Hi Scooter-Guy,
When we wrote our book,
The Adventurer’s Guide to Early Retirement, A Common Sense Approach, there were lots of things to consider.
One, was that we didn’t want to go through the whole scenario of begging a publisher to take us, and having an Editor dilute our message. We knew that self-publishing was the direction we wanted to take, but then we didn’t want to wallpaper our living room with the books that might not sell.
There were storage issues, sell-off issues, distribution issues and the cost of printing the kind of book we wanted to offer, not to mention that we are Perpetual Travelers, and have been now for going on 18 years.
The last thing we wanted to do was to give up this traveling lifestyle to baby-sit a book!
(Read:
The Birthing of Our Book: http://www.retireearlylifestyle.com/the_birthing.htm )
We were basically stalled at this point, until we thought of putting the book onto a CD-Rom in HTML format - we did NOT want to have a PDF format (this was in 2005). For us, this was the best possible solution. The book was lightweight, easy for travel, and we now offer a Download Version as well.
We had to look into payment systems too, that could be managed from ‘anywhere’ and didn’t require someone to stay in a permanent location receiving mail, cashing checks, swiping credit cards, answering phones, and so on. This is why we chose
PayPal.
Yes, some people have issues with buying online, and some people have issues with reading books on their computer. But we have found that this system easily let us go international instantly, without keeping a large inventory. It allowed us to maintain our Perpetual movement without having to base our lives around a storage locker.
Having the book on CD-Rom has allowed us to put video, sound, and very large full color photos. We can update our book without worrying about massive costs and we have them professionally ‘stamped’ by a software publisher -- we don’t burn them ourselves…
Another thing you must seriously consider if you are going to publish your book yourself, and this is promotion.
When you have a publishing house, part of the cost of the book besides the printing fees themselves, is that you will have someone working on distribution - libraries, Amazon, book signings, book stores and so on. If you self publish, you will be doing this yourself.
You can get an ISBN number printed on the CD book by applying for one, and then having the software publisher stamp that number on the CD when he silkscreens the book cover.
Take a look at our
Order Page:
http://www.retireearlylifestyle.com/orderpage.htm
and here’s the
Table of Contents: http://www.retireearlylifestyle.com/table_of_contents2-3rd.htm
In our situation, this was the perfect answer. It has kept the book affordable both to print and to ship, and relatively easy and less costly to update.
Hope this information helps. BTW, ‘everyone’ said it couldn’t be done and that ‘no one’ would buy it. We have now sold in 31 countries and are on our 3rd edition.
Be well,
Akaisha
Author,
The Adventurer’s Guide to Early Retirement
