Stephen Johnson

As I hope you are aware of, my debut novel Assassins Game is going to be available this fall. What you may not be aware of, is that it is not being published through, what you might call, the traditional route. That is, by selling the manuscript to a publishing house, which would publish it and get it onto bookstore shelves.

You see, unfortunately for me, I was not able to pique the interest of any of the literary agents that I contacted about representing it. I don't believe this to be a reflection of the quality of the work, since none of them read the book; it is just a reflection of how difficult it is for an author to get started in this business. Therefore, I decided to publish my book through the Print-On-Demand process.

For a more detailed discussion about how many first-time authors attempt to get their book published, and the rejections I received, please see the Rejections section of my website.

In the past, there were two ways for an author to publish their novel. The first was the traditional route through a publishing house, which I mentioned earlier. The second was for an author to self-publish. The author would design their cover, hire a printer to print the book, pay to have a certain number of the books printed, say one thousand, store the books someplace, visit area bookstores praying they would allow the books on their shelves, and try to market the book like crazy. In essence, the author became the publisher, printer, and distributor. However, this option did not seem very appealing to me.

Fortunately, there is now another option. As technology often does, it changes the way in which industries conduct their business, even if those industries do not wish to change. Print-On-Demand and the Internet are two of those technologies. Together they are reshaping the publishing business by allowing more and more authors, who traditionally would have labored in obscurity, to get their work out to a broader audience.

In the past, printing techniques required a printer to print at least several hundred books in a print run for the printing to be economically feasible, and printing just one book would have been impossible. But in today's world, the technology now exists for just one book to be printed at a time, allowing a publisher to print a book only once an order for the book has occurred, just as Dell only manufactures a given computer once the order for the computer has been received.

Thus, possibly in a not too distant future, the days of shipping and warehousing vast quantities of books will be gone. Sure, books like the Harry Potter series, which will sell millions of copies, will have print runs of millions, and bookstores will always want popular books and authors on their shelves, but perhaps the days of printing large numbers of speculative or niche titles may be coming to an end.

In fact, I believe that Print-On-Demand technology will become so ubiquitous that someday you'll walk into a bookstore, and if they don't have the book you're looking for on their shelves, they'll print one out while you wait. But for now, Print-On-Demand publishing will be dominated by authors who aren't able to interest a traditional publisher to publish their work, just as I have done with Assassins Game.

As Print-On-Demand technology has evolved over the years, a number of companies have sprouted up to help authors take advantage of it. These companies offer differing services, but basically, for a fee, they take the author's manuscript and format into book form suitable for Print-On-Demand publishing. Then, they make it accessible to the public through companies such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent bookstores. Thus, customers may both order the book through the Internet or through traditional bricks-and-mortar outlets. Then, these services print and ship copies as they are purchased.

This new way of publishing a book falls between the two extremes of traditional publishers and self-publishing, that I mentioned before. With this method, the author is still typically responsible for designing their cover and marketing their book, but they no longer need to worry about the printing and distributing of their novel. As I mentioned before this is the approach I have taken for publishing Assassins Game, and the company that I have utilized is Xlibris at www.xlibris.com.

The rest of this article provides a step-by-step guide to how I am using this service, the Internet, and other means to publish and market my book, including associated costs and the time in which it takes to get your book released to the public. As the publishing and marketing process moves further along, I intend to update this guide as necessary.

I could have attempted to provide a more generalized view of this process, but I don't tend to like this approach. I, myself, like to know specifics. I am a corporate trainer by trade (see more about me in the About Me section of this website) and my students tend to, as I do, like concrete examples, which is how I've constructed this guide. Therefore, if you are going to publish your book through Print-On-Demand, you can and should research alternative companies and products, because, what may have been right for me, may not be right for you.

Below are the steps which I have followed in writing, publishing, and marketing Assassins Game. Note: At this point I'm not finished with the publishing and marketing process, and thus, this guide is a work-in-progress and will be updated as necessary.

