It involves hard slog and little financial reward, but there's an immense joy to DIY publishing, and of bringing your book to public attention. Philip Levine offers a step-by-step guide.
Although it involves hard slog and little financial reward, there is an immense joy to DIY publishing, and of bringing your book to public attention. Here’s another step-by-step guide.
1 Register as a publisher via Nielsen Bookdata
This is the major database for storing book information. They also supply you with an ISBN – the number on the barcode of the book, which contains all the information about the book from price to publication date. It costs just under £100, but you get a set of ten ISBNs, which should last a while!
2 Find a designer
Designers deal with the font, typographic styling and images, making it look as good as possible. They also liaise with the printers and make up the files that will be uploaded for printing. We used the independent company www.designtemp.co.uk .
3 Source a printer
We found the printer Lightning Source, which is linked to the major book distributors, and also has an office in the USA for distribution - Lightning Source works on a 'print on demand' principle. If a book store orders a book for a customer or to display themselves, Lightning Source receives that order, prints the amount ordered, and sends it to the appropriate person. This means that you don’t have to print 1000 plus books, and then try to flog them off to everyone yourself.
4 Find a distributor
To get your book out to people you need distributors other than yourself. The major UK players are:
Bertrams www.bertrams.com
Gardners www.gardners.com
Amazon www.Amazon.co.uk
If you're not linked with at least one of the first two, it will be virtually impossible to get your book into stores. I would advise two strategies when dealing with distributors:
• put your book at 40% discount when a store or website orders it
• make it returnable.
The discount is common throughout the industry and most stores will not be interested in stocking your book unless it is returnable – a risk you have to take if you believe in the work.
5 Get your book out there
The only way to do this is to hassle bookstores to take it, occasionally for free. With stores such as Waterstones you have to send the book in for approval to determine if they want to sell it their branches. If accepted, they will give you a list of all their stores for you to approach, and ask to sell your book – they won’t get it into the stores for you.
