Over on Doc Morgan’s Blog, he brought up Blurb. Now, as I’ve gone on createspace for Inanis the Hooded, and am somewhat familiar with different self publishing situations (while giving for “REAL” publishers the 6-9 months they needed to tell me they weren’t going to publish my book (bitter? not much, just bored)) I’ve taken a look at blurb.

This had come up a couple years ago as well, can’t remember what it was called then, but it was definitely billed as software that would transform your blog into a printed book. Now, the question is, for those authors serious about publishing and giving their book a run for their money, how useful could blurb be? Not very.

Yes, blurb has its own bookstore, but it is basically a vanity press. If I were going to print a family history, print ye olde Froyd’s Rants for posterity (in case this global warming thing causes a new ice age and they need something to burn to stay warm), then sure I’d use blurb. it’s easy, possibly idiot proof, and the product looks good. However, for a serious self publisher who wants to market the book and make money, blurb is not the way to go. They don’t allow you to set prices and you make nothing off the book (from what I can tell by searching through their site). Now, don’t get me wrong, this is a great idea for a quality product…but if you are attempting to make money from your book, it’s not the way to go.

Now, contrast that with some POD (print on demand) places such as Authorhouse, or some others, where the initial price usually ranges from $300-500. When I was looking into them to publish a book for the sci-fi/fantasy club at my undergrad college, the price was definitely inhibitive to try and make a run of it. In fact, that seems to be the main problem that people have with these publishers is the price. Of course, the people who have problems other than that from what I’ve seen usually have inflated expectations of how much work they themselves have to do to publish the book as well.

Which brings us to Createspace, Lulu, and others like them. Basically, the setup is in your hands. The cover design, the interior of the book, everything. This of course, means that like me, one may have to run through about 3 proofs before things are correct. This’ll be covered in another post about stuff to watch for in book preparation, but for the most part it is a good thing. The main thing you want to watch for with these places is whether or not they are in cahoots with a bigger distributor. Both Createspace(owned by amazon) and Lulu can put your book up on amazon, but from the few books from Lulu that I’ve seen, it doesn’t have the search inside feature that Createspace does. I’d say, for self publishing, these are the most useful sites to use. Low cost of proofs, and you only need to purchase one to get going. Plus the ability to set your own price (they have a breakdown percentage of how much each company gets), this is the way to go for trying to make some money from your book.

Next post, within the next week or two, will be on the reasons to self publish, students and self publishing (a class that I think would really work at undergrad and grad level publishing/writing programs), self publishing and footwork, and probably one on things to watch for while preparing your manuscript for publication at createspace.

That’s all for now, you keep on writing!