Blogging Tips – Choosing Publishers For Your Book

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Though e-book is a great option to publish your book online, it probably lacks the glamor that comes with a printed book. There are several options open to you if you want to publish your book by yourself.

Lately I have several readers asking me about my recommendations on choosing the best way to publish a print book. Though I have not published any printed book yet, I can tell you what I have heard from the others who did.

Of the several options to choosing the best self publishing tool, here are the ones that I have heard good things about. These are all Print On Demand services. It means that you can design your entire book & publish it. You could do the order fulfillment yourself by keeping a stock of the books, receiving orders & shipping them yourselves. Or you could sell your printed books from several online retailers & pass on a hefty commission to them. Either way, you own the rights to your books & would be responsible for any legal issues.

Amazon Publishers: Amazon gives you are very competitive rate to publish your books in color or black & white. The print prices are reasonable & any book will come with an ISBN. If you self publish books with Amazon, your book will be automatically available on Amazon.com & they will do the fulfillment too.

In return, they will get 30% of the retail price as commission.

The advantage with self publishing with Amazon are many:

• You get the best price for print
• Your book automatically comes with an ISBN
• Your books are automatically available on Amazon.com
• You can create alternate versions to your print book like ebook & downloadable books for Kindle (available for regular Kindle Wireless Reading Device as well as for the Latest Generation Kindle DX

Lulu Self Publishing: Lulu is one of the first companies that revolutionized the self publishing business by letting people design, create & publish their printed book in less than 2 weeks. Their process is very simple.

Once you have created a PDF version of your book, you upload them onto Lulu’s servers. Lulu then creates a sample book as a proof & sends it over to you for authorizing them to publish. You could make any corrections from the first proof before you publish. Anytime you make a change you must order a proof copy from Lulu.

Lulu also runs their own online bookstore much like Amazon. They also take their commissions everytime a book is sold from their stores. But you dont need to pay anything unless you have sold.

Lulu has the option of attaching the ISBN barcode but you have to apply for it separately. They are working on a process to make it easier for self publishers to obtain ISBN codes right from their website.

Blurb Self Publishing: I like using the Blurb software especially for photography books. The pr-edesigned templates are very attractive & could make printing a photo book a breeze!

With Blurb, you need to download the publishing software onto your computer. Once you are ready with your pictures & text, you choose the best template & start adding the pictures & adding the text. Once done, Blurb software will connect to their servers & upload your copy. And you are all set to print your first book.

Much like Lulu, you must buy the first copy of your book. You can use this as a proof reading copy to make final changes or go ahead & ask them to publish the book.

Blurb also runs their own online stores & if you want you can use that to sell your books. Blurb will keep a commission every time you sell a copy. At this time, they do not have a mechanism to add ISBN codes automatically. They are added subsequently when you design your cover, provided you have already received your ISBN number.

Whichever way you publish, the copyright remains with you. Amazon, Lulu & Blurb would not be responsible for the content & assumes that you have all the legal documents necessary (like model releases for images etc).