Ask me anything
Recent Responses
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If a publisher wants YOU to pay THEM to publish your book, RUN AWAY as fast as you can. That's because it really means they are in the business of making money off of you instead of making money from selling your book.
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In theory, sure. After all, we just published a choreography book. Send our editor Ana the link at anastasia[dot]wraight[at]tstc.edu and she'll be happy to take a look at them.
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Quitting my relatively secure job as a college English instructor to start a book publishing business, always dicier and more ephemeral. -- Mark Long
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No. I would not use MS Publisher (any version) to create a book. Period! Invest in Adobe InDesign and/or hire a freelance designer who uses that program to lay out your book. Since the amount a good, reasonably priced freelancer will charge you will likely be less than buying and then learning InDesign or going crazy trying to use Publisher, that is probably your best bet. Just off the top of my head, I would recommend Steve Tiano at http://www.tianodesign.com/.
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That there's just not enough time in each day to keep pushing each book project forward as much as we'd like. A close runner up, however, would be people who still think we're printers instead of book publishers!
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As for writing a book, I'll stick to talking non-fiction since that's primarily what we do. (The process of writing a novel? Write about 250,000 words and then cut it down to the best 80,000 that tell the story you've discovered along the way.) If you've got an idea for a non-fiction book:
1) Do a market analysis--it's as simple as doing a keyword search at Amazon--to find other titles on the same subject. What's out there? What seems to be selling? What does your prospective book have to offer that book on the market don't already offer? Make sure to be able to identify the specific audience(s)/demographic for your book.
2) If it looks like your book actual fills a market need not already being met, write a brief table of contents--just half a page--that lists the chapter & their subjects in the order you'd like to see them in.
3) Write an expanded table of contents that's 2-3 pages long where you have a paragraph or so that details more specifically what content is to be covered in each chapter as well as the features in each chapter. That is, for us, doing instructional materials, you'll typically have learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, main sections that dovetail with your objectives, suggested additional resources, a glossary, review questions, application questions and/or labs.
4) Write a sample chapter . . . preferably not the first or last chapter of the book since those tend not to necessarily mirror the structure of the chapters in between.
5) Submit your market analysis, brief and expanded table of contents, and sample chapter to publishers who have books in your subject area to get their take on your proposal.
6) If you get the go ahead from a publisher, write the rest of the book. Or, even if you don't get a thumbs up but still think there is a market for you book, write it anyway.
7) As you finish chapters, submit them to one or more subject matter experts well versed in your book's topic to get their feedback.
8) When you get your book finished and polished, keep submitting to publishers.
9) Repeat step 8 until a publisher bites. Or self-publish your book. But that's a whole other rat's nest to get into! <g> -
Well, the first key thing when laying out a book--even before you start worrying about which kind of software to use--is to have a handle on the fundamentals of book design it. The book that I'd recommend along those lines--this is thanks to Steve Tiano, a freelance book designer at www.tianodesign.com--is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst (http://amzn.to/aRaVZ1).
After that, there are plenty of InDesign guides available at Amazon: http://amzn.to/aqfmIH. If you're not familiar with InDesign already, though, probably the best thing to do--because of its STEEP learning curve--is to take a class or workshop of some sort in its fundamentals. We're lucky because the graphics interns we use from Texas State Technical College (that's the school we publish at) are already pretty well versed in the software and it's just a matter of handing particular book/page specs off to them. But, if it wasn't for the training/instruction they get before they get to us, it would be a pretty hard row for them to hoe. -
Well, the easy answer is probably not, at least not in the foreseeable future.
That's because book publishers typically try to build product lines made up of a series of books on a particular topic or subject area. One example of this for us is the TechCareers series which focuses on different technical career fields like wind energy, biomedical equipment technicians, gaming programmers, avionics, and so on. And, each product line you create typically has very specific channels that you sell and market it through. For example, if you publish a cookbook, that is marketed completely differently (and sold through different retailers) than a biomedical equipment textbook. So, for us, publishing one fiction book wouldn't be worth the relative amount of effort it would take to develop the marketing and sales channels to sell enough copies to make money. Plus, our niche is technical/academic textbooks, career guides, some technology forecasting, with some one-off trade books like the Waco history book we have coming out this fall . . . and you want to have a clearly defined publishing niche so that you have--in theory--a cluster of related titles instead of a big group of books completely unrelated to each other.
All that being said, however, a couple of years ago we were kicking around the idea of trying to publish a young adult (YA) series of novels that were somehow fundamentally tied into technology, technical career fields, technology education, or something clearly along those lines. There are lots of interactive, community/story-based Web sites designed to get kids interested in science, technology, engineering, and/or math (STEM) subjects like Whyville and I don't see any reason that you couldn't do the same thing with YA novels, especially if you had a strong ancillary interactive digital presence to go with each title. But, we didn't really come across any potential manuscripts along these lines and, to be honest, with the limited resources that we have available, we're more likely better off developing existing product lines than building a new one like this from scratch.
Finally, though, to some degree each book is taken on a case by case basis. If we get a book proposal that clearly fills a market need, has a potentially long shelf life, and looks to make money from the get go, we'll consider it. But, "from the get go" means that we think we can move a minimum of 2000 copies upon publication. That's one of the reasons we're doing our Waco history book . . . most of the books out there on the market are 10-45 years old, our book has a more academic slant as opposed to just being a big collection of photos with captions, and we feel that it will be a steady seller for years to come. -
Well, as a relatively new start-up, the first thing we're trying to do is get our sales up to where we're actually operating in the black financially all year round. (Given that 1/2 our revenue comes from book sales for the fall semester, we're always in the black for 6-7 months after that while the expenses gradually rise to meet incoming revenue.)
Beyond that, though, in terms of products and services, we're looking to do more digital editions (that is, ebooks) of our current and future titles. However, I think the big concept to keep in mind there is that an ebook cannot (or, at least, should not) "just" be an electronic representation of a printed book. Instead, an ebook must fundamentally create a new narrative of the printed book that subsequently uses all those additional features and capabilities--video, audio, Web 2.0 interactivity--so that what you have is a "book" (this is being used in a very loose way)that embraces all the possibilities that the Web/software can offer.
That being said, with our limited resources--we carry 5 full-time employees so we're no Random House or Cengage--we're trying to be very thoughtful and deliberate about all this so that we don't go off half cocked and wind up misdirecting the capabilities we do have by following some non-productive rabbit trail. -
Typically, we publish 10-15 books year: 3-5 technical career guides, 3-5 textbooks, and 2-3 general trade titles.
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Well . . . we'd hope for questions that are publishing related but queries about Dallas Cowboys football and/or movies are always welcome as well!
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Publishing for Profit by Tom Woll . . . because he was publishing for a profit in order to write it with authorial authority!
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TSTC Publishing’s Bio
Waco, TX
A small college textbook publisher at Texas State Technical College.
