My buddy Bill Quain and I are doing a podcast series on behalf of FastPencil.com. It’s called FastPencil Pointers, and you can get it on iTunes or here. As we were preparing next week’s issue, I realized that many people do not know what self-publishing and publish-on-demand are.

Definitions:

Self-publishing: The publishing of a book or books where the author is also the publisher.

Publish-on-demand: The use of print-on-demand equipment to produce books in as small a quantity as one.

Thanks to the Internet and modern printing and binding technologies, it is possible for an author to publish his or her own book without having to invest heavily in large quantities of printed copies and the attendant logistics.

A self-publisher can use a publish-on-demand company for producing the book, or simply have it printed by a traditional book printer.

POD companies often offer additional services to the author, such as ISBN codes; cover design; connection to distributors, like Ingram (who supply bookstores, like Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.); editing; and more.

The initial POD vendors were not always transparent about the specifics of their service offerings, and sometimes left customers unsatisfied with the value of the “packages” they had bought. Today, competition has forced these firms to be more open about precisely what they do and do not provide. It’s easier for an author to make comparisons than ever before.

I recommend self-publishing to all my authors. If you publish your book yourself, and sell a few thousand copies–and then pitch a major publisher–you will be in a FAR better position to bargain for royalty rates, promotional budgets, intellectual property rights, and more. But frankly, at that point you may ask yourself whether the imprimatur of the major publisher is worth what you may have to give up.

As an author, you will make out better financially if you get a cover designed; get your book printed; and control your own promotion. Now, you may not have the time or the inclination to do those things, and there are plenty of people who will gladly undertake to do them for you; but whichever way you go, you should study the process so that you will understand what you are buying.

It was a good day at FastPencil.com. My friends at this Campbell, CA startup were featured on VentureBeat and in the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, the new FastPencil Pointers podcast site–that’s with me and my buddy Bill Quain–is up, and the podcast is also available in iTunes.

All of which probably means it’s time for you to take a look at FastPencil.com and see what it has to offer authors and publishers. Good stuff.

Your book can replace your color brochure. Let’s do a simple comparison:

A brochure tells what you do, what benefits the prospect will get, and how to contact you.

A book can do all that–plus you have as many pages as you need to explain the uniqueness of your process and to share case histories of clients you’ve worked with.

A nicely designed and nicely printed brochure establishes your significance.

Your book establishes you as an authority, not just someone who was able to afford a fancy brochure.

Do you keep fancy brochures you get? No? Neither does anyone else. They throw them out as soon as you’re out of the room.

Do you throw away books? Especially books that have been inscribed to you? No, and neither do I. Your book will hang around your prospect’s office or home–probably forever.

What does a brochure say about you? That you have good artistic taste; that you invested in a nice brochure.

What does a book say about you? That you are an author–and therefore, an authority. An expert in your field.

A nice brochure is expensive–$3-$5 each, by the time you’ve paid a designer and printer.

A hundred-page book with a full-color cover is $1.10 in quantity 500–less in larger quantities.

So–what’s a better investment for you? Book or brochure?

Perfect Pages by Aaron Shepard is an indispensable aid to someone who wants to produce a fully formatted book manuscript in Microsoft Word. Get it for about $12.60 at Amazon.com and read its 150+ pages, and you will save yourself a lot of grief.

Now you may think, “I’ve used Word forever. I don’t need additional tips.” You may be right, but I doubt it. Book formatting requires different

things than article or report formatting.

Word is a powerful program, and it can also be maddeningly cranky. This book helps you avoid the cranky parts.

The few pages on styles are so lucid that you will get your money’s worth from the book if you just absorb them. Styles are the blessing and the bane of Word, and the five pages Shepard devotes to them are spot on.

Partial contents:

• Managing Word–Options; preferences; workspace; features; safety; memory
• Formatting your document
• Typesetting your text
• Formatting your text
• Perfecting your text
• Handling special text
• Handling graphics
• Enhancing your layout
• Preparing for print
• Creating a cover
• Resources–a good long list of websites

This book will save you time and energy if you write in Word. Highly recommended.

I’ve written before about FastPencil.com, an online collaborative portal for authors. But “online collaborative portal” doesn’t really convey the whole juicy picture.

Here’s more of the story: When you decide you seriously want to write a book, you may just start writing. Or perhaps you start thinking things through and realizing there are lots of details standing between you and a published book. This may add to your stress, or cause you to put off the whole idea once more.

Or maybe you find out about free publishing sites, like Lulu.com. You go there, find out you have to produce a PDF for the whole thing to work right. You enter into the operational labyrinth–and find out there is no phone support, and email support is leisurely. You make it through the process, somehow; the book looks good on-line, so you order a proof copy, as they recommend. The book arrives a few days later….and it’s full of garbage, because the PDF conversion didn’t work. The on-line version Lulu.com showed you looked fine; it just didn’t come out that way in the book.

