This past weekend I had the pleasure to talk with a group of authors about how they could successfully publish their books through websites like Createspace and Lulu. Understandably, many of these authors didn’t have online publishing experience, but that didn’t matter. They still understood the basic needs and challenges that self-published authors face, however, such as:

*Recognizing and optimizing book quality: Making sure that their manuscript and book cover files are properly edited, formatted and designed.

*Knowing your printing costs: Self-published authors mostly live in a POD (Print-on-Demand) world, so each book is printed one at a time. As a result, each book will have a known cost to print, and that’s a cost you must be comfortable with.

*Understanding retail distribution: Depending on your book’s audience, it may be beneficial to have your book listed at the major online retailers like Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Doing so, however, means that these sites will get a piece of each sale, which in some cases means that you’re left out in the (royalty) cold.

*Managing royalties: Wherever you’re selling your book–online or offline–it’s critical to know how much money you’ll be making on each sale, and how that fits in with your business plan and your budget.

You can’t successfully self-publish your book–online or anywhere else– without recognizing and resolving the above situations. Fortunately, as we saw during our walk-through, Lulu and Createspace put most of this information right in front of you; it’s simply your duty to learn and apply it to your needs.

Yes, these sites can have confusing web-based interfaces. And yes, there are an abundance of other choices you must make about paper types, trim sizes, and the various “packages” for printing and retail distribution. If you’re persistent, however, at the end of the day you will wind up with a professionally printed book.  How your book compares with the rest of the books in the industry–i.e., those published through offline vanity self-publishers or by the traditional publishers–is independent of  your choice to use these online sites. It is a matter of your writing skill, your budget, your book publishing knowledge, and your planning.

Self-publishing or traditional publishing paths are choices you make. With self-publishing, you, the author, take ownership of your book’s future and initiate various activities to have your book printed, distributed and sold to the buying public. Online publishing sites like Lulu and Createspace are simply tools that can get you there faster, more efficiently, and more economically than their offline brethren.

What you might not know, and what some of the authors in my Saturday night presentation didn’t know but now realize, is that you can try most of these online publishing sites for free. All it will cost you is your time, and you may find that you can do it all on your own. If you can’t do it all, services like mine which still utilize the advantages of these online publishing sites might be of use. But either way it’s your choice.

The bottom line is that if you’re an author sitting on an unpublished book you no longer have an excuse for it remaining unpublished. More and more previously unpublished authors are taking advantage of these online tools to get their book out the door and in front of the masses. David Cornoy, a Senior Editor at CNET.com, recently made the news about choosing online publishing as the path to take for his first novel, “Knife Music.”

In fact, it looks to me as if David followed some of the exact same steps we walked through Saturday night. If he can do it, so can you–so get busy!

Till next time, keep publishing…

Henry Hutton

PublishandSell.com