Photo by nate steiner, via Flickr

All of those are perfectly acceptable options. But what if you want to do something different? What if you look at the options above and your brain just screams, “BORING!”

I have two more options for you: binding your own books (paperback or hardcover) or writing a “blovel”—a blog novel.

Hamish MacDonald was the first person I heard about who was doing his own book binding for his novels. He currently offers four books for sale, all hand-bound by him. He also offers a series of podcasts for the DIY novelist. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Kvasir House Press is another great resource for learning bookbinding and for other information related to self publishing. The owner, Chad Muller, offers an excellent two-part tutorial on how to bind your own books. The directions are excellent, and I honestly can’t wait to try them out myself.

No Media Kings offers a great comparison of self-publishing options that includes instructions for creating your own book press and for binding your own books. Definitely worth a read, though be aware that not all of the information in the self-pub options is accurate (mainly the assertion that POD books are only sold at retail price, which is false).

The other viable option for publishing your own books is to go the ebook route. But instead of going through SmashWords or the Kindle store, why not publish your novel on a blog? Serialized novels used to be quite popular in newspapers and magazines decades ago. Why not due the same thing on your blog? With one chapter released per week (or day), it gives readers a chance to come back to your blog on a regular basis. If you pair this with releasing a print copy of your book, you’re likely to see more sales than you would otherwise. And don’t forget to put a donation button on your blog so readers can support your work!

JungleG has a wonderful post titled “Procrastinating on that novel? Write a Blovel instead.” It gives a basic outline of what their approach to a blovel would be, though there’s plenty of room for customization.

We CAN! Promote Our Books has a great article on experimenting with the whole blovel idea (this time with a YA novel written entirely in poetry).

This idea has become so popular that there’s now a site dedicated entirely to providing authors with a space to write their blovel: Blovel Spot.

I’m sure there are plenty of other unique ways authors are self publishing their books. If you know of any, please share them in the comments below.

I don’t have a whole lot of news to share this week, as I’ve been busy again. But here are some highlights.

With the financial crisis what it is, it doesn’t surprise me that Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand are seeing renewed interest. Atlas Shrugged is my absolute favorite book. I only read it last year (and my copy is currently loaned out to a friend) but it had such a profound, life-changing effect on me. If you haven’t read it yet, I would strongly recommend you do.

The Espresso Book Machine has launched in London. This machine has the potential to completely change the publishing industry, making it possible for book stores (and any other business) to carry a virtually unlimited variety of books. Basically, the Espresso is a print on demand machine that prints and binds a book in less than five minutes while you wait. Since books are stored electronically, there’s virtually no limit to the number of books a shop can carry, including out of print and self published titles. If anyone has actually laid their hands on one of the books printed by this machine, I’d be very interested to know the quality of the finished product (feel free to post in the comments).

There was an interesting article written by Leo Babauta (of Zen Habits) over on Write to Done about copyright and why it actually hurt artists. I’m not entirely sure I agree with him on this issue. I may put my own views on the matter into a blog post at some point over the next week or two. One of the biggest issues I have is that once a work becomes really popular, the chances someone other than the original creator will be the one profiting from it increase (probably exponentially). I’ll have to look into it all a bit more before expressing a definite opinion. In the meantime, go read the article Leo wrote.

On a related note, Leo wrote a post over on his own blog, Zen Habits, about a certain author contacting him claiming he’d infringed on her trademarked book title. What was that particular phrase, you might ask? “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. In this case, I have to agree wholeheartedly with Leo. The phrase as he used it had nothing to do with her book (or any book) and was simply a reference to something a friend of his said on Twitter. Sometimes the whole copyright/trademark thing does go a little bit far. People need to use some common sense. To me this smells of an author trying to get a little free advertising on a very popular blog (though I could be wrong). And no, I’m not going to add the legalese this woman was requesting of him either. If you want to know who the author was, click through to Leo’s blog.

