Publish your own book

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 15:49

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Choosing a POD Service

A few years ago, there were only a couple of POD services available. Today there are many more options, which is no bad thing but it means that the choice can be overwhelming. We'll concentrate on the three biggest and longest-established POD services to compare the features you should reasonably expect.

As an example, we'll compare the costs involved in publishing a 100-page black and white paperback book that's around 5x8in in size. Each POD service subtracts these costs from the cover price when someone purchases one of your books. We also want to know how many sizes of book are available, the choices of paper on offer and whether or not it's possible to obtain an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for your title. The type of help and support on offer is also important, as is the presence of a community forum for discussing ideas. Finally, we'll look at what other merchandise options are available to help create a brand for your work.

Blurb's POD service is particularly interesting as it requires you to download its comprehensive BookSmart application to publish your work. This provides the tools to format and upload your book. The other sites require you to upload a PDF version of your work to their websites.

If you'd like your book to be available automatically through online distributors such as Amazon, and for people to be able to request it through a library, you'll need an ISBN. Of the above services, only Lulu offers this. Lulu claims that this means people can order your work through any of 60,000 outlets, both online and offline. This is part of the 'Published By Lulu' distribution package, which used to cost around £50 but is now free. It automatically includes a listing for your book on Amazon.

If you use a different POD service and you want an ISBN, you'll have to buy one. Nielson (www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk) runs the UK's ISBN registration agency. It charges £107.18 including VAT for a block of 10 ISBNs. Your book isn't automatically made available through Amazon if you adopt this approach, though.

Creating the Manuscript

It's a good idea to decide on a POD service before you begin the hard work of transferring your ideas into written form. This is because POD services need your work formatted in certain ways, and you can avoid a lot of frustration simply by downloading the document and image templates they provide.

To decide on an appropriate size for your manuscript, and therefore your finished book, take a few paperbacks or hardbacks from your bookshelf and measure their height and width. Find those that most closely match the formats on offer from the POD service. Use the size you like best, but don't be tempted to bulk up your book by choosing a smaller format to increase the page count. This will simply increase production costs and reduce your profit margin. Instead, choose the size you like and don't worry about how thick the finished product will be. After all, it's the quality that matters.

If you intend to include your own covers rather than choosing one from the POD service's galleries, it's worth checking what size your image should be. Most POD services require very large images. If you don't check early enough, you may have to resize them later, which can result in peculiarly squashed images.

When preparing your manuscript, there are a few publishing conventions you should observe. If you flick through the first few pages of a professionally published book, you'll see that there's a title page, usually a dedication, some details about the edition and copyright owner and possibly a table of contents. Each chapter may also begin on a right-hand page. You may have to introduce an extra page break here and there to allow for this.