On Monday we started down the road of answering some of the most common questions associated with online publishing. In addition to the authors I’ve recently encountered at various conferences, I’ve also found that many of the first-time users at Lulu.com were confused about what they were getting into. The online forums and chats also reflected this uncertainty regarding just what it was that Lulu did vs. what the author was expecting to accomplish.

Online Publishing Sites Explained

Specifically, online publishing sites are Internet websites that enable an individual author or small publisher to upload, present, print and sell their books to buyers. As I’ll explain below, “online publishing” means just that–publishing your book online via the Internet. Online publishing is no longer limited to writing and posting your content online in blogs, forums, etc., as was the case ten years ago. These days, Internet-based publishing sites utilize technologies that emulate or replace the manual and mechanical processes that traditional publishing houses and vanity presses have performed since the mid-1400′s. In the same way that eBay revolutionized personal commerce or that Amazon revolutionized retail shopping, online publishing sites have brought book publishing opportunities to millions of authors all over the world.

Lulu.com was the first site to offer this capability back in 2003 (yes, I was there), and more recently other sites such as Blurb, CreateSpace, and WordClay have entered this rapidly growing market. And, although these sites are each owned by competing companies and attract different audiences, their similarities outweigh their differences.

Over the next few days I’ll cover eight of the general concepts you should understand about these sites:

1. You–the individual author or small publisher–publish your book through an online process via the Internet.
2. For these sites, the basic online publishing process is DIY (Do It Yourself) and FREE(!).
3. Don’t worry, these sites still make money.
4. Because these sites are “online,” your book documents must be digital.
5. There’s more to online publishing than uploading documents.
6. The miracle combination–online publishing sites and POD (Print-on-Demand).
7. You finished publishing. Congratulations! (but let’s keep it quiet for now…).
8. Rinse. Repeat.

Today we’ll cover topics 1 & 2:

1. You–the individual author or small publisher–publish your book through an online process via the Internet.

As mentioned, all four of these companies are strictly “online”; That is, you access them only through your computer and the Internet–not by telephone or traditional mail. You generally must register by providing an email address (at a minimum), make any purchases via credit card check-out that occurs online, and deal with any customer service issues through email, online forums, or online chat.

Once you’ve registered with any of these sites you’re presented with a series of steps that take you through the book publishing flow for either a physical printed book and/or an ebook. With the exception of Blurb (which requires that you download specific publishing software), all of these steps take place within your Internet browser– Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari.

2. For these sites, the basic online publishing process is DIY (Do It Yourself) and FREE(!)

Yes, that’s right–free. Since these sites all utilize Internet-based publishing software, it really doesn’t cost them much at all to set you up with an account and maintain your book’s digital files, and all users go through the same general flow. Therefore, all of these sites can literally allow thousands of authors a day to try their publishing tools for free. But that’s all you get–free online tools without much hand-holding. Why? Because hand-holding costs money, and they can’t afford to do that for free.

These free online processes can be challenging for the novice (or even advanced) tech-savvy author, and in reality only a small percentage of authors that attempt to publish their book are initially successful in finishing the publishing process. But, if an author is willing to take the time and effort to figure it out–along with some trial and error–they can end up with a high quality published book without paying a cent up front. Hundreds of thousands of authors have done just that.

I hope this helps, and we’ll cover more topics tomorrow (Here’s the link). Till next time–Keep Publishing!

Henry

Tags: author, authors, book, books, DIY Publishing, self-publishing, traditional publishing, Vanity press