Go Figure

Now I’m excited about self-publishing my novel. I spent the weekend investigating self-publishing, designing the innards of my novel as well as the cover. I suck at Photoshop so the cover is very spare. In an ultra-secret private correspondence, Empty Drum wrote to me how these are great times to be an artist. There’s no reason to wait around to be published or discovered, artists can do everything themselves. Made me feel better about the prospect of publishing myself.

I’m thinking about publishing with Lulu.com. Amazingly, they’re free. You just upload the guts and the cover of the book and they charge you by each book you order. You can order only one book and you don’t even have to make the book public. It’s a great service. No professional binder will let you order just one or two books. Most other self-publishers charge at least $500 and from what I gather the books look about the same. I’m going to get one book from Lulu and see how it turns out. My friend has a novel called The Spoon on Xlibris. Looks like a real book to me. I stole many of the elements of his book to design my own. A good read too so buy it.

I’m sure there’s a lot of embarrassing writing on Lulu. Just like blogs, anyone can do it, so you have to sift through a lot to get to decent writing. I haven’t read my novel in a while so I don’t know how it reads these days. It might lend itself to self-publishing than other novels I’ve written because it reads quickly, so some say. Lulu might be to publishing what blogging is to journalism: a very interesting development and the jury’s still out about where it’s going to lead.

This blog has enough readers so maybe one or two people will buy the novel. I know some people who run a magazine in L.A. (The L.A. Innuendo), maybe they could review it. I’ll at least have something I can give to people I meet. Without self-publishing, I wouldn’t be able to say these things. It would have been another novel laying lifelessly on the shelf. I’m looking forward to getting a book out there. I wonder what took me so long. I was just hoping that I’d finally get that magical publishing deal. Instead, I have to do everything myself. Story of my life.