San Francisco Writers Conference: Publishing Illustrated Books

POSTED ON Feb 17, 2012

Joel Friedlander

Written by Joel Friedlander

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While you’re reading this I’ll be down at the San Francisco Writers Conference, which is sold out again this year.

Along with literary agent and publishing consultant Peter Beren, I’ll be giving a session on the challenges of publishing illustrated books.

Illustrated books are generally the most difficult to self-publishing because of:

  • technical challenges
  • risk involved in offset printing
  • difficulty of getting the finances to work to your advantage.

But there are a lot of different kinds of illustrated books intended for different markets, and we’re going to explore some of the possibilities that put the leverage back into the self-publisher’s hands.

This subject might seem a bit odd to you, considering this is a writers conference. To me it signals how the writing and publishing functions of the book business keep merging into one another.

Authors today want to look at their book’s potential for self-publishing, and why not? Entrepreneurial authors stand to do very well financially from these books if they have a way to market and sell them.

And the author retains complete control of the project. With illustrated books like those for a gallery or an artist, this can be a critical part of getting the work into print.

I’ll post the graphics used in the presentation as an addition to this blog post tomorrow.

Here are the slides:

Click this link to view the slides, or right-click and choose “Save as . . .” so save the PDF to your computer.

SFWC-Illustrated-Books

Do you have illustrated books you want to publish?

Joel Friedlander

Written by
Joel Friedlander

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