I am starting a new series of posts on How To Publish Your Book. The series will take you through the basic process of getting your book published and delivered to market.
It seems like many of us have a book inside just waiting to come out. With all the changes going on today and the falling of the publishing, distribution, and marketing gatekeepers it is getting easier and easier to bring your book to market.
What is a Book?
Wikipedia defines a book as:
“A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
Well that is one definition. Books have changed a lot especially with the growth of e-books. We use to think of a book as a physical things that was maybe 300 pages long, printed on paper, nice cover, permanent. Not any more. Books can be any length, even one page. In electronic form it is hard to tell how big a book is, it all depends on the device that you are reading it on. It is more about the information then the length. Books use to be permanent, once printed you couldn’t change them. Now with print-on-demand and e-books, if you want to make a change you just upload a new file. Books can be constantly updated. This has pulled the rug out from under traditional publishers but has opened up tremendous opportunities for authors. Books can be in physical form, electronic form, pdf, audio, video, long and very short.
From my own experience I have found it is way easier to write and deliver six 60 page books than one 360 page book. You can now turn your six books into a series or volumes, combine them back together into a collectors edition of all six. It is more like the days of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle when books were serialized. You can now charge for all six and make more money than you can for the one.
What a book is today is a shifting concept but one that fits very well into the internet and the electronic world.
The next post will cover Why Should I Self-Publish My Book?.