Writing forward had a great post on using questions to come up with writing ideas. It’s got some awesome information, so I definitely recommend you check it out.

Yesterday was supposed to be the (self-imposed) deadline for finishing the first draft of my new non-fiction book. I have three chapters left to write. A bunch of paid work popped up at the last minute and consider it’s the end of the month, I had too much other work to get done. So my goal is now May 3rd (this Sunday) for finishing the first draft. I’ll post as soon as it’s done!

Photo by happysweetmama, via Flickr

According to a post on the blog How Publishing Really Works about sales statistics for self published books, the average POD book sells less than 200 copies. The article appears to be well-researched and I don’t doubt the numbers. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. There are a variety of reasons why self published books don’t sell more than 200 copies, and being self published isn’t one of them.

Here are the main reasons I believe so many self published books don’t sell more than a hundred or so copies:

#1: The book was intended for a very small niche audience.
A lot of self published books are published with the intention of selling a few copies to family and friends. These might be family or personal histories or books about a local event. The authors generally don’t publish them with the intention of selling many copies or making any money; they simply want those who are interested to be able to purchase the book if they choose. These books can often be picked out by their lack of an ISBN.

#2: The author never did any marketing.
This is probably the most common reason why self published books don’t sell. The author writes their book, does some editing, uploads it to the POD service of their choice, and that’s it. They might order a few copies to give to family and friends, and there’s almost definitely a copy displayed prominently on their bookshelf. But they never bother to market it. They don’t take advantage of the Amazon book pages. They don’t have a blog or even a basic website. They don’t engage with people who might be interested. They don’t send out review copies or contact bookstores to persuade them to carry the book. They do nothing once the book has been printed.

#3: The book is very low quality.
This is the one that is mostly responsible for self publishing’s negative image. Someone writes a book. They show it to their mom, or their spouse, or their best friend, and that person says it’s great. The may try submitting to traditional agents or publishers for awhile but when that proves fruitless, they turn to self publishing. They never ask themselves why their book wasn’t picked up by a publisher or an agent. They don’t bother with trying to get an independent critique by someone who doesn’t know them and doesn’t feel like they have to be “nice”. They format their book according to the free guide their POD printer of choice offers, sometimes disregarding the information on good font choices or consistency or margins. They make a cover using free clip-art that came on their computer or a photo they took themselves. They send it off and then wait for the rave reviews and orders to start coming in. They might market more heavily than the authors in #2, but their product just won’t hold up.

If you’re considering self publishing, don’t fall into the traps of #2 and #3. Realize that self publishing is a business. It takes work. You need to know how to market yourself and your book. And make sure before you put your book out there that some independent, critical eyes have looked it over a few times. Hire an editor if you can afford it. Hire a copyeditor or at least a proofreader (or find a friend whose grammar and spelling is good enough to do it for you). Even if your spelling and grammar are impeccable, you need a third party to double check things. Make sure you’re putting out the best product you possibly can. Study books in your genre or niche and see how yours stacks up against them.

And most importantly, look beyond the numbers in statistics and think about the methodology. While the numbers might be sound, they may not mean what you think they do.

CNN had some great coverage on web and Print on Demand publishing.

The Guardian covered the #queryfail and #agentfail extravaganzas, and the comments section brought out a lot of great information on self publishing.

My suggestion for one of the best writing how-to books, Between the Lines by Jessica Morrell, was featured on Editor Unleashed in their “The 10 Best Books for Writers” post (it’s the 4th one down). Other books on the list include Stephen King’s On Writing and Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell, both of which I also own.

Writing Forward had a couple of excellent articles this week: Writing on the Go and How Poetry Writing Improves All Other Writing. I wrote poetry in high school and at this point I’m glad I lost all those notebooks (or burned them…whatever).

Nathan Bransford has a great rundown of other publishing news for the week, as he does every week.

