Bob Spear is a long-time bokstore owner, book reviewer & packager, and self-published author. Bob has published 11 books of nonfiction and is working on five mysteries to be self-published soon. He currently blogs about his venture back into the world of self-publishing with his latest mystery, Quad Delta.

First—why did you pick Lightning Source over the others? Was it the price vs. service level, reputation, print quality, or something else? What publishers have you used in the past?

Lightning Source is a top quality digital printer and a distributor, not really a publisher. I have a great local source for digital printing, which is as cheap when taking into account that they deliver my books for free. I just used their services for my first 50 books. On the other hand, Lightning Source is wholly-owned by the world’s largest book distributor: Ingram. Normally Ingram will not distribute my titles because they require a publisher to offer at least 10 different ones. Because I’m going through Lightning Source, they now will distribute me regardless of how many titles I offer. That’s a huge advantage.

Nor is their service exclusive. They know I can also go local when I need something immediately, and that’s okay by them. A similar service exists from BookSurge, which is owned by Amazon.

What service level did you choose, why, and how much did it cost? Are you happy with what you get for the price?

Because of their distribution service, I have signed on for two levels of service:

The first service is to print any number I order and ship to me to sell as I can, and I pay for shipping. I pay their agreed-to printing price, which varies by page number and size and is spelled out in their downloadable materials.

The second service is for them to print onesies and send them to whatever retailer orders them direct from Ingram distributors. That costs me a standard distributor’s discount of 55% and nothing else for the printing. The retailer pays directly to Ingram for the shipping.

Rights: who retains them, and for how long? In whose name is the ISBN registered?

I supply my ISBN that I obtained on my own from Bowker. The rights are all mine. Remember, these guys are a printer/distributor, not a publisher or a vanity press, some of which (like Publish America) can tie up your rights for seven years or even forever. Caveat Emptor—let the buyer beware.

Self-sales: does the printer give author- or bulk-discounts if I want to purchase copies to distribute locally? Lightning Source is owned by Ingram, with its massive distribution channels. How heavily did that weigh in your choice?

It’s Ingram’s distribution system that is the primary reason I’m using Lightning Source for digital printing. Digital printing is best only for small quantities that may be needed quickly or to test a market or to send to reviewers in advance. Digital printing is too expensive per book to use as a primary source for day-to-day sales to the book industry, which may ask for 40 to 65% trade discounts to do business with retailers and two levels of distributors. For that, you’ll need to take the risk of printing lots of 500 to 1,000 or more via traditional offset printing. Paying more per book for the security of digital printing really isn’t viable over the long run. Lightning Source will be happy to bid on offset print runs—which they will job out—but so will any printer, under the right circumstances.

Quality: some people are saying self-publishing’s not publishing, just really, really, really good photocopying. Is that your experience? Are you pleased with the quality of what you pay for?

Self-publishing is not just printing. It’s doing everything from production to marketing yourself. Digital printing these days, on the other hand, looks as good as offset—with the exception of color printing, where offset printing uses inks that mix and blend, while digital uses either toner or wax in color layers, which usually comes out a little darker than the ink blends.

How do you like working with Lightning Source, personally? Do you find them pleasant and helpful, informative, really inspiring? Or simply business-like? Or does the service kind of suck, but worth it for what you get? Would you recommend others use them, and would you use them again yourselves?

I have been frustrated in that I haven’t been able to use their file-uploading system, for some weird reason. I had to send the files on a CD via US mail. They were nice enough, but insisted that the problem had to be at my end because of my server. This is after trying to use my Mac and my PC on Roadrunner cable from home and my PC laptop over ATT’s DSL system down at our bookstore, The Book Barn. That was frustrating, but I worked around it. Fortunately, I had that local source for digital printing that tided me over with an initial print run of 50 copies.

Remember, also, that I do true full-service publishing for myself. I don’t need iUniverse or Booklocker or Author House, et al, because I can do all the things they offer for cheaper and with total control.

