When I attended the World Innovation Forum in NYC last May, I listened as Paul Saffo of Stanford argued that the era of the "consumer economy" has ended, and a new economy is beginning that revolves around a new type of transaction: individuals contribute unique content to corporations and get services in return (think of a transaction whereby you or I contribute a search string to google). My raw notes on Paul's speech are here, and Stu wrote up some commentary here.
Certainly the widespread growth of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are evidence that something along those lines is definitely happening.
Bloggers contribute content that is typically based on their area of passion. Most of the posts I write, for example, revolve around one or more of the following: the building of software for the information storage industry; the culture in which these products are built; corporate innovation and the process of driving ideas into a product; and new technologies and directions that I'd like to work on next.
Over the previous 12 months I have noticed that several bloggers in the storage industry, as well as co-workers of mine within EMC, have decided to take their area of passion and create content in book form. Tony Pearson of IBM wrote a "blook" and talked about it here. Blogger Tony Asaro has mentioned that he is currently writing a book about being a consultant. Blogger Dave Hitz released a book earlier this year. Dan Schawbel is a co-worker of mine that made the jump from blogger to author. Other co-workers of mine have been experimenting with e-book technology.
Last year I made up my mind to do the same. At the time I had been reading some very interesting and stimulating blog posts about innovation. I decided to test out the process of organizing my thoughts on innovation and putting them into book form.
I found the process of publishing a book to be fairly straightforward. It's not as easy as setting up a blog, but the concept is similar. In this post I'll be writing about my experiences with self-publishing (otherwise known as POD or print-on-demand).
If you're considering doing the same, here's my advice.
1. Consider Formatting Issues Before Writing
As a blogger, the writing was the easy part. I came up with about 16 chapters and wrote them in 16 different Word docs. It was similar to writing extended blogs (except that each chapter contained much more detail and content). However, when it came to issues like margins, fonts, page headers, or blank pages, I lacked experience. By the time I got to the end game (working with my publisher to turn a Microsoft Word document into a printable book) I spent ALL my time tweaking those items. I wished that I had made those decisions back at the beginning. Who can help with those sort of issues? An editor.
2. Hire an editor
This is the advice that StorageZilla gave me and it was advice that I followed. However, my work with an editor mainly revolved around content and grammar. My editor did provide some extra services for me: changed the font from Arial to Times New Roman, and added some section headers. But I didn't consider margins (which vary based on the final "size" of the book), I didn't consider the impact of inserting diagrams and how that intersects with the margins, and I didn't understand the strategy of when to leave some pages blank and when not to.
My foremost goal in hiring an editor was to ensure that the book was grammatically sound; an equally important goal would have been to ask more questions about formatting early on.
Finally, an editor WIDENS the number of print-on-demand vendors that you might quality for. Some vendors don't care about the inside of your book; some of them most definitely do.
3. Choosing a Print-On-Demand Company
I did quite a bit of googling to research my options for turning my manuscript into book form. By far the most common name I ran into was Lulu.com (in fact, this is the company that TonyP used).
It seemed pretty easy: send LuLu your finished manuscript, slap a stock cover on it, and start selling.
My editor, however, recommended another option: Booklocker.com. Booklocker.com actually reads the manuscript. And then they reject 90% of what comes in. From what I can see there were two important aspects that helped my manuscript gain acceptance from Booklocker.com: (1) my manuscript was grammatically sound, and (2) I already have an internet presence (this blog, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc). For bloggers, item #2 is typically not an issue, which is why I recommend Booklocker.com for those of us that want to turn blogs into books.
What's more, Booklocker.com has a great contract: give them a small fee, they'll start selling your book, and you can terminate the contract whenever you want. The author always retains full rights to the book.
4. Front and Back Cover Artwork
After my manuscript was accepted by Booklocker.com and we went back and forth on the formatting issues, I was presented the option of either (a) submitting my own cover artwork, or (b) hiring their contractor to come up with a cover that matched the theme of my book (high-tech innovation).
Submitting artwork is tricky (for me) because the width of the book affects the width of the "spine" part of the cover. When you add in the fact that I had trouble drawing stick figures in elementary school, the contracting decision was a no-brainer for me. Booklocker.com's contractor was very accommodating, and I was pleased with the end result (I've attached it to the end of this post).
5. Listing it on the Internet
The last thing Booklocker.com needed from me was the description and author information. They created a dedicated page that describes the book and allows it to be purchased. They also take care of getting it out to the other major sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and provide instructions on how to update the book descriptions on those sites as well.
That's it. That's all it takes. What's it like to get that first printed copy of the book? Pretty cool. Booklocker.com sends you the first copy (before listing it) in order to give it a final look-over.
I'd be interested to hear from other bloggers who have done the same, or perhaps used a different service. Drop me a line if any of you have questions about the path I went down.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
Innovate With Influence Description and Cover (below)