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Formatting TYOTE for CreateSpace POD

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This post documents the workflow I followed while formatting my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE), for printing with CreateSpace. If you’re venturing down the same print-on-demand (POD) road I hope my experience makes your project a little easier. I also fervently hope this post reminds me of all the useful things I learned the next time I have a manuscript to format. (Had I not kept notes, ninety-percent of what follows would already be lost.)

As posted previously, I finalized my cover redesign, uploaded the files to CreateSpace, and got the proof back in short order. To my utter amazement, all of the decisions I made turned out exactly as I hoped, and I was quite pleased with the result.

But I worked hard for that happiness.  [ Read more ]

The TYOTE POD cover

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Having had the smarts to avail myself of the experience, insight, technical skill and patience of designer Joleene Naylor, I now have a cover for the print-on-demand (POD) version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. I’m not only satisfied with the result, I’m thankful I didn’t have to produce it on my own. Whatever time it might have taken to do it myself, and however much I might have learned along the way, I wouldn’t have been able to replicate the give-and-take that helped us arrive at the solution you see here.

TYOTE Wraparound Cover

All of the issues I wanted to deal with or resolve have been dealt with or resolved. The look of the POD cover is an evolution of the original e-book cover, but it also speaks more directly (albeit suggestively) to the contents of the stories. I can’t help but feel that it’s an improvement.

Total cost for all of the advice, artistic input, technical wizardry and plain old common sense that Joleene provided: $50.  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Print-On-Demand Roadmap

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As regular readers know, I put a collection of short stories on Smashwords four months ago, where it can be sampled, purchased and downloaded in various e-book formats. I now want to make a print-on-demand (POD) version of that content available, so people can order a physical copy of the book. (This post rejoins a conversation I had with myself — and many helpful commenters — shortly after making the e-book available. More here and here.)

Paranoid Overview
There are a lot of companies offering print-on-demand publishing to independent authors. I also know there are a lot of disreputable companies — known variously as vanity or subsidy publishers — whose business model is predicated on charging abusive up-front fees for middling or nonexistent services. Industry propaganda against fee-for-service publishing says that money should flow to the author, not from the author, but as I noted late last year that propaganda has always been a self-serving fraud. Authors can be ripped off by anyone.

For any independent author, controlling costs and maximizing each dollar spent is critical. Philosophically I don’t care whether costs are up-front, fee-for-service charges or back-end participation. What matters is getting the most service or product for my money. As a practical matter, however, minimizing out-of-pocket costs is important because it preserves operating capital. The longer I can keep my head above water the longer I can write, and the longer I can write the more chance I have of seeing a profit.  [ Read more ]

The Print-On-Demand Molehill

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One of the best things about being part of a community is that the whole has the potential for being self-correcting. It’s not a sure thing, as any example of mob rule or cultural intolerance can attest, but there is at least the potential for a group to help individuals overcome blind spots or obstacles. Individuals who do not belong to a group, or who do not have access to collective wisdom, may be doomed to reinvent the wheel or to repeatedly fail because of their own tendencies and shortcomings.

I’m not a big joiner. I just threw Facebook in the junk pile because the price of belonging to that group is self-deception, and like Sam Spade I’m not willing to be somebody’s sap.* More than wearing a team blazer or adopting a popular philosophy or expressing loyalty to a particular trendy brand, I value belonging to a community of ideas. This has always led to involvement with smaller groups of people who share my interests, but the benefit to me is that these more issue-oriented groups can both augment and check my own thoughts.

In order to derive such benefits, however, it’s not simply enough to belong to a group. Approaching someone to suggest that they may be incorrect about something is fraught with risk, and presumes that the individual is open to such communications. As we all learn at a very young age, this is usually not the case. Most people would rather feel right than be right, even at the expense of their own well being. There is also a tendency for people to be more interested in telling others how wrong than they are in hearing the same thing themselves, and this tendency is often (if not commonly) greater in people who are ignorant or uninformed than it is in people who are knowledgeable. As a result, even if we are open to hearing about our mistakes, the number of reliable advisers that anyone might hope to hear from is usually small.  [ Read more ]

The Print-On-Demand Mountain

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At first blush, print-on-demand (POD) seems to be the middle-ground in the publishing revolution. It yields a physical book, much like traditional publishing, but is the result of a quasi-do-it-yourself process. To the extent that holding a book, or being able to physically transfer contents in book form, is important to an author, there are a wealth of companies providing POD services. (The big three are probably Lulu, CreateSpace, and Lightning Source, with Blurb anchoring the image-heavy end of the self-pub spectrum.)

Thinking that it would be nice to make a POD version of The Year of the Elm (TYOTE) available for anyone who wanted it, I spent a fair amount of time last night digging deeper into the POD process. What I’ve come away with today is both a renewed appreciation for the craft and complexity of publishing, and a growing conviction that I don’t want to go down the POD road, at least for now.  [ Read more ]

Living in the Moment

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Thinking about my reluctance to recommend an e-reader to anyone, I realized over the weekend that it’s not simply a belief I have that e-reader technology isn’t ready. That’s part of it, but there’s another issue for me — a more global concern that I tend to mute because I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.