Bob Spear is the author of Quad Delta, among other self-published titles. He can be reached through Sharp Spear Enterprises and his Book Trends blog.

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos independently published her book, Silent Sorority, on April 18, 2009, after eighteen months of approaching traditional publishers from her background as a professional marketer.

She did her due diligence, spent five years writing her book, hired an editor and designer, identified her unique, focused market, and blogged and networked conscientiously to build her platform. (You should see the number of comments on her site.) She researched agents and had some enlightening conversations. The bottom line? She was writing for “too specialized” a target market. No one would publish for an audience “that small.”

Pamela’s niche market? The infertile for whom medical intervention does not work. Those who fall through the cracks of the massive fertility industry ($3 billion in the U.S. alone). A grieving community for whom no books, apparently, are published—not because those readers aren’t there, but because nobody in traditional publishing knows they are.

Pamela is one writer who is also a successful marketer. And she agreed to be my next interviewee on indie publishing.

First—what printer did you use? Why? Was it the price vs. service level, reputation, print quality, or something else?

BookSurge. It was at the time one of two companies that Amazon had acquired.

I did a lot of diligence about what different vendors would provide in the way of services. I wanted control over artwork and cover—BookSurge did offer turnkey, but they also had a very lightweight offering that said, If you provide us with everything, we will assign you a publishing consultant to guide you through the process. It was $300 to turn over my fully-formatted and -designed book.

They sent two different final proofs, with covers, to read. I found a few more typos I didn’t catch in my formatted files and got them back to them for revision. I approved the final galley, and within a week it was up and available for purchase on Amazon.

What service level did you choose, why, and how much did it cost? Were you happy with what you got for the price?

BookSurge no longer exists—it got merged with CreateSpace—so I was lucky, I got the tail end, because CreateSpace at the time was entirely self-service. At BookSurge, I had the name of a person who was my account contact, so I had a go-to person. At CreateSpace, in April 2009, you didn’t have that extra layer of protection in terms of service available. (I recently found a link that compares the BookSurge to CreateSpace offerings.)

Rights: who retains them, and for how long? In whose name is the ISBN registered?

I own my copyright. I did register for it. It’s one of those administrative tasks that are absolutely must-have. I applied to the copyright office a year before my book came out. I submitted for the copyright, ISBN, Library of Congress, all in my own name.

Daniel Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual is phenomenal. He’s really good about giving self-pub authors help, he’ll sit the book on his website, he’s got a newsletter. It’s been around for awhile, and he’s updated and added a bunch of things.

His recommendation was to create your own publishing company. (It was way too much to do for tax purposes, for me). He has a checklist.

Self-sales: does the printer give author- or bulk-discounts if I want to purchase copies to distribute locally? If the publisher is not associated with a major distribution channel (like Ingram), doesn’t it then cost a lot of money to place physical copies at local bookstores?

CreateSpace is associated with Ingram. CreateSpace allows me to buy one copy and gives me an online store, whereas BookSurge had an author discount only if you bought a bulk number of copies.

My royalties went up when BookSurge merged with CreateSpace. If you click on Buy the Book, it takes you to what looks like a storefront. Amazon completes the transaction, but I get $8.50 for every book sold on my storefront, and on Amazon I get $5.75. My cost for books I buy is only $3.44.

I have had a couple of wholesale distributors buy, but for most folks fertility is a fairly narrow topic, so if you’re a bookseller my book is not necessarily a must-have.

Barnes & Noble—I ended up sending a copy of my book to B&N for review, and I got this very official form letter that said, We don’t believe this title has a broad distribution opportunity, so no, thanks. But I ended up going through Smashwords. The CEO/Founder Mark Coker does an amazing job (for no charge) helping authors convert their manuscripts to ebook formats. He has a relationship with B&N and Sony, and in a matter of weeks—literally, from the time I took it from print PDF to ebook—it became available through B&N. (You can submit your book separately as a Kindle, but you get higher royalties through Smashwords.)

