A look behind the scenes of getting a book out the door

I've been asked many times about what it was like to self publish our last book (http://www.thecrmbook.com).  Overall it was an good experience that we would certainly do again for the right topic/audience.   I wrote a blog post a couple weeks go here that highlights some of the behind the scenes details including the fact that it takes a lot more effort than just the author or author team to get a book out the door.  You can read the blog post here.

Last week, Julie who took on the traditional editor and publishing roles for the book did a podcast with CS TechCast talking about some other details - you can listen to that here.  She did a great job with the book and just last week even still volunteered to be part of a future book project!

One of the biggest differences between publishing with a larger player and doing it yourself, is when you do it yourself you have to take care of all the little things.  These can be minor things like getting your ISBN number to more important things like getting into the PDC book store!

Self publishing does also give you more control over the schedule and content.  In my experience with working with larger publishers I never saw that as a huge problem, but self publishing we did find offered a little more flexibility.  That can work both ways because the only push you get to get the book out the door will come from your own team as there is no contract date that you are trying to keep!

One area we did find less approachable was the books online companies - books24x7, safari and others all seemed to stuck on the traditional model. That really surprised me because since they deliver digital content I assumed they would be more approachable by smaller publishers. 

Other areas we are still investigating are things like getting it on the Kindle.  As you go into the mobile formats, format becomes the issue because the content has to be formatted to get into a usable device structure.  This is another area where I was surprised that there weren't enough tools to make this a no brainer.   Question - Do you want tech books on your Kindle or other mobile device?

We also learned a lot about Microsoft Word - we learned that Master documents are evil, and that Microsoft Word automation via VSTO was our friend to help be able to build a full book document from the part chapters.  It still required a little bit of manual editing to do the final touches but certainly helped reduce a lot of the manually effort.

I did a lot of proofing while I was traveling.  For that we used a combination of Kinko's to print out a few chapters and also http://lulu.com which is great for printing or two copies.  Lulu does a great job of putting an easy front end for people who just need to publish a few copies and change content frequently - as they don't charge each time you update the content.  In the end, our books are printed by another company that also makes sure they get into Amazon and other distribution channels.  Unlike Lulu, they charge us when we update content etc.  So while they are great for the final product that's produced in higher volume, I loved being able to order one copy for review early on thru lulu.

And of course I wouldn't be complete without mentioning that we used TFS for managing the book content.  That includes both the book chapters and the code.  We leveraged the check in/checkout etc to pass around to the book team.  This worked well and was much less chaotic compared to the mass e-mailing I have seen where nobody knows for sure what the current version of a chapter is.  Using TFS, we got all the good stuff like labeling and easy version history.  I think Sharepoint could also do well for this process as well, but it was nice to have one tool to track both the chapters and the code.

In the end I think self publishing is an alternative to traditional publishing but certainly not a replacement.  It's also not for those that don't want to get their hands dirty, but if you want a little more control it's worth considering.