So you want to write a book. How to.
I've had a few people ask me about the process of publishing a book so I thought I'd write up a "How to".
Hopefully it won't get buried here before the people that wanted it see it.
So you want to write a book.
Okay I'll spill the beans. There is no magic sauce and your success is not guaranteed, EVER.
First I will preface this by telling you that I have only published one book, and its been moderately successful.
Enough success that I didn't lose my ass and I want to do it again. But I by no means made a huge bucket of money nor am I ready to retire. However all of my "fun" trips are a tax write off as are many of my outdoor toys and the book pays for most of it now so its worth the effort. See my Avatar? Book paid tax write off.
The basics of getting a book published are.
1: Get a big publisher, Random House, Penguin book, and sell your soul. I never even tried.
2: Find a small publisher and pitch them your idea. U of U press etc. I never even tried.
3: Go it alone. I love a challenge and this is not for everyone, but I did it.
Since I can't help with #1 or #2 I'll stick to what I know and did.
I decided someone need to write this book, looked around the room and saw my brother who I can usually con into my crazy ideas and decided "GO".
I'll talk about "I" here but my brother did quite a bit of the work and is co-author. I had never done this before. I found a book a bit like the one I wanted to write, located the author and picked his brain. There are no "publishers" or distributors in the food chain here. Not that they are bad, I just didn't go that route and perhaps it hurt my end game but it proves you can do this on your own.
I started collecting information, taking photos, basically researching the book. Seems logical right?
This proved to be a mistake as a first step. Reality set in when I started figuring out how to print my masterpiece. Yikes! Just let me tell you there are sharks in this business, not all of them are lawyers. Some have ink stains on their hands. In fact this process delayed printing by TWO years.
I wrote the book in MS Publisher which turned out to be another mistake. Its just a crappy piece of sw but we made it work because the printer was very good at their job. So with a few mistakes under my belt here is what I recommend.
Step 1: Decide if you are writing one book or several. If you want to make "money" don't expect it from a single book. Plan to write several over a 2-3 year period. Write the outline for each BEFORE leaving your house, writing the first line, or committing any cash. In fact if you think your book writing career will be for multiple books I highly recommend doing basic outlines of at least the first three before launching into book #1. It will give you a feel for whether you are kidding yourself or actually have what it takes and might give you a feel for which order to publish. I'm not suggesting a huge effort. You should be able to do an outline in a day. The most successful self publishing self distributing author I know is Charles Wells (www.funtreks.com). Charles has made a name for himself and published a number of books on his own and it appears to me he really enjoys his work.
Step 2: Find your printer. Chat with them about what works best for the printing process. They can give you details of how to setup the pages, margins etc etc at the beginning so things work out in the end. Ask them about what software to use and how to set it up. This will also will give you some of the cold hard facts about what you will need to do to make your book pay for itself at the very least. I didn't do this early on and all my hard work nearly died on the vine until I found the right printer. The printer should tell you the lead time from when you have it in their hands until its boxed and ready for pickup.
I used North Star printing in Spanish Fork Utah (http://www.nsprinting.net). I highly recommend them, they know what they are doing and they were inexpensive. In fact I know a publisher that has books done in China and only saves a few pennies per copy over what I paid. They went out of their way to get me as a customer, make the book work and did a ton of pre-press that I really should have paid for but they didn't ask for a dime. (http://www.nsprinting.net) The cost for my book was under $2 a copy perfect bound full color. I'll compare that to the $11-$18 I was quoted many times by other printers. Of course I can't guarantee you will get that price, its all about the size, format, paper, cover, binding, number of copies etc etc. The more work you do the lower the price. This is where you will decide how big your book will be and the price you will be asking retail and wholesale. My first printing was 5,000 books. You will actually receive more books than this from the printer. They printed 5,400 books and I received about 5,200ish of them and only paid for 5,000. Printers must print more than you order because some are damaged in cutting, binding, boxing etc. Some of you are going "Hmm, $10K forget that crap" about now. Read on.
Step 3: Make sure you know exactly who will sell the book for you. Not who will be likely candidates but actually talk with the store owners, show them your outlines and get some feedback. Don't be surprised if they piss on your idea, tell you they have books just like it that didn't sell etc. Just close the deal by asking "If I print it, will you buy and sell it?" I managed to get enough commitment for the book that when it was ready to print I took orders and CHECKS that paid for the printing. Since the book had local travel interest I sold it to the several county tourism offices, a few motor sport dealers and even some hotels and grocery stores. No books stores however since there were none in the area. Expect that most will want to keystone the book meaning they buy it at half the retail value. My retailers seem to be happy with a 25% margin. You are not collecting money at this step, just making sure you have a real potential buyer. Tell them you will return with the manuscript later. This is daunting for most people I know. It involves talking to people you don't know and you should fully expect to be treated like a "sales guy". Suck it up, your a stranger asking strange questions, if it doesn't feel weird your not in tune with people. The next time you go back they will recognize you and be glad to see you and your manuscript. Remember nobody will beat a path to your door to get your book. If you can't do this part you will not be successful selling your own book.
