Yes, it is much easier to self-publish a book these days. So easy, in fact, that many sharks have entered the fray. There are quite a few good small publishing houses that specialize in short-run books but there are quite a few, shall we say, less than honest publishers as well. You have to be very careful out there. Mistakes can be costly. When we decided to publish Piano Tone Building ourselves we went directly to the small printer that my wife freelances for (she is a book editor), Gorham Printing, http://www.gorhamprinting.com/. Gorham has a quite a bit of information for the novice book publisher available from their website. Printers like like this work directly with the author and the author can do as much or as little of the preparatory work as they feel comfortable with. In our case I did the writing the preliminary editing and Barb did the final editing. I then did the page layout in Adobe InDesign (one of the standard page layout programs that any good printer will use). We hired an independent cover designer that freelances with Gorham just as Barb does. When the package was complete Gorham did the printing. This is probably the least expensive way to get your own book published. But it does assume you, the author, is capable of doing quite a bit of the work yourself. A word of caution: many authors consider themselves to be such great writers that they do not need the services of a professional editor. Take it from me--no matter who you are you are not that good! Find and hire a good editor; your readers will thank you later. There are many small book publishers who can do this work for you but it will cost considerably more either upfront or in the long run. Most small publishers will farm out this work to freelancers and will then charge a substantial fee on top of that charged by the freelancer. As well, many of these publishers will claim to do your marketing for you but beware--this also can be very expensive. Assuming any marketing is done at all it will generally be ineffective for specialty books like ours. Many, if not most, of the grandiose claims for marketing are meaningless and in the end it will be up to you to promote and market your own book anyway. Since the market is limited for piano-specific books we decided to market Piano Tone Building in two ways. We have generated a certain amount of publicity for the book and sell it directly to the buyer. But these sales are limited. Most are sold through PTG which then makes a profit on each sale. On my demise--well, hopefully, just before--I plan to turn over my rights to the book to PTG so that it will continue to be available to coming generations of piano lovers. ddf _____ From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Scott Jackson Sent: April 06, 2009 5:35 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: [pianotech] Book publishing (was Re: fiber) Last month we had some discussion encouraging John Delacore to publish a book, now Jurgen is putting up his hand. I think that it is possible these days to do small scale publishing with the help of internet based companies. My wife Sharon works with a girl who just printed a book with <http://www.blurb.com/> http://www.blurb.com/ . According to her, the result is a beautiful and very professional looking publication. Another company is http://www.iuniverse.com/ . I have no personal knowledge of them; does anyone else know of them or others? Searching for "self publishing" shows many sites. There are also "print on demand" services such as http://booksandtales.com/pod/index.php , which will try to sell your book for a fee, rather than just printing it for you. Scott Jackson ----- Original Message ----- From: David <mailto:David at piano.plus.com> Boyce To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2009 9:10 AM Subject: Re: [pianotech] fiber This list is a wonderful exchange and repository of superb photographic and other material and insights on repair and rebuilding. JDs beautifully illustrated articles are among the finest, of course. A year or two I mooted the notion of a book, and suggested semi-humorous alliterative chapter headings. A problem is, however, that such a book would be for a "niche market", and there is little money is publishing for niche markets, and the unit cost of a full-colour illustrated technical book for low volume sales would be entirely prohibitive. The standard of colour photgraphs of all sorts of interesting piano things on here is superb. You realise how good it is when you look back at Reblitz in black and white. It's good, and when first published wa a quantum leap above anything hitherto. But visually it ain't a patch on what COULD be published, if there was money in doing so. But let's face it, no publisher is going to produce a full-colour-photo book of piano technical articles. Reblitz continues to be published in black and white, to make it affordable. What then are the options for the superb material here, such as JDs? Perhaps a manual on CD Rom, which could be produced at minimal cost, and which could of course be replete with crystal clear colour illustrations. Purchasers would then have the option of printing out any parts of it that they wanted, at their own expense. I don't think that any hard copy form of publication is likely. What do others think? Best regards, David. >Amen. >JD must be published; at least in the Jounal if not in a publication of his >own. >Scott Jackson ----- Original Message ----- > >> Thank you, JD, for your information about this repair. Your technical >> articles belong in a piano repair manual. The whole presentation, with >> excellent photos, surpasses anything I've seen before. >> >> Paul McCloud >> San Diego -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090406/928e82f7/attachment.html>
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