What do you need?

With HOW TO PUBLISH YOURSELF, you will have asked yourself a series of extremely important questions... and you will know how to do what publishing requires - so all you need to ask yourself now is: :: How much do I want to do myself? :: What do I want to pay other people to do? :: As a publisher, you will need: A manuscript - that's your job, and may be all that you want to produce yourself A typist A typesetter - you can do both these yourself, if you've got a word processor; and, as Peter points out, half the cost of producing a book goes on the typesetting A copy editor - this is a must: we are too close to our work to notice our own mistakes. A book designer - you can do this yourself, too, if you've got the software for desk top publishing. A designer for the jacket - both front and back - once again, if you're artistic .......... A distributor - Booksellers buy @ 35% discount, carriage paid; and pay up (with luck) within 30 days. For the full package, ie storing, repping, supplying and chasing invoices, a distributor will charge about 25% of the discounted price, plus VAT (which you can reclaim, if you are registered). To follow these sums through: my EASY BEING retails at £8.99: Retail Price £8.99 Less 35% - to the bookshop - £3.15 Wholesale Price - paid by the bookshop £5.84 Less 25% - to the distributer - £1.46 Sub total £4.38 Less VAT @ 17.5% - £0.77 I receive per book (within 90 days) £3.61 I then reclaim the VAT and we're back to £4.38 per book (a lot less than £8.99 - which I'd get if I sold them one by one, myself), but I can't be bothered with all the nitty gritty of distribution, so I'm happy to pay someone else to do it. It is up to you to decide how much you want to do. A publicist - people need to know that your masterpiece is available, and miles of column inches are devoted to books£nbsp;- not to mention volumes of sound bites and television exposure. Journalists and programme producers have time and space to fill - your masterpiece could be just what they are looking for. The capital - (this is the only disadvantage of DIY). To give you a vague idea of prices: EASY BEING is 224 pages, paperback, with black and white diagrams and photographs. I produced it on disk for the designer, and the whole exercise cost about £10,000 for 5,000 copies (ex VAT) - ie £2 per book - of which the printers' bill was about £6,500. The huge cost of printing is for setting up: for reprinting, a run-on of 1,000 will only cost about £700, ie 70p per book - which is rather different. TIP: Register for VAT. There is no VAT on books, but a whacking great 17.5% is added on to every bill you pay in the course of production; and you can't afford it. It does mean doing your accounts every quarter, but you get the VAT back. And I've had nothing but kindness from the VAT people - they know I'm not an accountant, and fully expect me to ask silly questions and make mistakes. The size of the first printing is important - for example, if I had only printed 50 copies, no one would have been able to afford to buy them; whereas, if I had printed 100,000, I would be making an enormous profit per book, but how long would it take me to repay the capital investment? You have to decide for yourself. If you are already an established author, then you can more or less guarantee sales. How big was the first print run of your last book? I chose the figure of 5,000 because my first book LAZY LEARNING had a first print run of 5,500; it was published in June 1994 and, by November of that year, was out of print. So I reckoned 5,000 was a fairly safe bet. LAZY LEARNING has been reprinted every year since publication, which is a nice little earner for the publishers, whereas I still get the same royalty as I did on the first print run. A Company name for your Publishing House. Mine is The Useful Book Company and is an unlimited company because it's just me and I'm operating on my own from home, ie no huge company debts for which I could be liable.(NB Check with Companies House in Cardiff; - or wherever is necessary if you are not in the UK - that no one else is using the name you have chosen.)