So you want to GO FOR IT! Good.
Step 4: Get that computer humming. Set some goals based on your outline and push yourself to keep a deadline. You can do this in a few months working evenings and a few weekends. I found it invaluable to be able to see the format while writing. It gave me a feel for how the book would flow as I could see the photos on every page and make decisions about whether I needed a bigger, smaller, narrow, wide photo etc to make the book read well. I constantly shifted things around, moved a photo or chapter around in the book. If you don't do it this way the pre-press process will kill you. If you pay someone to do layout after the fact it will cost a fortune and generally you are talking about the content of a photo in the text anyway so you need to make sure the text isn't three pages after the photo. This "pre-press" process is what large publishers do for authors as well as editing and managing distribution. Its expensive which is why they take such a huge chunk of the action or won't even consider specialty books. My brother and I took all the photos, collected the info, wrote the book, dealt with pre-sales, printing, shipping, and distribution. Don't do anything dumb like violate someone else's copyright.
Make sure you leave room for an ISBN number, use a fake place holder for now. Don't apply and layout the money for an ISBN until you are ready to print. Make sure you compare your book with similar books, do you have a LOT more pages? Why? Pages mean costs so be careful of page creep. You should have a target number of pages you want to hit as a result of printing cost discussions. Ever wonder why books of similar ilk are roughly the same thickness and size? Its all about printing costs. If you had sold your idea to a large publisher before writing it they would tell you "We want xxx pages", its all about printing costs. Call the printers as soon as you are finished and send them an electronic copy, get firm pricing for the finished product, bound and boxed for pickup. If you need it shipped calculate that in your cost per copy. Get a window of time where they can take on the project and tell you when it will be done. At this point you know your exact cost per copy. This is a big deal. You only get to keep the difference between this cost and the actual sales price which will be a wholesale price most of the time if you have any success at all. If this is only a few bucks per copy I don't think its worth the effort unless you are just doing it for fun. Nothing wrong with that either.
Step 5: Print a few copies in color, and hit the streets, go back to the same places and maybe find a few more. At this point you are entitled to say "Hey I'm not loaded and printing is expensive. I'd like to pre-sell you 20 copies." If they balk start upping the numbers and lowering the price per copy. You are not trying to make money here, you are raising funds to print. Get the money on the spot or within a few days. Tell them anything they need to know. Your home address, first born, who is printing, when it will be finished etc. Be prepared to produce a formal invoice on the spot, get an invoice book at any office supply. You should have had enough interest in step #3 to know that even if some drop out at this point you will be able to cover the bulk of your printing costs in this step. If you are going forward you need to get your first ISBN bar code. This is not hard or expensive. You go online (www.isbn.org) and follow the process. There are FREE barcode generators online. Google "Free ISBN barcode". Don't pay anyone for helping you get the ISBN, or make a barcode. Lots will try. This is NOT an option, no retailer or book store will touch your book without an ISBN bar code. It also gets you in the big book central database so book sellers can find you if they want.
Step 6: Get it printed. Waste no time. You have taken money from people. If this starts taking longer than expected call the customers ASAP and explain the problem (e.g. printer fell into the machine and was eaten alive, whatever). Just understand that things happen in the process and you need to have added some padding to the delivery time you gave customers over what the printer told you. Be realistic about how time flies, don't expect hard and fast dates. Pay in cash/check. Please don't mortgage the house betting on this as a money machine.
Step 7: Deliver to customers, get them excited about it, try to get it displayed in a prominent location. Then beat the bushes with a trunk full of books. It can be a lot of fun, take you places and meet people. Even if the say no the first few times keep going back and tell them how its going. Don't hesitate to give some away, people love a free book. Just make sure you consider it a marketing activity and the person can perhaps help sell the thing for you. Get use to signing it, carry a fine sharpie pen. Many large books stores don't much care for dealing with individuals and will tell you to go get with a distributor. I don't but if you do tell us all how it worked. Get a website setup, its not hard to do something basic and let people buy it with PayPal. Try to link the book and the website. If you had more photos than fit in the book you can always tell people to go to the website for more. Maybe they will see book #2 and buy it. Think about using Amazon, I didn't but its not a bad deal really.
You have now published your book, It was a lot of fun. I've written two more but keep tweeking and debating their economic value. Self published books are seldom huge sellers, but they can pay for themselves and your efforts and put a few bucks in your pocket. If nothing else its a great excuse to dive into your favorite things and learn more, see more, go more places. A few people are even impressed. You can call people and say things like "Hi I'm Bob , author of XYZ, can I get a few moments of your time?" Surprisingly they seem to see some value in the fact that you are a published author, I have never had anyone tell me no when asking for a meeting.
Thats that, I hope you become rich and famous, perhaps stalked by beautiful people, invited on the Craig Ferguson show and asked to cut the ribbon at the grand opening of used car lot or see the queen from a few hundred yards away. Good Luck.
