Practical Advice to Help Self-Publishers Build Better Books
From the category archives:
Yesterday I wrote about using 48HrBooks for advance print runs. Some clients prefer printing their advance copies at other vendors, like Lulu.com. But the article also brought up some questions about why self-publishers need these advance print runs at all:
What are they good for?
Once the book is ready, shouldn’t I just go to press [...]
The effort involved in self-publishing is never trivial. But there’s a chance that, in the end, you might discover the secret to successful self publishing. That’s what happened to me, and I’m going to tell you how I discovered it.
The Journey to this Point
Of course, even to get to the point of having a book [...]
I used to run into this kind of call a lot, years ago when I had my own little publishing company. An author would be on the phone talking about his book and why I should publish it. “And you don’t have to worry about the copyright either,” he’d say with confidence. “I mailed myself [...]
I’ve been researching what the best practices are these days for copyright, and I’ll be writing about them in articles soon. But one area of copyright is really difficult to understand for most publishers, and for bloggers too for that matter. And that is: What constitutes “fair use”?
To answer this question I’m very fortunate to [...]
Podcast: What Every Self-Publisher Ought to Know About Editing [8:16]
(Right click the link to save the podcast, or click the play button below to listen.)
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
New self-publishers are often confused about how the editorial process works. They want to know what takes place at each stage of their book’s [...]
There was a time, back when Jill and I were new publishers, when we were innocent. We had a partner who was our investor. I had left my day job. We had a carpenter friend build desks and workspaces in our spare bedroom. We had bought a brand new fax machine, and I was on [...]
Last time I gave examples of long and short copyright pages that you can use in your book. Today I have two types of information you might want to add to your copyright page: disclaimers and credits. Let’s look at disclaimers first.
Examples of Disclaimers
The copyright page is the place publisher put disclaimers. Here’s my disclaimer: [...]
One of the most common questions I get from new self-publishers is, “What do I put on the copyright page?” For some reason, the copyright page has the power to intimidate some people, with its small print and legalistic language, not to mention all those mysterious numbers.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There [...]
When an author decides to publish their own book, there are many questions to be answered. It’s the first of these questions about self-publishing I want to address in this article, and that has to do with starting a publishing company.
Some authors will decide to simply print copies of their book for their own use, [...]
I believe there is nothing that bothers writers as much as English grammar. Let’s face it, for most people writing a book is a pretty big project. It will take months, perhaps years to get to the end of a manuscript that is ready for publication. One of the biggest reasons we need editors—and all [...]
