Emblem Divide – Free serialised book for charity

The last method I can think of for publishing is rather radical. Some people have disagreed with it, but I’ll discuss that later. If my ultimate goal is to get the book into as many hands as possible, whilst still maintaining the possibility of making some revenue from it, why not give the first book away free? It sounds like a crazy idea, but bear with me on this. If I can generate a lot of interest and readership from the free version and with it publicise the following idea, it might just work. By receiving a following online, hopefully someone that reads the book will either work in or near the publishing industry. Armed with this and the knowledge that I’m looking for a publisher for the sequel, it may be an incentive for a publisher to contact me.

Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s a bit of a long shot, but in all seriousness it could work. The disadvantage is two fold; for one, I wouldn’t have the backing of a large publisher who could push the book forward in terms of publicity, and secondly, it would be available only in electronic format. I could put it on Lulu.com for people to buy as well I suppose, but I’m thinking that people will generally buy the printed copy once they have read the electronic copy, if they enjoyed it that much. Which leads on to an interesting twist, I could just release the first half of the book free, and make the whole document available for a small fee.

I guess, being an open source enthusiast, I have clung on to the notion of giving things away for free, however in the literary world it’s just not the same as in the software world. The reasons for making a piece of code open are not just so that it’s free, people have been doing that with proprietary freeware and other types of license for many many years. With a book, there is nothing to hold back. The book doesn’t have source code to make it useful. It does have intellectual property however, and often an entire fictional universe behind it. It’s this intangible universe which authors are often trying to protect and with good reason too.

Overall, I’m largely reserving my decision until I hear back from the review panel. It’s exceedingly difficult to know whether what you have accomplished is worth publishing. I thank Lisa greatly for all the feedback she has provided me, it led to a few changes, and some minor embarrassment at my “lack of” vocabulary in 2003. I want the book to be a success, I want it to be an adventure for all who read it. The review panel will hopefully be able to guide me into a decision, be it good or bad.

I spent a long time thinking about how I wanted to publish the book, after all, there are just so many methods these days. Eventually I distilled it down into three choices. My main aim for Emblem Divide, is not to make money. The book was written as a labour of love and to be honest I’d be happy if it stayed that way. My main goal is to make it available to as many people as possible, however here is where the problem lies.

The first method that popped into my mind for distribution was Lulu.com. I like Lulu.com, they do fairly good quality prints and I have seen what a copy of the book looks like. We hit a problem though; printing a physical book costs money. That goes without saying, but getting a small volume of prints costs more money. As mentioned in the Printing the book article, a single copy of Emblem Divide cost £12 to print and £7 to ship. I felt overwhelmingly that printing this way would alienate a large number of the potential audience, after all, would you spend £20 on a book by an unknown author? I certainly wouldn’t, not for fiction at any rate. There is of course the option to let users download a PDF from Lulu.com, more on this later.

The advantage of the Lulu.com physically printed medium is exactly that, readers would receive a physically printed, highly tangible, copy of the book. If I’m perfectly honest, I’d much prefer to read any book in physical, rather than electronic format. I commute to work every day, and although the journey isn’t a long one, I catch a train where people are often commuting to London. Let me count the number of times I have seen someone use and e-reader. It’s really simple. None.

The second method for publish is to follow the traditional route and find a real publisher. Looking at the size/cost of paperbacks, it’s not unreasonable to think that I could get Emblem Divide in the shops for around £8 or so. Having said that, this method brings with it a whole new set of issues and problems. The first of these issues is actually finding a publisher to take on the book, and it’s a biggie. There is a lot of preparation involved in finding a publisher. Some won’t even take submissions from Joe Public, forcing you to go through a literary agent, who will undoubtedly take a percentage of your profits. That doesn’t really worry me so much, but it’s the fact that I’m basically ’selling’ the rights to publish my book to someone else. I’m sure every writer goes through the same thing, but, I don’t know if I want to part with them.

In point of fact, whilst searching for publishers and publishing ideas I did hit upon an alternative method at Lulu.com. It was a product called “Published by You” and with it, for a small fee of $99, you obtained the right to be a publisher yourself, receiving an ISBN number for your book among other things. You retained all rights to publishing the book. In short, it was very tempting but alas the scheme is no longer available. They do still offer a “Published by Lulu.com” service, but again, you lose all rights to publish the book yourself anywhere else, at least that’s how I understand it.

Tune in next time for the second part of this article, and more about my decision.