I had another email from the people who want to publish this blog, but have ignored it. I can do it myself.
One thing I noticed from talking to smokers in sunny Wales was that most of them never or rarely use the internet at all, other than for buying things or Email or Farcebook. They don’t even know what blogs are, much less look them up.
They do know what Amazon is, and lots of people have Kindles or some similar device.
Getting a print book onto Amazon costs nothing. Getting ebooks out costs nothing either, and you can make ebooks dirt cheap. There is a price limit with print, obviously, but you can put out a Kindle ebook at 99 cents (about 80p in proper British money) no matter how big it is. You can even give the damn thing away in any format anyone wants.
Pat Nurse has been thinking of putting some blog posts out that way, as have I. Cover art is important but it doesn’t have to be brilliant, it just has to fit the required format. I can do it, I have some practice now so I can do it reasonably well, if I say so myself.
Some people will want the posts in real print on paper. For that, I found that around 40 pages is the minimum to make it worth doing. Any less and it costs the same so for value for money, a 40 page booklet is the one to go for. Bigger is better, but the price does go up.
The great thing about print books is that they are easily passed around. Unlike ebooks, which require computer use. So, give one person a print book and it will pass to someone else, then someone else, and so on.
Print books can be ‘forgotten’ in waiting rooms, on trains, buses and planes, coffee shops and the rooms that used to be smoking rooms at work.
We are making progress on the internet but many smokers aren’t on here. Those that are, have no idea where to find us. To reach them, we have to leave them clues.
The print books will cost us money but we can add a small amount to the price which will help defray the costs and help to fund future books. Not too much, they have to be cheap to be tempting. The sort of book someone might add to their Amazon order just to tip them over the free-delivery limit.
In the back of every book there must be a blog list. Or, perhaps better, a link to a blog list. Within the text, not too many URLs especially in print, because they are dull to read. References can be listed at the back if needed.
If we all did this, then any search for ‘smoking’ on Amazon would turn up page after page of results. Then, all we need do is tell those huddled masses outside the pubs to go on Amazon and type in ‘smoking’.
Even if the antismokers take one of us down, if we all do it independently we will be very hard to kill.
I also had another email from them. This time I replied to say that I needed no assistance in publishing my blog: I was already doing so.
I think that maybe they believe that something’s only been ‘properly’ published if it’s printed on paper between hard covers, under a dust cover showing Tarzan swinging from a liana with Jane away from the pursuing chimp hordes. Or something..
Paper print costs nothing too, and you can keep full control. Although the new eBook means you can let people load up a block of posts in any format they like and since it costs nothing, you can make it free at no loss.
I think they are fishing for content for their business. We don’t need a middleman pushing up costs.
Print on demand is a possibility for no-cost print books – they literally just print them up as they are ordered.
Lulu.com may be worth investigating – gives you ISBN numbers and automatic listings on Amazon etc, too. Also gives you a downloadable version (not sure if Kindle-ready), too.
I’ve used Lulu for a long time, but found CreateSpace gets onto Amazon quicker. Some months back there was some kind of hoo-hah between Lulu and Amazon and all the Lulu books were taken off. No matter, CreateSpace does it for free.
There have been recent developments. A few months ago you could only get listed on Amazon US. Now you get onto UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy Amazon for no cost.
Kindle, I do myself, it’s easy. Smashwords is no use for sales but if you get the guidelines right they’ll put you into Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and others. No cost.
I’ve been trying to find time to write this all down…
I have had similar approaches but frankly I just regard it as a extension of vanity publishing.
If you want to read my blog, then you can read it on – er – my blog, so what’s the point?
I did publish a collection of my 2010 posts in book form and it’s available for download on the blog as a pdf file. I thought about doing the same for 2011, but I figured it’s a shed load of work so why bother?
Pat’s thoughts are about getting the salient posts into print so we can hand them out. Not to make us rich but to get he message out at minimal cost to ourselves.
It breaks us out of our online straitjacket. The MSM will never listen, perhaps the customers waiting at the barbers or the doctors will?
Are .pdf’s and blog-sites downloadable and readable on those various brands of e-Books if they have a wi-fi connection? If so, that is a vast reading audience potential because of so many having them with them while commuting and so forth.
Blogs are not readable on the gadgets but can easily be converted – for free – and then passed around.
Fantastic idea. I’ve been giving out copies of one of Frank’s blog posts whilst conducting the Isis survey. None of those surveyed read blogs and get all their news from the MSM (let alone read smoking blogs).
Please do it.
Probably thinking along different lines, I usually do. How about a book called something like The Joy of Smoking. It could be one of those photo books like Tokyo A Certain Style. It could be filled with pictures of people really enjoying a good smoke in a variety of interesting places. It’s a shame the Kindle can’t do colour. I’m sure Flawless Dierdrie is not quite so titillating in 16-level grey scale.
Roobeedoo has alerted me to an interesting possibility: of us bloggers coming out with a book full of selected blog posts. I think that’s a delightful idea, and I’m up for it. It’d be wonderful to be published somewhere alongside Leggie. But I haven’t a clue which of my posts (if any) anyone would want to print. Except for the one Roobee printed, obviously.
I have that problem too – which posts would be best? If you go to ‘posts’ in WordPress you can list them by the number of comments. That might be the best way to choose.
What I’m thinking is that I should write down the free-publishing and free-advertising tricks I’ve been using. Straightforward instructions. Then we can all do our own collections at our own pace.
Harder to shut us all down if we don’t centralise
Then, one book, containing a post or two from as many of us who want to contribute, that will advertise them all. We’d make that a free eBook and as-cheap-as-possible paper book and every few months, put out another one.
I asked my commenters recently what posts of mine (if any) they’d liked. They were quite voluble. There were quite a few they liked. I may just go and have a look at what they said again.
I’m certainly not the best judge. I just write the stuff, and I like some of it for some pretty obscure reasons that nobody else understands.
Number of comments is a possibility, but my maximum comment numbers are found during the CATCH debates of 18 months ago, which a lot of people were interested in.
I think I’d want something that was quite well-written, and might interest someone just because of that.