Depending on what you sign up for, the way of quality control, you may get different experiences. But CreateSpace and Smashwords are as good as a bookstore. And I would encourage people to take copies to libraries.

Quality: some people are saying indie publishing companies are not publishers, just really, really, really good photocopiers. Was that your experience? Where you pleased with the quality of what you paid for?

The book quality, in the end, was as good as you’d find in a library or bookstore. I did hire a book designer, which gave me professionally-formatted PDF files that were then uploaded and used for the first book proof. I took the time to get a good book designer. I found her on on Elance, a San Francisco Bay Area marketplace of freelancers. I typed in a proposal, and people bid on the project. Elance is great. You can check references. They take a small percentage of the total amount paid. I also hired a great editor.

You know, If someone just has a personal interest in sharing a story with immediate family and friends, there are tools that allow people to do that. Shutterfly—there are a variety of other ones—there are ways to create mini-photo books. They’re boardbound.

How did you like working with this publisher, personally? Did you find them pleasant and helpful, informative, really inspiring? Or simply business-like? Or did the service kind of suck, but it was worth it for what you got? Would you recommend others use them, and would you use them again yourselves?

Smashwords is very, very professional, and, as I say with BooSsurge, they would send me emails in response to everything I was doing, and at the bottom of each email it said, If you’re not satisfied, here’s the customer service info.

Can you tell us how sales have been?

It’s been really good, based on just word of mouth, and my sales are increasing, month-over-month, trending up as I get deeper into the communities of interest.

I’m contributing articles to blog sites that range from Open Salon to Divine Caroline to Fertility Authority. In some cases I’m compensated for my posts, and sometimes not, but it really does have a multiplier effect. At the Huffington Post, for example, there’s a woman who teaches women’s studies in Houston, and I get involved in those conversations. It does generate a moving flywheel. Get that flywheel spinning, the royalties start coming in.

I set my price by looking at other comparable books. It’s a balancing act. I chose a price significant enough that, if someone truly wanted to buy it, I wanted them to think it was worth the time. Based on other books in the marketplace on this topic, and the fact that it is a first run, I chose $14.95 because it’s under $15, and hardcovers are around $25.

You have to look at the economics of it at all. For the publishing houses to make an investment, they are taking a big risk. Consequently they have to figure out that the market truly is big enough to support a particular title. At the same time, what happens is there are always going to be niche books. I fully understand that my book will never be a best seller. But the people who are interested in it—people in the infertility community—read everything they can. They have the time. They’re sitting in doctor’s offices! These people are voracious.

I’m reaching an international marketplace. In fact, two of my biggest markets are in South Africa and Australia. I don’t know if there would be this opportunity for me without Amazon. Because it’s Amazon.

Interesting point—I did a fair number of interviews with authors who had gone the traditional versus indie route. After a certain time, traditionally-published books became unavailable. With indie publishing, I jokingly say my nieces and nephews will be getting my royalties in perpetuity. I’m finding the people are very loyal readers. They want the book on their bookshelves. My resale price is twice as big as my real price because a lot of those are being sold in Euros. Another woman did go through traditional publishing at the same time I did, but her book was safer and a how-to manual. She and I are listed as comps. Her books went from $15 to $6, and the price of mine is staying constant. I don’t know what was the initial agreement with her publisher. But, you know, my book will always be available.

Is there anything you would have done differently? Any specific advice you have for others considering independent publishing?

The only thing would be to have been given myself more time to do pre-launch book promotion. I was dead set on getting it out by Mother’s Day, so as a result I really rushed my own promotions. I pitched media first and then put out a press release. I know the drill. I had predetermined a number of bloggers and sent them copies and knew full well that they could have given me a thumbs-down. Fortunately the reviews came in positive.

Nonfiction in particular is an easier way to pursue indie publishing than fiction because there are ways to get into industry groups. I wrote a business plan for my book. There’s an industry around fertility, so I know how to work those channels. If you’re writing a book about infertility, you have to be smart and differentiated. I knew that, since 99.9% of the books out there have been written by mothers, I had a unique voice.

