ebooks, but once you have the ebook you can put it on Smashwords, which will then distribute to other ebook sellers.

- Print On Demand (POD) is a good option, and I think Lulu does it (amongst other printers) so people could have hard copy books if they wanted them.

Good luck!

[AnaKhouri]

Oh, and before you choose any self-publisher, research them thoroughly. Lots of scammers out there. The Preditors and Editors website is invaluable.

[Kristev]

Yes. I have been through three different companies for self-publishing books. If you PM me, I'll tell you more about it.

[Kheldarson]

Some advice that I've picked up from my travels...

- Get anything professionally edited, or at least proofed. You do miss things.

I'm part of a brilliant site that helps with this: www.scribophile.com

It's a private critique site that has folks from everywhere and every walk of life. We crit each other's work and discuss ways to make our writing better. Highly recommend it.