Abouts Books

By Joseph Kerrigan

Self publishing is one of those activities where the old saying is true - "if you want a job done well, do it yourself".

Consider the stages in self publishing: You write the book, you send it to a publisher or maybe to an independent printer and book binder. You collect the books and then try to sell them. Or maybe you leave the whole publishing job to a specialist publisher.

Look at the possibilities for something to go wrong: The printer is behind time, the costs per book are high, the appearance of the book is not to your liking. You are left with too many unsold copies. If you use a print on demand publisher they take a large cut of the price, and so on.

Now look at this scenario. You write the book. You market it. As you get orders you run off a copy of the book on your home printer. You create a cover for the book using card and do the artwork using a simple desk top publishing program (you can get one free). You bind the book using a simple wooden jig you can make yourself or get a handy woodworker to make for you for a few dollars. Each book takes only about 5 minutes to bind and the whole cost of the book is normally only about one dollar depending on the quality of paper used!

This is the ultimate simple, easy self publishing and self book binding dream.

The beauty of this method is that you are totally in control of everything. In fact if you are a fast writer you could have a book written, printed and published and in the post or the shelves in less than a week.

We are not talking here about some shoddy looking bunch of papers stapled together or a few sheets pressed into one of those school or office type binders. We are talking about an attractive, normal sized paperback book which can stand alongside normally published books and be practically indistinguishable from them. Except it will have your name or logo on it.

Joseph Kerrigan is an experienced writer and self publisher, both online and offline. He writes, prints and binds his own books and encourages others to do the same. Easy, simple bookbinding does need a course of instruction and on the author's web site is information about a superb, inexpensive course teaching easy book binding. The inexpensive course includes full illustrations, details of many free resources and lots of extras. Please see it at http://josephkerrigan.com