Timothy's Thoughts

   Pencil Drawing  P ublishing a coloring book seems like it might be a fun thing to do. I saw an article on eHow [1] in which Lesley Barker gave a process for doing it, starting with purchasing ISBNs from Bowker. From there, the article pretty much gave the general self-publishing process, with the exception of number two, which said to scan your artwork into the computer and save it as a jpeg. Lesley Barker’s article falls well short of a complete description of what must be done to publish a coloring book. Obtaining an ISBN and selecting a publishing company (a choice that will determine whether you even need to purchase an ISBN or not) are the least of your worries if you plan to publish a coloring book.  Ink Tracing of Pencil Drawing  The heart of a coloring book are the pictures. Creating a coloring book isn’t as simple as grabbing some of the free coloring sheets you find online and binding them in a book. Not only would it be illegal for you to copy ...

T oday, I’m writing a book review unlike any I have written before. Actually, I’m going to I’m reviewing two books and I haven’t read either one. As you may recall, some time ago, Thomas Nelson announced that they were entering the vanity press market, using the imprint WestBow Press. The first books out of that arrangement are making their way down the pipeline, two of which you can see here. The first thing I noticed when they arrived was the size of the box. I arrived home and saw the box sitting on my front step. My first thought was that they had only shipped on of them. The box is the same sized box Amazon.com uses to ship individual copies of my novels. I opened it up and found both novels stacked neatly, one on top of the other. Both books have the dimensions 6” x 9”, a fairly standard size for non-traditionally published books. Publishing a book with that dimension simplifies the process when a book will be published both as a paperback and a hardback. One of the books is p...

S ome time ago, I did a comparison of BookSurge, CreateSpace and Lulu in terms of value per dollar related to self-publishing a book. Both BookSurge and CreateSpace are owned by Amazon.com and recently they merged. I don’t think this surprised anyone, considering that having the two companies using two different pricing schemes only made things confusing, which is part of why I did that comparison. I recently received an e-mail from a reader, asking me to do a similar breakdown of the new CreateSpace. I am happy to do so. For our purposes, we will assume the author has a print-ready PDF for both the interior and the cover of the book. The author may have done this work himself, or he may have had someone else do it for him, but as he enters this process he believes he is ready to upload his files. In the new CreateSpace, he has several options. One is the Author’s Express Package. This is essentially the same cheapest possible package that was available under BookSurge and costs $299. ...

O kay guys and gals, I’m looking for self-published novels, specifically from WestBow Press, CrossBooks Publishing and (I’m sure I’ll regret this) from Harlequin Horizons (or DellArte Press or whatever they call themselves). Authors with a book published through one of these imprints or if you are in the process of publishing a book with one of these imprints, please attempt to persuade me to read you book by leaving comments to this post. If I select your book, I may be writing comments about it on this blog in the near future. Also, tell me which publishing package you chose and why. NOTE 1: You may want to peruse this blog and consider what kind of books I am likely to like and what will offend me. Failure to do so may result in a flaming review. NOTE 2: This offer stays open until…well, until I decide to close it.

A s I’m sure you’ve heard, Thomas Nelson has launched a subsidy publisher , WestBow Press. I don’t have enough information to do a complete analysis of this new kid on the block and compare it to the subsidy publishers that came before it. WestBow Press is similar to other companies that sit between true self-publishing companies like Lightning Source and BookSurge and traditional publishers. The way these companies work it that the author provides some amount of money and the company provides workers and services. The author takes on all or most of the risk in publishing the book, or the publisher charges high prices for the book so that the profits on the few successful books will make up for the losses on the rest. There is a broad spectrum across which subsidy publishers are distributed when we consider every company between BookSurge and PublishAmerica. Some place more risk on the author, some less. I don’t have enough information to know where WestBow Press fits on this spectrum....