Jun 11 2009
How to publish your own book – revisited
About a year ago I wrote one of the most popular posts on this blog, How to publish your own book, a write-up on the process of self-publishing my first book. One more self-published book later, I tried out many of the ideas on what I would do better after the first one. My latest book, Bridging the communication gap, looks and feels a lot better than the first one. It is getting some really great reviews, often being labeled as a ‘must read’ for all those working on agile team. So I must have done something good – and it is time to update the self-publishing write-up as well.
Moving from Lulu to Lightning source
One of the most important changes between the two books is that I switched from Lulu.com to Lightning Source for printing the book. While I was preparing the book, I had technical problems and got very annoyed by Lulu customer support. They only offer support via online chat and for the help that they were giving to me I could have easily written a shell script to do the same job. To any question that I had they only ever opened a ticket and told me to come back in 48 hours. Lightning source gave me a dedicated account contact who I could call by phone and get issues resolved much quicker. They also provide a much better service – printing is quicker and cheaper than on Lulu, and they are much more professional. They also approve books for distribution much quicker – in a few days unlike Lulu where that takes a month.
In addition to distributing to online bookshops, Lightning source also apparently gets the books into brick-and-mortar book stores although I haven’t seen my book in any bookshops near where I live.
In terms of payments for distribution, Lulu is a lot better – they pay at the end of the month. Lightning source pays 90 days after the end of the month.
I still use Lulu for booklets for my training courses as they allow me to set up everything via a web app and upload JPEGs for covers. Lightning source requires you to submit covers as Quark or Indesign documents and charges a setup fee for each book. So if you plan to print just a few copies and are not planning to sell it through Amazon, Lulu is probably a better choice as you don’t have to wait for approval and there is no up-front cost. For things that will be distributed to sellers, Lightning source is a lot better.
Dumping FOP for XEP
When I prepared the last book, I spent most of the time troubleshooting Null Pointer Exceptions in FOP. I did not want to make the same mistake again, so I looked for an alternative and found XEP. XEP is a commercial XSL-FO renderer written in Java so I easily switched from FOP. The single desktop license is pretty cheap, from what I remember about 70 pounds. It is a bit slower than FOP but does not break, so I saved quite a lot of time with it.
Simplifying Docbook
I really liked Docbook as a way to prepare the first book as I could keep the files versioned with Subversion and my copy-editor could work on the files directly. That was really important for me so that I do not have to waste time copying corrections from prints back to files. I decided to simplify docbook a bit and built an XSLT stylesheet that converted HTML-like elements such as <b> into docbook tags such as <emphasis type=”bold”>. This saved me a lot of time while typing and made it easier to read the script.
Selling the book myself
Based on my past experience with Lulu, when the book took more than two months to appear on Amazon, I decided to sell the paperback and PDFs myself on acceptancetesting.info. Lightning source got the book listen on Amazon just a few days after I approved it, so it turns out that I did not really need to sell it myself. In do make more money per copy in general, but I am not convinced that the effort it worth it. A few people complained that they haven’t received the books which Lightning source sent by first class post, so I had to re-send them via a courier which makes it more costly for me than selling on Amazon. Anyway, it was an interesting experiment.
Lightning source does not have an online store for consumers so I decided to sell PDFs myself through the web site, expecting that I will make more money than on Lulu (the Paypal transaction commission is a lot less than what Lulu was charging). It turns out that unlike paperbacks, PDFs are not VAT-exempt. I found that out late and did not found out how I could actually set this up automatically on Paypal, so instead of complicating the Paypal integration I decided to keep the price same for everyone and pay the VAT myself. As Lulu is US based, there is no VAT for their services so the money I take for a PDF is more or less the same as on Lulu.
Conclusions
Selling the book myself did not really turn out as I expected. I probably would not bother setting up the stuff for Paypal next time and just sell the PDF directly through Lulu. With the quick distribution to online bookstores that Lightning Source provides, selling the paperback on my site does not make much sense either.
Simplifying docbook and buying XEP were really good decisions as they saved a me lot of time. It took just six months from the first paragraph being written till the book appeared on Amazon which I think was great, considering that I spent just two days a week writing the book during that time.
Moving to Lightning source also was a really good decision. They got it out there quickly and gave me support along the way whenever I needed it.
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Thanks for the update.