*Publish on demand services have made old school self-publishing obsolete
If you want to publish something in book form (what geeks refer to a dead tree delivery) it has traditionally been a complicated and/or expensive proposition. Trying to get a publisher interested can be a huge challenge and for many types of book you need an agent to even be able to get your proposition in front of a publisher at all.
The alternative to a publisher taking on your opus has been self publishing, which is easy enough but most “traditional” self publishing businesses require runs of hundreds of copies which made it an expensive proposition.
As usual, the ‘Net has changed everything and over the last few years and print on demand (also called publish on demand, and in both cases abbreviated as “PoD”) services such as Lightning Source and Booksurge have appeared making the expensive old school self-publishing market more or less obsolete.
That’s not to say that Lightning Source and Booksurge are inexpensive: Lightning Source’s Standard Publishing Package via their affiliate, 1st World Publishing, is $1,899 for a complete promotional package and Booksurge starts at $799 for more basic set of products. In both cases you get 10 soft-bound copies of your publication.
What if you only want one or two copies of your book, maybe as family gifts or maybe you want hundreds to use as a glorified business cards to give to your clients? Then cost becomes a huge factor.
A few companies have tackled this market such as CreateSpace but the customer feedback (for example, see the Corante blog for some comments from dissatisfied customers) has not been great.
A new company, FastPencil, has recently been launched that is extremely price competitive, provides a slick, streamlined workflow, and gingers it up with a measure of social networking.
While I am impressed by the service’s Web interface through which you can create your opus it is the pricing that astounds me: FastPencil will print on demand and deliver a single copy of a 100-page book in trade paperback format (black and white, 5.32-inch by 8.51-inch) for the amazing price of less than $10!
The Web interface really is very good and the features well thought out. There’s no charge until you print something and you can start creating books as soon as you sign up. You can edit your content directly into their system adding chapters and subsections along with basic text decoration or, if you want a more sophisticated layout you can edit in, say, Word, export to PDF and upload. You can even have FastPencil convert your blog into a book!
You can also set up your front and back covers including color artwork and configure the spine text and layout and exporting to e-book format is free.
The social networking side of FastPencil looks promising: You can allow others to proofread and or edit your work and you can make your books public or private, allow comments, create 140 character public messages (why no integration with Twitter?) and keep notes. It will be interesting to see if authoring and publishing communities develop. This actually is something that I would encourage FastPencil to invest in with things like integration with other social services as it is a natural for their marketplace.
In its packages FastPencil offers professional editing, layout design, page review services, acquisition of an ISBN number, channel distribution (through partners), and author support in their Silver and Gold package plans ($399 and $999 respectively) or as chargeable options on the Basic free plan.
I have great expectations for FastPencil … Great Expectations … that would be a good name for a book …
Web Applications Alert Bonus: FastPencil has offered the first five readers to write in a copy of a book they create in FastPencil to be printed and shipped to them for free!
