Gail,

Self-publishing is great if you have a small, specialized market/target audience. When it comes to publicity, remember that you'll (probably) need to do most of it. Also, you'll probably need to pay publishing costs up-front... out of your own pocket.

Gail:

I have self-published a couple of novels using booksurge.com, now a subsidiary of Amazon. The key to keeping the costs within reason was to do ALL the editing (with friends) and formatting myself. That meant preparing the professionally formatted high-quality PDFs with 300 dpi figures for downloading into their POD printer system, one for the cover and one for the body. It cost me $99 to get into their system and another $50 to get listed on Amazon (that was 3 years ago - recheck prices). On yes, I found I needed to get my own set of ISBN numbers -- another $250.

Take a look at Memphis 7.9 (revised) and Broken River on Amazon to see the results. Total sales about 900 copies so far combined, and I consider that a success.

You will have no luck with "regular" publishers unless you have a truly hot-selling concept (or your name is hot). Peak Oil is not a not a hot topic, just as earthquakes is not. In fact, most people shy away from negative concepts. Publishers are in business for the money only, and they will judge your book purely on that basis. You can expect a royalty of ~4%, going higher if it is a best-seller. You will have to do all the work on the promotion and marketing anyway -- they will give you suggestions on what to do, make arrangements for you to be places, and maybe give you a little advance to help you do it, but it will be your time and effort that make the difference.

Marketing is a matter of sending out PR and getting attention. TOD is a good start. Send free copies to other peakoilers and get someone(s) to write a review of the book The book should have its own website from which you can sell the book, or at least direct link to Amazon (~25% royalty). See www.the79scenario.com. You can also get on the lecture circuit and sell the books at the end of your talks.

Booksurge and Amazon offer one means for distribution, and a pretty good one, but it is Print On Demand. They have plans for authors to get their books into the book distributers, like Ingram, but it requires more of an investment, and the price points can become a problem. You may need to print several thousand copies using offset printing to get the low cost needed for the normal book channels into the brick and mortar book stores. Then you have the problem of storing the books.

I believe there is no real competition between having the PDF chapters on the Internet and selling hardcopies in places like Amazon. Some people demand hard copy; others will whine when they cannot get PDF files. They are not the same people. So do both, but your PDF files should tell them how to get their own "signed" copy from you for a price. Also, on the Internet you can ask for a donation to help defray the cost of your website and your time in writing the book everyone needs.

I am not sure about the situation in schools, except most of what I hear is that choice of school books is more political than quality driven. If you find some teachers that want to push your book, great.

Hope that helps. Good luck, and if you want more specific information, get in touch.

Sam Penny
the Prudent RVer
www.PrudentRVer.com

As one who has published a book used in college and tech-school classes ("Economics: Making Good Choices," Southwestern, ITP, 1996) I have some suggestions.

1. Write the book to please yourself. You can rewrite later to make editors happy.

2. College textbooks sales representatives can be very valuable resources. They know what is out there, what is selling, what publishers want.

3. An agent may help--but maybe not. I had a supposedly first rate agent who tried for a year to sell my book; he failed, even though he believed in the book and made substantial efforts to get editors to look at it.

4. Personal marketing is what worked for me. The editor who finally bought my book saw it because of the efforts of a sales rep who was a distant cousin of a former student of mine. The book nearly died three times, first when an editor got sick and died of cancer while the script was on her desk, and second when ITP bought Southwestern; then the acquiring ediotr (my chapmpion and mentor and sponsor and guy who wrote the advance check) moved on to another company.

5. When the book was first published there was no publicity, no advertising budget--so I took matters into my own hands and personally promoted the book at a big critical thinking conference. (A critical-thinking perspective is a distinctive feature of my book.) This promotion worked, and a woman whose family owns a chain of tech schools loved the book; they adopted it; many tens of thousands of copies were sold, and I got to retire early.

The most useful advice anybody can give to an author is:

Write the best book you can. Then hope that somebody likes it.

By the way, try to hold out for a goodly advance, because the bigger the author's advance the bigger will be the advertising budget.

Hi Gail,

I teach Science in further education in UK. I have also taught in schools.

In response to question 3, I would buy mostly from established educational publishers (for the library as well as the lab. book shelf) simply because of the reliability factor.

Also remember that schools are very curriculum/exam syllabus driven. So if PO is not on the syllabus (and it isn't here, although renewables/non-renewables are) then we generally don't have time to "teach" it from a specialised text. That's not to say that I don't manage to sneak the message in when the curriculum allows! :)

Really to answer 3. It all depends on who is doing the buying, how much time they have to research books and how much budget they have to buy books that deal with only a tiny part of a curriculum.

I wonder if there are many PO aware teachers out there?

Sally

PS Teachers do have an advantage over others when it comes to spreading the word - a captive audience! I only feel slightly guilty about this! :D

Hi Gail,

Kudos for the article. I'm looking forward to the rest of your series!

As for self-publishing, I would take a look at http://www.lulu.com/ Lots of people swear by them, and their services do seem pretty straightforward.

You can do it pretty cheap if you take care of all the typesetting + design yourself. I would recommend using a document processing system like LaTeX: it takes care of most of the hard typesetting decisions, and the results are professional in quality. Also, stay away from Excel if you want print-quality graphs (sadly, most graphs published here in the Oil Drum look cheap and amateurish because Excel makes such a terrible job). It is worth learning Gnuplot — and especially Asymptote — if you want beautiful professional graphs and illustrations:

http://www.gnuplot.info/
http://asymptote.sf.net/

(All of the above are Free Software!)

Here is also a quick link to Lulu's book cost calculator:
(as I said they are very straightforward)

http://www.lulu.com/includes/calc_book_inc.php

Hi Gail,

Thank you for doing this. It's wonderful to see.

I'd like to give some "quality time" to reading both of your posts, etc. - and don't have it for a few days. Any chance I could respond later w. comments?

I don't know anything about publishing. Still - have a few suggestions! :)

Yes, I would definitely try for a "regular" publishing co. My suggestion would be to email Paul Roberts (from his official website) http://www.the-end-of-oil.com and ask him if he might offer some suggestions. Perhaps his agent or editor could help you.

I say this because I have the view that people who are concerned at the level "we" are take a view towards supporting everyone's efforts. (At least, I hope so.)

New Society Publishers has published Richard Heinberg's books (not sure which ones), but you might try them, as well.

I have a couple of other suggestions of specific people to contact, and if you could email me (aniyacafe at yahoo dot com), I'll be happy to send you those as well.

Personally, I think there is a growing interest in "peak oil" and a huge need (and growing potential demand) for a book like this. Also, if it's published by a larger co, you might be able to add more graphics, perhaps even photos, etc.

From what I can see, for example, there's a surge of interest among college-age people in "peak" and environmental issues in general. I think your book is needed and welcome.