Of course, the first thing I did was to write and edit my manuscript. You can't begin the Print-On-Demand publishing process until this step is done. You should have your manuscript in as cleanly edited a form as possible, with very few mistakes and mispelled words. If you don't the cost of fixing those errors will become greater the further along into the publishing process you go, as well as, delaying the release of your novel.
1. I started Assassins Game in the summer of 2001 and finally finished editing the final draft in April of 2003. For more information about the writing of Assassins Game, please see the Assassins Game section of my website.
2. Before I decided to go the Print-On-Demand route, I first tried the more traditional route of publishing, by first attempting to get an agent to represent my novel. You may also want to try this first, especially if you feel your novel has a good chance of selling well. If you'd like to read more about my failed attempt at this, please read the Rejections section of my website.
The next step was for me to choose a Print-On-Demand publisher. There are many out there, and a simple Internet search will find many of them. They each provide different services, and I won't try to cover them in general, instead I'll describe the Print-On-Demand publisher I chose, which was Xlibris.
Xlibris provides three publishing service levels: Basic, Professional, and Custom. I chose the Professional service.
1. The Basic service costs $500. Your novel is made available in paperback and e-book formats, not hardcover. You can choose between 8 basic cover templates and 5 interior templates.
2. The Professional service costs $900. Your novel is made available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats. You can choose between the 8 basic cover templates and 10 more professional looking templates. There are also 13 interior templates to choose from and you can alter these slightly if necessary. This is the option that I chose.
3. The Custom service costs $1600. Your novel is made available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats. With this option, you can speak with an Xlibris designer to help design your cover, provide your own cover, and have help with more complex interiors.
Now, before Xlibris can begin the publishing process, you need to get the materials in order that are required for the service level and cover template you've chosen. Since I chose the Professional service level and Professional Cover Template #2, the following items were required:
1. The Manuscript: This needs to be provided in either Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) (most popular word processing programs can save in RTF format). Xlibris will also take a hard copy of the manuscript and type it in for you, but this option is expensive. More information on how to format the manuscript is provided below.
2. Dedication: A short dedication that will be placed inside the book on a page by itself. This too is provided in Word or RTF format.
3. Author Bio: This is a short bio (up to 100 words) about the author, which is placed on the backcover of the book. This too is provided in Word or RTF format.
4. Book Summary: This is a short summary (up to 100 words) about the book intended to grab the reader, which will also be placed on the backcover. This too is provided in Word or RTF format.
5. Author Photo: An image of the author 2" by 3" provided in TIFF format at 300 DPI. More information about how I created this image is provided below. A hard copy may also be provided and they will scan the image in for you.
6. Cover Image: For the cover template I chose, I needed to provide a cover image 5.5" by 8.5" in TIFF format at 300 DPI. Different cover templates require different image sizes or multiple images. More information about how I created this image is provided below. A hard copy may also be provided and they will scan the image in for you.
I used Microsoft Word as my word processing program for my manuscript, as well as, for the dedication, author bio, and book summary. When formatting your manuscript with this or another word processing program, you want to make sure that you know and understand any formatting rules that are required by your Print-On-Demand publisher. Xlibris has several formatting rules, and they provide a document on what to do and not to do. It will help save you time if you understand these rules before you begin typing your novel so you don't have to go back and fix things later.
1. For instance, I wasn't supposed to use spaces or tabs to indent my paragraphs, but in many places I did. Instead, I should have used the Horizontal Ruler to properly create paragraph indents. I had to go back through my entire manuscript and fix all of the paragraphs I had formatted incorrectly.
2. Another common mistake would be to hit the Enter or Return key at the end of each line, as if you were sitting at a typewriter. In a word processing document, however, this causes a End-Of-Paragraph marker to be placed at the end of each line, and thus, each new line will be mistakingly formatted as a new paragraph.
  