Twenty or thirty years ago, products were rated in two basic ways. How well they did the job they were designed to do, and how reliable or long-lasting they were. Between then and now, however, the question of reliability has changed. It no longer refers to a product’s ability to perform over time, but rather to a product’s ability to perform at all.

I have no proof of this, but I believe the change took place as the products in our lives became predominantly electronic, as opposed to mechanical. Where physical mechanisms used to power most of our devices, those devices are now controlled by circuitry that is inherently more complex, if not unfathomable.  [ Read more ]

Updated: Sullivan’s Experiment in POD

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Andrew Sullivan’s print-on-demand (POD) experiment continues apace, with interesting results so far:

How did we get the price down by half? We did it the way publishing houses do it – with a twist. We didn’t guess the demand or market test it, we simply asked for pledges. We crowd-sourced the price. We got enough pledges to do a print run of 2,000 which brought the price down to $16.25. But unlike the publishing houses, we’re not pocketing the difference. We’re handing it over to you in a lower price.

The idea of pooling demand for a print-on-demand book, then using that aggregated demand to drive the per-book cost down, is interesting to me. Provided it doesn’t cut into the profits of the publisher (in this case, Blurb), there’s no reason not to do this, and particularly so for impending releases. (Pre-ordering of content is now quite common in the games biz, but there’s rarely a break on price for ordering early.) Here consumers win twice: they can elect to order prior to availability as a convenience, but can also drive the price down in the process.

In Sullivan’s case, however, the price drop seems to be a one-time event:

A catch: Once those 2000 copies are bought up, however, the price will return to $29.95, so secure one today.

I wonder if this is necessarily the case. It may be that there simply needs to be an additional mechanism added to the purchase of a POD book: one that offers to delay shipment until a certain number of offers are stockpiled, at which point the price drops accordingly. How much book-buying is spur-of-the-moment, and how much is for later gifting? Would consumers be willing to defer a purchase to save a few bucks? Or, once the purchase decision is made, will people see paying more (full retail) as the cost of getting it sooner? How can demand be pooled more than once? (For example, can I have the option to get a book now for the regular price, or choose to go into a pool of people waiting for a lower price?)

In the end, I think Sullivan’s example not only blazes trail, it indicates that self-publishing and POD are going to continue to evolve to meet market needs. The landscape we see today is not going to be the landscape we travel tomorrow.

— Mark Barrett

Andrew Sullivan: Going Rogue

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In late summer I noted that Andrew Sullivan was preparing to release a book via print-on-demand (POD). That day is now here:

The Dish is very psyched to announce that the first edition of “The View From Your Window” is now available for purchase. You can preview the book here at Blurb.com, the print-on-demand company that is publishing the book. It’s 200 pages of window views, selected from all the submissions sent in over the past three years, with the front image and the back one picked by you, the readers of the Dish.

If that’s not smart enough, Sullivan and his team are leveraging Sullivan’s platform (his built-in audience and online presence) to improve things for his customers. This is not simply another retail opportunity, it is a community gathering and co-operative effort:

$29.95 is not a bad price for a 200 page, four-color coffee table book/toilet-browser. But new technology can bring this price down. Here’s how:

If we order a mass offset printing, each unit costs a lot less (just like in old-style publishing). It will take a little longer than ordering the book yourself right now, but the savings could be considerable. The Dish is not looking to make money off this – we’ve decided to forgo any profit to get you the book you created at the cheapest price possible. So if 1,000 of you pledge to order the book, we can slash the price; if 2,000 do so, we can slash it some more. The goal is to bring the price of the book to under $20. Perhaps well under.

A few years ago, this book would have been published by a traditional publisher, on the publisher’s terms, or it would not have been published at all. Today Sullivan’s team is determined to push the envelope:

No old-media publishing house would give you those options. The combination of a blog and print-on-demand publishing can. And if this model works, it could help launch a whole new wave of books created with user-generated content and priced with crowd-sourcing efficiencies. We hope the Dish will help pioneer this, and help do to the book publishing industry what blogs have helped do to MSM establishment journalism. A four-color 200 page book is an ambitious place to start, but, as always at the Dish, our attitude is: why the hell not?

Why the hell not, indeed. We all profit by watching how this project unfolds. Whether you want to buy a copy of the book or not, take note of what’s happening here.

This is what you find when you walk a ditch.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Mick Rooney

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Mick Rooney is the proprietor. The full title of his blogsite is POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing. I ran across it while chasing down links related to the previous post, and it certainly seems to be up-to-date on the titular subject matter.

And no, I’m not pointing to him because of the awesome ditch mention.

— Mark Barrett

Lightning Strikes

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This is the kind of thing I love learning, courtesy Maria Schneider at Editor Unleashed:

To be very honest, I never noticed any difference in quality between the various POD shops. Most of these services use Lightning Source to actually print the books.

Who knew? Lightning Source.

Update: very nice links page on the Lightning Source site, featuring a wide range of author resources and author-service companies.

— Mark Barrett