Monday, January 17, 2011

A New Book Already

Strange though it may seem, I’m nearing completion on my work in progress. Last year, I worked on a novel for much of the year, decided the story wasn’t working and pulled an old manuscript out of the closet. I did significant rework on it, so I wasn’t sure I would publish a book at all in 2010, but on December 18 Mother Not Wanted was published. Tomorrow marks the one-month anniversary, so maybe I shouldn’t allow myself to feel that frustration that my post on Friday showed. But already I’m talking about releasing my latest work in progress. We aren’t even a month into the new year.


It is to my advantage that this book is non-fiction. I’m optimistic that this book will sell more copies than Church Website Design: A step by step approach. If you’re keeping tabs, Church Website Design is my bestselling book and is keeping my publishing endeavors in the black. But the market for a book like that is much smaller than the potential market for this new book. This new book is aimed at self-publishers and small presses. There were about half a million books published by self-publishers and small presses last year, so the potential is huge.


The book itself takes a similar tone to that of Church Website Design in that it get people over the learning curve and to encourage them to produce something better than what most beginners are producing. But rather than cover the topic of website design, this book deals with book cover design. It’s doubtful that the book contains anything that a graphic design professional doesn’t already know, but I’m not aiming at the graphic design professional. Instead, my aim is on those people who have decided to self-publish a book and have done little in the way of graphic design, those people who want to better understand what a cover designer has to do and those people who might have the opportunity to reject the cover their small press publisher has offered and design their own. To that end, I’ve limited the scope of the book to tools that are free or low cost, so that the profits aren’t eaten up by the cover design.


This book will be self-published and it will remain self-published. One thing I hate to see is a book about self-publishing that isn’t self-published. An author who isn’t himself a self-publishing enthusiast has no business writing about how to self-publish. Another thing about the book is that it will be printed in full color using the POD printing method. I field a lot of questions about the suitability of POD for printing color. The nature of the book necessitates the need for it to be in full color, but it will also give me a product that I can point to as an example of what is possible with POD color printing.