Guest Blogger’s Self-Publishing Saga #5
From Randee Russell Bieler, who wrote the Oscar-nominated short film Graffiti as well as the short story collection Bombs. She is self-publishing her novel Quilt, the story of a slave mother in the American South, and three contemporary mothers.
Quilt, Book 1 is in a holding pattern now, waiting for the final proof read. Turns out I have to do the print-on-demand before the Kindle. They get all the bugs worked out on the print version and then you pay them $69 and they slam it through some kind of cyber-something and voila! The ebook on Kindle!
I have made the decision to go with CreateSpace (which is part of Amazon) because it’s cheap and easy and big. There are a lot of other P.O.D. (print on demand) places but they have packages which cost around $1500 and I don’t really need all of what they offer. I already have my cover, that’s the main thing. And I don’t really think I need their marketing help. All those things you have to buy in the other guys' packages whether you use them or not.
CreateSpace is more a la carte. With them I am opting for the layout services for the text itself which costs about $500. I could maybe have done this myself, but this book was created over so many years with so many computers that I just couldn’t be sure there wasn’t some odd and undetectable tab hidden in there that would translate the whole thing into Chinese. Well, not really, but for $500. they would clean it all up and make sure the margins, typefaces, etc, are consistent, etc. And there’s back and forth, so it’s not set in stone until you say. I have the say.
I must say this process is growing on me. If the book had sold, all of this would have been out of my hands. If I’d had an idea about typefaces, it wouldn't have mattered; the choices would have been set in stone before I even got a look.
It was overwhelming, at first, the idea of making all these decisions, I hate decisions. But I’m coming around and when it happens, I think I’ll savor these little typefacey/margin-y choices the way some people savor choosing just the right door knobs in a dream house they are building.
Categories: enhancing creativity
Tags: Randee Russell Bieler, self-publishing, slave mothers
Comments
Thanks for sharing. I can foresee coming to this decision myself in the near future. It will be another learning curve, but I can imagine being excited about taking control of the process.
For most people, there’s both euphoria and a lot of tooth-grinding helplessness involved in the traditional way, Belinda. I’ll be very interested to hear what you do.