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Blurb.com helps and hurts self publisher
by Graham Best
The Tightrope Walker's Dream
Print-on-demand (so far...) by Blurb.com Visitors to the official website for my book read the whole thing online and then a lot of them click the link to buy the book, but they seldom finish the sale, because of the high prices, in my opinion. They discover that the cheapest version of my book costs over $20 at Blurb.com when they are accustomed to getting equivalent softcovers in bookstores for $7.95, such as Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. I understand why they decide against buying my book once they see the price. Some people buy it anyway, but most don't. My message to fellow writers/illustrators is therefore that print-on-demand has its uses, but the high prices of the books make it a dead end for selling very much that contains illustrations or photos. If your book is a picture book like mine, it will probably be in a high price bracket with a print-on-demand service, and your customers won't often pay that much. The plus side of print-on-demand is that, if you have some technical chops, you can arrange your book nicely and create a very professional version of it without a formal publisher, all for free. You simply upload it to blurb.com using their software bundle and then people can buy it. They can also preview it at blurb. Have a look at the blurb.com preview of my book (click preview) if you want to see how nicely a book can come out using this approach. I think my book looks amazing and the time I put into setting it up to my satisfaction was well worth it. So one good side of print-on-demand is you can get your book into a very professional state at little to no cost if you have the technical chops or you have a friend for that part. Another plus side is you can sell some books this way, but probably not many, no matter how much marketing you do to direct traffic to your book. Still, you will be able to print them up and give them as gifts and the people who really love your book will buy a few. I have sold some, but the prices suck, as I mentioned. Finally, I'm thinking the real value of print-on-demand may be that it puts me in a position to submit my book to formal publishers in a nice presentation rather than sending them muted print-outs from my home computer on typing paper or from scans of my illustrations, etc. Because my book is full of colorful illustrations, it was costing me roughly $30 a manuscript to send it to publishers, who don't always send it back. Now I can send it for roughly $19.95 (or less if I buy in bulk) as a beautiful blurb.com book. So print-on-demand offers me the opportunity to expose agents and publishers to a very high-quality version of the book as their first encounter with it, and it will cost me less than it was costing me to send them amateurish printouts on typing paper in manuscript form. It is also much faster for me this way since print-on-demand does the printing for me and I don't have to spend an hour per manuscript at home monitoring the printing process, which involved keeping an eye on ink levels and collating pages and quality assurance routines, etc. That part of my submission process was an unsustainable headache. My only concern now is that agents and formal publishers who receive a blurb.com version of my book will think I have already published the book myself so they won't want to publish it too. Perhaps I will quietly address such things in my cover letter. The Tightrope Walker's Dream.
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