Silent Sorority came out on April 18, 2009. I did a fairly heavy amount of promotion in the May-June-July timeframe. I’ve got a community of readers who read my blog regularly. I had a post up called Birth Announcement for my book.

The workload now feels infinitely lighter than trying to get the book ready for publication. That, for me, was the hard process. A really fine-tuned social appointment, a set of reporters I know, Google set for topics. Now it’s seamless. I do this for a living, so it seems perfectly easy to spend an hour a day scoping about who’s writing about what.

Any other points or stories you’d like to elaborate upon? If I missed something significant that you think others should know about, please do talk about it.

I will say to your point earlier that there is nothing easy about publishing these days, whether it’s through traditional or indie. As the author you are 100% accountable for the publishing of your material.

Indie publishing’s got a negative connotation based on the marketplace. I really was very reluctant to move toward self-publishing, worried it would signal that my writing wasn’t of a good-enough caliber. I was extremely hard on myself when it came to the manuscript. I rewrote it three times over five years. I think you really need to think hard about: Are you propagating the myth of junk? Or are you really truly holding yourself to a high standard, such as you’d get from an external source?

I was reluctant to associate myself with anything that could be perceived as vanity press. And let me be clear: broadcasting to the world that you couldn’t conceive isn’t something you do for vanity purposes. In fact, I didn’t tell family and friends that my book was available right away. They found out about it after I’d already sold a bunch of books.

Realistically—I’ve been around the block (I’ve been blogging for three years)—my intent initially was to build a community and see what the level of appetite was for the type of book I was writing. I signed up for a couple of helpful search engines, went diligently and found out what agents work in what topics—Who do these agents represent? Do they look at issues outside conventional wisdom? And I put very specific pitches together. What I found was really interesting. The response was, “You’re involved in a particularly unusual topic that doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into the traditional publishing world model, so I don’t know that I’d be successful at pitching your idea. It doesn’t fit into their categories.”

Would my idea in itself be interesting because it’s different? I had three or four conversations with agents about this, but they didn’t feel they could make an adequate commission (reading between the lines). Pub houses were tightening the filter, so it had to be a blockbuster type of book.

Which reminded me of the movie studios. There was a time when if it didn’t fit the model it wasn’t used.

I spent eighteen months chasing the traditional publishing world, and I thought, Okay. I work in marketing. I’m just going to do that. I became the contractor for my own book.

I think we’re in the really early days of indie publishing. There are those of us who have decided we don’t fit the formula. When I’m talking to those who have created an economic arbiter—like Hollywood—I don’t lead with the fact that I’ve self-published, I just say it’s available.

Publishers were once the arbiters of good taste. Now it’s the readers who decide what’s good and what’s not. I’ve got thirty reviews on Amazon—thirty-two if you count Amazon.ca—twenty-eight five-star and two four-star.

You said you asked yourself, What is my objective, as an author?

Yes. I was feeling isolated in my infertility experience, I had enough angst about it that I went to the library, I went online. I could find no books by women about infertility who were not mothers. It became evident that there were a whole bunch of issues that hadn’t been covered—the stigma associated with failed infertility treatment. There were no appropriate guidelines for how you grieve and move on through that experience. I got so annoyed, I thought, Hell, I’ve got to change that.

I was shocked by how the fertility industry had become all about the business, not about the individuals seeking treatment. I was flying back from a business trip, and I was in business class, and this young woman was chatting near me with the flight attendant. The flight attendant asked, “What do you do?” and she said, “I’m a med student. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and the highest-paid doctors are in fertility.” Fertility and plastic surgery, those were her two options. The highest money. That’s nasty.

Because there are huge emotional issues associated with finding out you may never have a child. One of the things I put out to people is there is a belief—in society—that if you never actually delivered a child you have no loss. There is this weird sense that you have to have diapered a baby, or you have not suffered any real loss. The creation of embryos, really truly—when you have for the first time gotten an alpha pregnancy—you associate a life and a set of dreams with those early days. To know that others disregard that completely? It’s devastating that there is no support system. So if you’re out there trying to work through that set of emotions, you don’t have a natural safety net, a safe harbor to work through the loss of a fragile dream.