Now try to find out what went wrong. And by the way, the book and shipping were at your expense.

I worked with an author who went through 5 cycles like that until getting it right.

FastPencil is different. For one thing, it lets you write on-line; no need to worry about conversion. For another, when you’re ready to convert to different formats, FP worries about that for you.

The FastPencil Marketplace gives you access to cover designers, editors, promoters, and a variety of publishing and distribution options. All inexpensive. (You’ll soon see courses there by me and Dr. Bill Quain that offer you some extra assistance in writing and promoting your book; watch for them.)

Membership in FastPencil is free.

Let’s face it, writing a book is a non-trivial undertaking. I mean, you’ve been thinking about it for–how long now? A year? Five? Surely if it were important or could make a significant difference in your business, you’d have realized it and just gotten it done.

Think about all the things you have to do to write a book:

• Define your audience
• Find something that is a “pain point” for them
• Be able to articulate what you can do to resolve their pain
• Let your readers know know a bit about what your approach has done for others who used to have their pain
• Write the book
• Get a cover designed
• Get the book printed
• Start handing it out or selling it

That sounds like a lot of work–at least 30 days’ worth, at 1 hour a day. Do you really want to spend your time that way? Wouldn’t you be better off:

• Attending referral clubs and networking groups
• Handing out business cards
• Making cold calls
• Handing out more business cards
• Trying to explain how you help people, while
• handing out still more business cards
• Designing and printing a $5/each color brochure
• Investing in a $5000 website

Don’t these things make so much more sense than writing a book that will cost you $1.10 (quantity 500) and will credentialize you, establish your authority (author=authority), differentiate you from your competition, and actually give you something to sell AND a basis for creating additional products?

Of course they do. I knew you’d see it my way.

In the menu bar at the top of the blog, there is a new tab: “Forum.” Come check it out! Post your questions, comments, thoughts.

Warmly,

Joel

Here are a couple of definitions of “book” from the Web:

• a written work or composition that has been published (printed on pages bound together); “I am reading a good book on economics“
• physical objects consisting of a number of pages bound together; “he used a large book as a doorstop”

But if you think about it, you’ll realize that not every object that matches those definitions is considered a book. One big determining factor: Binding.

A saddle-stitched pamphlet–a stack of sheets folded in the middle and stapled–is not usually recognized as a book. Publications with spiral or comb bindings are generally not called books. Material distributed on 3-hole paper in binders is not typically regarded as a book.

Why does this matter? Because a book is written by an author, and an author is assumed to be an authority. A booklet is written by a pamphleteer, not by an author. A workbook or action guide is recognized as coming from a teacher, not from an author.

So if you want to be an author, your writing must be published as a book. The simplest distinguishing factor of a book is that it has a spine. And it is good if the spine has letters on it.

I’ve seen 120-page booklets; the people who wrote them are not considered authors. I’ve seen frankly lousy 48-page books that had a spine; their writers are authors.

It’s not particularly reasonable, but it is a fact of our culture.

So if you want to be an author, you must produce a book. With a spine.

New HP service undigitizes books: HP believes this whole print-to-digital book conversion push is very much a two-way street — sometimes, for some things, you really want a hard copy. And for a company with roots in printing and ambitions in services, the next play was a natural: How about we offer custom book printing services? And so we see making its formal debut from HP Labs an initiative that puts powerful publishing abilities into the hands of the masses.

The service is called BookPrep, and it enables any publisher “to digitize any existing book and turn it into a virtual asset that can be sold over the Internet and printed on demand — either as is, or personalized by the consumer. … BookPrep automatically aligns and flattens scanned texts of current and out-of-print-books, cleans and brightens the fold and corners of the pages for consistent coloration, and outputs a professional and print-ready PDF eMaster. … BookPrep makes it possible to give consumers access to every book ever published as a high quality replica of the original that they can even personalize.” The appeal here is in the long tail, all the fodder for those with passionate niche interests residing in the estimated 90 million books that are out of print, millions of them out of copyright. The latest addition to the books available for on-demand printing is a collection of 500,000 rare or out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan Library. And while the cost of a custom run was once prohibitive, new technology will let HP price a 250-page book around $15.

Go to Blurb.com and download their free software, Mac or PC. Watch their excellent video tutorials. Then design your book, including photos, and get a coffee-table quality book, soft or hard cover. Wide range of prices; 4 sizes.

Printing color books in small quantities has always been price-prohibitive; Blurb.com is not cheap, but acceptable, for special projects.