Self Publishing

[richsc]

The CEO and founder of Red Hat, the Linux distribution software, had to eat a lot of unsold books of his, prompting him to start the web based you publish it site Lulu. Might be the one for those very small print runs that you can't get profitably published anywhere else. Any one have experience with them?

[url:3si6livp]http://www.lulu.com/[/url]

[mcbishop]

In the UK, there is now Publish and Be Damned:

http://www.pabd.com/

which offer a slightly different take on things (you have to undertake to buy a small number of books) so not quite as distanced from vanity publishing as Lulu, but nearly there.

In the UK, Waterstone's are also offering a self-publishing service, which includes free 'in-shop' (yuk!) publicity, but this one costs you so it is closer to VP.

Note that Lulu do not really have a 'trade paperback' size, which PABD do, but Lulu include selling of PDFs, whereas PABD only carry free PDF books (including an example of Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons ground-breaking sci-fi stuff). By the way, if you want to know where publishing is going, watch the likes of Doctorow (starting with www.boingboing.net ) rather than mainstream publishers who mostly lost the plot many years ago.

Just never make the mistake of thinking you can make money out of publishing...!

Mike Bishop