  Instead, you should just keep typing at the end of the line and let the word processor correctly wrap the text to the next line. Only hit the Enter or Return key when you've actually finished a paragraph. Once again, I mistakingly did this on one line in my manuscript, and I didn't catch the error until I received my first galley proof. I then needed to pay extra to have my mistake corrected.
Next, I created the cover image for the book.
1. I could have simply taken a photo, scanned it in using a high resolution scanner, and let Xlibris add the title and author name to the image in a font of my choosing. But, I wanted greater control over the design of it. For this, I needed image editing software that would allow me to manipulate a photo. There are several products available to do this type of work, such as Photoshop from Adobe. I, however, used a program called Paint Shop Pro from Jasc Software, which I found to have all the functionality that I needed. It retails for around $100, which is a fraction of the cost of Photoshop.
2. Like most of you reading this, I am no graphic designer and had no experience with this type of image software. However, I did find Paint Shop Pro easy to use, and I recommend a book called Teach Yourself Paint Shop Pro 7 in 24 Hours by T. Michael Clark. Without it or some other similar book, I'm sure I would have struggled with learning the program. Even after reading the book and performing the example exercises, it does take a while of trying different designs before you'll find something you'll like, especially if your as unartistic as I am.
3. Next, I needed to either take a photograph for my cover or somehow acquire one. Since I'm no photographer and I didn't have any photos lying around that were of what I wanted, I decided I needed to purchase one.
  1. I searched the Internet and found I could purchase images from Getty Images. They have a very convenient search feature that allowed me to search their database for images with the type of content I was looking for. After searching for a while, I found a nice photograph of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. that I wanted to use.
  2. Getty Images has two types of images: Royalty-Free and Rights-Managed.
    1. With Royalty-Free images you pay one flat fee to use that image in your project.
    2. Rights-Managed images are more complicated to purchase, with the fees typically being higher and based on the type of project you are working on. Those types of images are more for companies that want that image for their brand or national marketing campaign and don't want the market saturated with that image.
    I, of course, purchased a Royalty-Free image.
  3. The images come in different sizes and resolutions. The bigger the image or higher the resolution, the more the image costs. The image I purchased came in 4 different sizes. The image format I chose was 4" by 6" at 300 dpi and it cost me $189. As of this writing, that same image at that size and resolution, now costs $249.
4. I could have just purchased the image and used it for my cover without alterations, but I felt like adding a little more to it. You can see an example of the cover image on the Home section of my website. The following describes some of the steps I performed in creating the image.
  1. I found one of the most useful features of Paint Shop Pro was it's layering ability. When you look at my cover image, you see one image, but in reality it is several images layered on top of each other. Each image is called a layer. There are, in fact, five layers that make up the cover image.
    1. The bottom most layer is the lettered background. This layer is difficult to make out in the small image on the Home section of my website, but it is the background area that my name and the book title is set against.
      View Layer #1
    2. The next layer up is the Title and Author Name layer, which I've placed on top of the lettered background layer.
      View Layers #1-2
    3. The third layer up from the bottom is a small section of the Capitol Building image that I have enlarged. This is the region of the image that is inside the rifle scope, which looks zoomed in on. Although you might think that I carefully created this image layer as a circular image, I did not. In fact it is a rectangulare image, but you just don't see the whole image, since another layer is draped on top of it.
      View Layers #1-3
    4. The fourth layer is the original Capitol Building image. I've created a circular transparent region in the middle of it. This is the area where the third layer (the Enlarged Capitol layer) is visible in. That's the great thing about layers, you can obscure or show through the underlying layers. You can also blend two layers together to create very interesting effects.
      View Layers #1-4
    5. The final layer is an image of the sniper scope. It is positioned on the boundary between the third and fourth layers to create the final effect.
      View Layers #1-5
  2. Paint Shop Pro has a lot of special effects capabilities. For instance the Author/Title layer was created using a 3D Effect called Beveling which gives the lettering a more rounded, and shiny look.
  3. And, the Sniper Scope was created using the application's shape and line drawing tools.
5. It is sometimes difficult to get a good feel for the way an image will look when it is printed as compared to how it looks on a monitor.
  1. This can be especially true when the printed image will be 5.5" by 8.5" and your screen is not nearly that large.
