I wrote a novella for Bronwyn for her birthday. I did most of it over Christmas 2005 and it's not a bad little story. The hardest part was finding a place to get it printed relatively cheaply. Blurb was the obvious solution, but it's still in private beta. So I found Lulu, which pretty much does everything Blurb promises, and then some. It cost $8 (£5) for a perfect bound 100 page book, with colour softback cover - that's a good unit price, especially if you consider that the book could retail for £6-7. So at around the same time I read Cory Doctorow's comprehensive trashing of the traditional publishing industry, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see just how much interest I could generate in my own creative works by utilising the 'edge infrastructure' that's now available to content creators. IMHO the only valuable channels to authors, provided by the book publishing industry, are marketing and distribution, and technology has commodotised these. So why not adopt a DIY attitude and cut the 'incumbents' out of the value chain altogether? My list of 'plumbing' in the edge-publishing infrastructure includes:

• Lulu and Blurb for microprinting services
• Lulu’s publishing service – provides a unique ISBN and scan-able barcode
• Sales on Amazon (if your ISBN is registered), Amazon Marketplace, eBay etc
• Promotion and sales on Google Book Search, Google Base et al
• MySpace for product and author promotions (is it worth bothering with any other social network these days?)
• Promotion on 43 Things and All Consuming
• Promotion on Flickr
• Bookcrossing.com (n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.)
• Websites, blogs and podcasts (create an audiobook), leverage all the good promotional stuff available in the blogosphere
• Book review sites
• All the usual forums etc.
• Geocaching (leave a hardcopy in a geocache)
• Promotional flyers, stickers etc.
• Local high street retailers (bookshops, comic shops et al.)

The list is endless. My point is that time spent chasing agents and publishers is time wasted; the odds are stacked against anyone who hasn't been 'introduced' to the industry anyway. Far better to be proactive and expend effort on grassroots guerilla promotion, and so disintermediate traditional publishing channels altogether. Face it - the book industry is going the same way as the record and film industries; they'll all be gasping their last breath in a decade.
(Note to self - must stop using the 2.0 suffix for every new idea.)

November 09, 2005

Top 20 geek novels