vanity becomes much cheaper

I saw this article in The New York Times* last month.

It was interesting. I’ve long thought that it would be fun to have something published between hard covers, printed on paper rather than with bytes and pixels.

A Sane Woman is the obvious choice. It was originally written to be presented on paper (in chapter-long chapbooks), before I even imagined any other way of publishing fiction. And even now it’s very linear, not at all hypertexty.

So, I visited the three websites mentioned in the article. After very preliminary investigation, here’s what I found out:

Blurb.com wants you to use their proprietary software (Mac & Windows, not Linux, of course). This was not appealing, half the fun would be doing the layout myself.

Lulu.com seems to want you to register before they give out any information. Also not appealing. Would you shop in a store where they wanted your credit card number before they answered any of your questions about their products?

Also, I really don’t want to be published by something called lulu.com. This applies somewhat to blurb.com as well, but my aversion to “lulu.com” is stronger, since it reminds me of Little Lulu.

Createspace.com looks good, though. Send them a PDF file (well, two PDF files, one for the cover and one for the insides) and you’re published, or you will be as soon as somebody orders a copy. The downside (you get no free copies, even your proof copies have to be paid for) seems outweighed by the upside (no cash layout, at all).

Createspace is owned by amazon.com. I bit of further investigation revealed that amazon also owns booksurge.com (are all the good names taken already? Is that the problem?). I had to poke around a bit to figure out the difference between createspace and booksurge, but it turned out that there’s a pretty significant one.

Createspace, as I described it above, is pretty DIY. Booksurge supplies formatting and editorial assistance as needed. I assume you pay for this somehow, but I didn’t investigate that far, since I don’t want editorial assistance (A Sane Woman was finished in 2005, I’m not going to rewrite it again now), or formatting (I’m enjoying figuring out how books are formatted), or marketing (since I have no expectation of making money anyway).

Besides, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner never laid out their own books. 🙂

It reminds me of how some movie directors do double-duty (even apart from the most obvious: writer-directors, or directors who also act). Like directors who also edit their own movies (John Sayles always does, and Robert Rodriguez, and the Coen Brothers – under an alias). Some directors score their own movies (Rodriguez again, and sometimes Clint Eastwood). And some even shoot their own movies (Steven Soderbergh is the one who comes to mind – at least for his more independent-type movies).

So, I’m checking out the different books I have here, looking at fonts and margins and layout. And wondering if I’m going to switch the whole thing to “smart” quotes, or stubbornly stick to my straight quotes.

Plenty of time to figure that out. So, all in all, a pretty exciting development.

(More of The U-town Murder Case was posted last week, starting here. The rest is coming soon.)

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* I know that’s not The New York Times. I couldn’t find the article again on their website, so I found it somewhere else instead (which was easy to do, since it was originally from AP).