  2. Also, an image's colors can look quite different when printed than how they look on a monitor. In fact different printers will probably print an image quite differently depending on their printing capabilities.
  3. Also, monitors employ a color scheme known as RGB. By mixing red, green, and blue colors the monitor can simulate all the various colors. Printers on the other hand use a CYMK color scheme. The letters CYMK stand for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and Black (don't ask me whay they didn't use B). By mixing these colors, a printer can create all the various colors, but your printed image may look quite different than what you see on your monitor.
  4. Taking all these factors into consideration, I decided I better print the image to make sure it printed the way I wanted. My printer is fairly old, but still works good, but to get the most out of my printer I bought the best paper I could find, which was premium high-gloss picture paper. For my printer being so old and cheap, the image seems to print well, but I know that my printer is not the printer that will ultimately print the book's cover, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything turns out all right. I'm hopeful though, since I'm sure the printer that Xlibris uses is employing a printer that cost significantly more and is of higher quality than my little personal printer.
  5. I would suggest that you also make sure you print your cover image and not rely solely on how it looks on your monitor.
6. Once I had the image looking the way I wanted I just needed to save it in the correct format (TIFF format), dimensions (5.5" by 8.5"), and resolution (300 dpi) that Xlibris requires. TIFF is a standard image format that most imaging software supports.
7. It may seem to you that I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the cover to look like and that it didn't take me very long to create it. This would be far from the truth. It took me a couple of weeks to get comfortable with Paint Shop Pro and several more weeks of tinkering with different ideas and layouts. In fact, my first attempts were completely wretched.
The final thing I needed was an author photo for the backcover of the book. Unfortunately, I didn't have any photos that were acceptable, and I'm not a professional photographer, nor did I want to pay for a professional photographer. I figured my best bet for a decent photograph would be to take one in black and white.
1. To me black and white photos seem to be more professional when taken with a normal camera when compared to color photos.
2. I also thought any small blemishes, shiny areas (I am bald) that might otherwise glaringly show up in a color photograph, might be diminished or hidden.
3. Taking a good picture in black and white was a little more difficult than I thought, so here are a few pieces of advice.
  1. Shadows, even small ones, will show up big time.
  2. Background is very important. Monotone backgrounds will look like one color and look awful. Have a background with some life to it.
4. Once again, once I had a picture I liked, I needed to get it into the proper format. I could have sent the photo to Xlibris and had them scan it in for me, but I have a scanner, so I scanned the photo in myself and used Paint Shop Pro to crop it the way I wanted and to get it into the correct format (TIFF format), size (2" by 3"), and resolution (300 dpi).
Once I had all of the materials (manuscript, author photo, cover image, etc) that I needed for submittal to Xlibris. I printed and filled out a simple form and copied all of the files onto a CD. Then, I sent the form and CD to Xlibris. Below is a detailed timeline of the publication process once I submitted my materials to Xlibris.
1. I sent in my materials on April 28.
2. I received an email confirmation on April 29 that Xlibris had received my materials.
3. On May 8 I was notified via email that Xlibris had completed their initial review of my materials and had concluded that they had everything they needed to begin the publication process. At this point, Xlibris official began working on the manuscript to get it into the proper format for publication.
4. On June 12 I received the galley proof of the manuscript and two cover proofs (one for the hardcover layout and one for the paperback layout) for review. These came in Adobe PDF format.
5. After reviewing the proofs, I discovered three errors that were my fault. I could have ignored them, they were fairly minor, but I decided to have them corrected. Xlibris has a corrections form that you need to fill out to have any corrections made to the galley. To have any corrections made at this point it costs a base price of $25 plus $3 for each correction, so it cost me $31 to have these corrections made. This is why it is important that you submit your manuscript with as few mistakes and typos as possible, otherwise it will cost you a lot of money to fix these.
6. View the Hardcover Layout Proof (in Adobe PDF format)
7. View the Paperback Layout Proof (in Adobe PDF format)
8. I emailed the corrections form into Xlibris on July 3. Once they have made these corrections they will send an updated galley back for my review. This is the point that I am currently at in the publishing process.

As you've just learned, I'm currently in the middle of the publishing process with Xlibris. I am estimating that my novel will be available early this fall. As I continue through this process I will continue to update this web page. Please check back later for updates and thanks for visiting. I hope you've enjoyed learning about the Print-On-Demand publishing process and I hope to see you again soon.