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BY
STRATTON D. BROOKS Superintendent of Schools, Boston, Mass.
AND
MARIETTA HUBBARD Formerly English Department, High School La Salle, Illinois
[Taken from www.gutenberg.net a while back, the .txt was on my local drive, I followed the site's instructions and produced...
http://www.lulu.com/content/1533479
£6.81 a book, but I think the euro and dollar sets come out less. So, setting up book packages...three books would be £20, some of which would come back via profits from sales, so £20 or less for three books...
Plus any random or directed online sales. Hmmmm....seems too easy...(but so does photocopying--to me--compared to pre-photocopying technologies, so...)
Thanks for the link! Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
Still it depends how often you sell that 40 books whether you can make a living or not. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
/estimated hourly wage so far: 3.8 cent. "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles." Sun Tzu
(1)I have no say in editorial decisions --and so far the company only produces the woman's books.
(you could slip a CD into that package, too.(2))
((2)I only type that to encourage your inner and outer artist.(3))
(((3) If you can get it to me before, say, the end of the second week of Christmas I can send it on to another person who (I think) will be interested.(4)))
((((4) When I say "I think will be interested" I mean that I am supposed to be sending him something and I'm thinking that he might be interested in the combination))) Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
I certainly wouldn't write teaching books if I wasn't able to get a fair compensation for the work, but there probably are people out there who think of that as a fun thing to do.
/really? "If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles." Sun Tzu
Quite a lot of professionally published work isn't terribly good, so it's not as if professional publishers are effective gatekeepers. But their output sells (to the extent that it does) because they have the distribution networks needed to get books into bookshops, and the PR network needed to create a buzz.
So Lulu is not the answer. Self-publishing is a waste of time unless you have some way to do effective promotion. And in fact, people trust bookshops to offer them something which is better than average. It's almost impossible to create that experience on Lulu.
The people who do well out of self-publishing are the scammish 'get rich quick' '100 top seduction secrets' 'essential ways to wipe out bad credit' artists who sell PDFs direct from a website. There's usually a SPECIAL LOW PRICE TODAY ONLY!!!! tag somewhere near the bottom, the hardest of hard sell further up, and regular spam reminders afterwards.
It's rather vile and seedy content-wise, but it's much better at making money for the people who do it than publishing on Lulu. The overheads are much lower - the hosting cost of a few PDFs and a website is negligible - and with clever Google-fixing people come to the site, so a PR operation is unnecessary.
Obviously this model wouldn't work for ET-ish books.
ET-ish books could only be sold with an established name - ET Think Lab, etc.
Once the name is recognised, book sales become a natural development.
For very few copies a service such as Lulu is quick and easy.
Example: I am in the process of producing an "ET Christmas Present" to myself. (It seems to be coming in around 25,000 words, and then there are lots of pics.) Once I have it ready (and once/if I get permission from the writer to publish), then I will buy the writer a copy, buy one for myself, sort of a "Here's a piece of ET to remind me for when the web (or ET) has moved on".
So, that's two copies. I'll tell people about it here, maybe that generates two more copies.
But...if there are X people (and what is X?) interested, then I would contact people such as Cambridge Publishing (or A.N. Other as recommended by anyone here) to see what rates I could get for larger print runs.
This proposed book is built from ET content. I would expect to publish it via MMM LLP (whatever that might mean or entail--I'll give a copy of the book to Paul, I doubt he read the original articles, so that's three copies ;) The marketing is a problem or an opportunity for any person or people who wish to see the book more widely distributed, or just get a copy for themselves.
Well, that's my take anyway.
For proposed publication runs in the thousands, then yes you will need some form of marketing team to identify and then adevertise the product a thousand (or say 500 for break even?) potential buyers. Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
Giving stuff away for free only works online. I know someone who has given away >100,000 copies of a book about the music business. It's a good book, and it's been very influential as a free download.
As a paper project, he might have sold 10-100 copies.
Online, people find you. In physical print, you need to find them, which seems to be rather harder.
If you want to print for friends+family+a few left over, that's usually called vanity publishing, and is a different animal again.
Getting even a small print run of 500 is a major operation. 500 books is a big slab of wood pulp, and takes up a lot of space. In hardback it's heavy enough to significantly stress a domestic floor.
You really wouldn't want it in your home. Which is why publishers usually pay distributors to handle the physical logistics of moving that much dead wood around.
You can certainly self-publish at that scale, and people do - sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
But it needs a bit of forethought to make sure you can still get into your home after you've had the books delivered.
If we want to sell books it seems much easier to upload them as PDFs, set up a paypal account with voluntary donations and/or a fixed price, and point people at a print on demand service if (and only if) they want a hard copy.
Total 6,047,023 Average Per Day 4,660 Average Per Visit 4.2 Last Hour 354 Today 3,231 This Week 32,622
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s21jerome
I can't work out how many "readers who don't post" that makes, but that silent (and hopefully enjoying themselves) audience somehow connect to 1), 2) and 3) above.
It's early days, maybe this idea (these ideas) of mine are just....pfff...but I like ideas and I like testing them against realities of various kinds...
Am I making any sense? Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
PDF + print on demand as TBG suggests sounds like the best way to publish, but getting the discussions into publishing shape is another thing. On that note, it is good to note that google can be used to search any site with the simple site:eurotrib.com included in the search terms. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
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