Publish Your Own Book: Self Publishing

I have a few giant volumes of text I would like to have bound into hard copies… Like maybe this blog for example, or a collection of my screenplays.

There are a lot of sites on the web which will print your manuscript into a bound book and even help you sell it. Some of them will sell it off their site for you, printing up copies on demand… some even will print copies for strangers buying your book and will let you collect a royalty on your work!

Here’s the research I did for this idea.

  • ranty article at Go Publish Yourself

  • My old favorite CafePress has a new Book Service… if you decide to do this, feel free to list me as the referrer because I might get free stuff! My shop ID is ghosthouse . Look, I’ll even put an advertisement in my entry!

    Design and Sell Merchandise Online for Free
    I like their deal because not only can you price it however you want (your diary could be $1000… you greedy sell-out!) but also they take PDF, which means I can pretty much print out anything I want, like diagrams or weird fonts.

  • Lulu it turns out is not run by my friend Lulu, nor is it related to the SF restaurant… They also publish on-demand books, and they have options for color.

  • Xlibris was one of the first places I looked. they are a pretty serious service, and have a bunch of different services you can buy from them, like cover design, editing service, and a marketing services. What is kind of crazy is they also have a Art Studio which takes illustration commissions. Another thing I really like is Xlibris offers publishing services for hardback children’s picture books.

  • Here is the Yahoo Directory for self-publishing

  • BlogBinders is a new service: their printing is a little ghetto but! it’s totally streamlined to print your blog content and it’s also automated:

    First, you provide some information about your blog account and an automated program downloads your blog content. Blogbinders application strips out any images and HTML formatting at this point, so you are left with the basic written text from your blog entries. Subjects, dates and carriage returns are maintained.

  • iUniverse is a more focussed version of Xlibris… if they like your published book, it gets picked up by editors and gets promoted! Their marketing tools also look like they are more serious, and have things like the Clipping Service and the Publicist Service. Like Xlibris, these are all services you pay for… however unlike Xlibris the initial fee is pretty sizable… as of this writing the cheapest level is $460 !

  • Creating Comics is a quick list of links… with tips on getting a distributor, etc
  • Dimestore Productions is a small-run publishing company for comics
  • iComics has a
    pricing list

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