DTG
Joined: Jun 20, 2005
Posts: 250
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DTG
On 2009-05-18 03:42, Jeff Central wrote:
The Book of Exotica has been a project of mine for the last 5 years and highlights my 25 years of Exotica research. Unfortunately, not a lot of publishers share my enthusiasm or ideas on what this book should be. I am rethinking the whole publishing process and am weighing out my options.
Like the DVD of Tiki, I will not release this until its time, even if I have to finance it myself.
Trust me, it will be worth the wait.
In the meantime, look for a new and improved website later this year showcasing a lot of my writing from various publications.
Thanks for the interest.
Cheers and Mahalo,
Jeff
Jeff, I would highly recommend going the do-it-yourself publishing route, should you not find a reasonable publisher's interest.
I wrote my first and only book, The Fantastic Worlds Of Grenadier (a history of American company Grenadier Models that manufactured lead -- and later, Pewter -- miniatures for historical, fantasy, and Sci-Fi wargames and role-playing games, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s), and went that route. Though the book was (and still is) the first of its kind, I knew the topic of my book would only appeal to a niche crowd, so didn't even approach a publisher. I did everything myself -- research, writing and typing, image scanning, layout, etc., even put up the money to have it printed in two small runs. All this with absolutely no previous experience. I sold nearly all the books on eBay in less than six months. (Now I occasionally sell a copy on PDF on CD -- basically an eBook -- charging less than half the cost I would charge for the printed article.) My goal wasn't to print a huge amount of copies and make lots of money. I simply wanted to fulfill a goal and get the book out to people who'd appreciate it. But I did fairly well for such a small run and on a shoe-string budget. And why? No publisher. No distributor. No middlemen.
The key for self-publishing is to shop round, compare, and hopefuly find a good and competitively-priced printing company, get it printed in a small run, then know where to sell the book -- where to reach the niche audience that would be interested in buying the book. You'll know this far better than any publisher's distributor would. Once you sell out the first run and receive requests for another, then proceed.
I went with a company called Instant Publisher for the printing and was very pleased with the result. My book was a softcover with glossy pages and loads of colour images. The book came with a CD supplement full of B&W and colour images. The CD supplement helped keep the cost of the book down, while increasing its value to the purchaser, and, in a sense, making the book 43 pages longer.
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