You've heard the drumbeat—You need to write a book! Your competitors have already written books, where's yours? Maybe you don't need to write a book to succeed, but if you've been thinking about it, let's talk.
A year ago I published Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer, and now it's won two national book awards!
The last step in the self-publishing process is getting the book into the reader's hands (or reading device). I'm not talking about marketing in this post (I'll talk about that later); I'm talking about dead-tree distribution here because that's how I published Live Full Throttle, for reasons I outlined earlier in this series.
When you're publishing your own work, you're taking on all the departmental responsibilities of a publisher: editing, design, printing, financing, distributing and marketing. Unless you're publishing an e-book you'll have to choose a book binding.* Deciding between hardback and softcover lies at the intersection of finance and marketing.
After writing about how to roll blog posts, newsletters and articles into books, self publishing, writing book proposals and what a book can do for you professionally, I invite you to walk with me down the path of self-publishing a book of my own.
When I talk to prospective authors about their publishing plans very few know what they're up against trying to get a traditional publisher to fund their project. That's how you should think of it -- funding the project.