This isn’t exaclty news this week, since it was published last August, but it’s still worth reading. Novelist Paulo Coelho finds the perfect alchemy of print & digital from the Guardian talks about how using the Internet and even releasing books for free online boosts sales.

Photo by David Masters, via Flickr

I estimated finding an agent would take a minimum of six months, and then finding a publisher would likely take another six (that’s assuming I could even find an agent, and that they could in turn find a publisher—both are far from definite). At that point I’d finish writing the book, another three months. Then it would go to an editor, who would look it over and decide what needed improvement, and then I would edit again, taking another month or two. Hopefully, by then it would be in good enough shape to progress on to line edits and then a copyeditor, taking another few months. All told, I realized I was looking at a minimum of probably two years before my book would ever see the light of day.

TWO YEARS!

Now, without going into too much detail, the subject I’m writing about is likely to change quite a bit in the next two years. And for all I know, there could be a handful of publishers out there with books like mine already in the works that could be realeased months before mine. I could end up releasing a book into a fully-saturated market. Not exactly what I wanted to do.

So I started looking into self-publishing. And the more I read, the more convinced I became that the type of book I’m working on would be very well-suited to going it on my own and becoming an indie publisher. Here are some of the reasons:

• It’s in a very specific niche but still has a very large market (up to 80% of teenagers are likely to be interested, along with plenty of adults)
• It’s particularly well-suited to online, viral marketing campaigns
• It’s not going to be a particularly long book (~250 pages), keeping production costs down
• It’s particularly suited for word of mouth promotion
• The topic and format are likely to get more publicity in particularly appropriate niche sites

I realize that’s all a bit criptic, but I’m still not quite ready to disclose what the topic is. The marketing campaign for the book will be launching in about a month, so everything will be disclosed then.

Now, there are a lot of self-publishing options available to the indie publisher.

There are subsidy presses and vanity presses that sometimes cover part of the expenses of publishing (sometimes the author pays for all of it). Many of these companies are misleading at best in their approach to authors, implying that their imprints are just as respected as the traditional, big publishing houses (they’re not).

There are self-publishing services such as CreateSpace, Blurb, and Lulu (among tons of others) where you pay a setup fee, and either provide editing, copyediting, design and all the other things that go along with producing a book yourself, or pay sometimes exorbitant fees to them to perform those functions. Often, you can provide your own ISBN, meaning that you are your own publisher, not CreateSpace or Lulu or Blurb. Otherwise, they’ll provide you with an ISBN (either for free or a small fee) and they will be listed as your publisher. The biggest drawback to these companies is that the per-book price is often quite high, making it almost impossible to make a profit if you want to remain competitive.

I’ve decided to go it completely alone, without anyone there to hold my hand other than the customer service people at the vendors I’ve chosen. I’ll be setting up my own publishing company (Untime Press, and yes, I have a great story about the origin of the name) and ordering at least one ISBN for said company (probably just one at this point to keep costs down). I’m going to go through Lightning Source for my printing needs (they’re the largest POD printer in the world and a subsidiary of Ingram, one of the largest book distributors in the world). I’ll be doing all of my own layout and design (I have a background in magazine layout and design) and all of my own promotion and marketing (hopefully with some help from a few friends).

It’s a big undertaking. There are tons of things to plan, to organize, to manage, all while I’m writing the book. There are self-imposed deadlines to meet. There are all of my regular writing responsibilities to keep track of, two blogs to manage, and another big website project I’m working on, plus all of my usual household and family responsibilities. I’m thinking it’s probably going to be overload for my Moleskine planner and might require me to look into some online time management apps (luckily, I’ve written at least four articles that should help me in my search for the perfect app).

In the end, though, I think it’s going to be well worth it. This is the kind of project that could take off with a life of its own (I’m hoping it does). I’ll be blogging the process of writing the book and self-publishing it here and you’ll be the first to know when the book’s website is launched later this month.

If anyone has self-publishing tips, non-fiction writing tips, or any other advice for what I’m doing, please post in the comments below!