Tag Archives: self publishing

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.

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.

So far we've talked about the need to hire a book designer and editor. I took the step of developing a prototype for Live Full Throttle: Life Lessons From Friends Who Faced Cancer.  Mine is in a PDF and included the cover, introduction and first chapter, but you could include less. You'll see that I used the Flash capabilities of Scribd to embed it here.