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Founding Sysop
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: In Connecticut, on the Housatonic River near its mouth at Long Island Sound.
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The April 24, 2005 issue of the New York Times Book Review has an article on the book business. How to Be Your Own Publisher discusses several print-on-demand publishing services that operate mainly on the web. Citing the Bowker Books in Print d/b, the article said that the top three of these firms (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, XLibris) brought out almost 12,000 new titles last year.
They discussed Amy Fisher’s book If I Knew Then as an example. Fisher wanted to have control over the publishing circumstances — P.R., particularly — but the services also allow the author to have a larger royalty than conventional publishers. They also provide a ISBN so the book can be sold by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other (online) booksellers. The article doesn’t really discuss quality, but I think it is more or less Docutech (i.e., toner, not ink), and all are perfect-bound paperbacks. Vanity press books normally do not get reviewed, and brick-and-mortar stores usually will not carry them. The article describes efforts by these new publishing companies to overcome those barriers. A handful of conventionally published books were discovered when self-published (and self-promoted). My favorite quotes from the article, both from XLibris founder John Feldcamp: “Publishing has been an arcane specialist skill under the control of a guild of people that are unique and different from anyone else.”The burden of being not only “unique” and not only “different from anyone else” but also someone who is not a “normal human being” kind of overcame me as I read, so to learn more about this new publishing business you can read the article yourselves! (You may have to register to do so, but I believe it is free.) __________________ [SIZE=2][COLOR=LemonChiffon]::[/COLOR][/SIZE] [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] |
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