Publishing a 3rd-party book–Splitting the difference

Earlier, I described how it probably wasn’t worth your while to self-publish. Depending on your needs, though, you may be able to split the difference between self-publishing and the three-corner deal described in the previous posts on this subject. For example, for a couple hundred books, you might use Lulu.com. The production quality and formatting won’t be anything fancy, but it’ll be a book with a slick cover. (Lulu.com books are pretty good and I like them, but buying something that looks really good can be very expensive per copy.)

If you want to do a run of a couple thousand books (or more), you may be able to talk to a small, specialty publisher. For example, Double Tall Press, XML Press, and Scriptorium specialize in smaller niche markets. There are dozens of other small publishers that may be able to provide you with boutique services but still keep your per-book costs down on smaller runs.

The biggest disadvantages to most of these is that they don’t have big departments and budgets for distribution and marketing. However, if most of what you need is someone to help you produce a book and you can then market yourself, this may be a viable option.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>