The reader email I get now breaks your heart.

They say, “Nobody understood what I was living through. You have given me a voice I never had.”

Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos is the author of Silent Sorority. She can be reached through both her blog and her book.

Michelle Davidson Argyle and Davin Malasarn, along with Scott G. F. Bailey, run the Literary Lab, a vibrant online community dedicated to the literary craft of fiction. In the past several months, they’ve run a contest for short stories in a variety of genres, with the results published as the Genre Wars anthology, from which the proceeds go to charity. Michelle and Davin graciously agreed to be the first to be interviewed in this series exploring the independent publishing options available to authors.

First questions first—why did you choose Lulu as your self-publisher? Was it the price vs. service level, reputation, print quality, or something else?

Davin: Well, I first started using Lulu only because Scott (and others) told me how fun it was to print out a draft of their novels in this format to get a sense of actually holding it as a book. So, I tried that with my novel and had a blast. When it came time to do the contest, I knew that other aspects of this would be complicated: reading the entries, judging them, advertising, finding charities—so I wanted to minimize the complication and stuck with Lulu because it was familiar. The price seemed reasonable, although I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.

Michelle: I first heard of Lulu through my father-in-law a few years ago, but I never did anything with it. Then I heard about Davin and Scott printing out their manuscripts through them and how the quality was up to par. I then ordered a novel from a fellow blogger who had put her work for sale on Lulu. I was impressed with the quality and the prices offered. I haven’t really looked into other POD publishers, so I’m not sure how Lulu compares to any others. So I guess you could say it was the reputation that initially got me interested in Lulu.

What service level did you choose, why, and how much did it cost? Were you happy with what you got for the price?

Davin: We chose the most basic service level. This means that we did everything on our own, from the cover design, to the formatting of the text, to the copy editing. So, all that was free. The only cost we had was the cost per copy, which was around $9 each.

Michelle: I’ve been happy with the overall price and the fact that we can also offer downloadable copies of our anthology at whatever price we choose. I like how we can set the price of the anthology, how much profit we’ll make with each sale, and the cut that Lulu takes as well (which seems to be about a fair percentage to me).

Rights: who retains them, and for how long? In whose name is the ISBN registered?

Davin: We didn’t get an ISBN for the book. Again, we wanted to keep things simple. So, as far as that goes, we have the rights to publish the stories. But, since this was an anthology, we only asked for one-time rights to publish the stories in the anthology (and the winners on the blog also). After that, all rights revert back to the original story authors.

Self-sales: does the publisher give author- or bulk-discounts if I want to purchase copies to distribute locally? I have heard that Lulu makes authors pay full price, like everyone else. If the publisher is not associated with a major distribution channel (like Ingram), doesn’t it then cost a lot of money to place physical copies at local bookstores?

Davin: We are able to get copies of the book for the standard price minus any additional revenue we decided to add onto it. That means we can get copies for about $9. We could have also made the book available at that price. But, since we’re donating our profits to charity, we chose to pay full price like everyone else. However, we did order the cheaper versions of the anthology so that we could copy edit from the hard copy. As for bookstores, that wasn’t really a consideration for me. We are basically an online presence and an online community, so we planned to stay within that community.

Michelle: Lulu does also offer bulk discounts—the more copies a buyer purchases, the cheaper each copy is. I’m not sure how this works with Lulu, since we seem to make the same profit off each one, even if they are discounted for the buyer. So I’m guessing it just costs less for Lulu to print multiple copies, so the price therefore goes down, which is nice. I’m not sure if that answers your question at all about distribution. I guess if we wanted to distribute physical copies to local bookstores, the cost would be doable since we’d order in bulk and just have to pay the printing cost.

Quality: some people are saying Lulu’s not a publisher, just a really, really, really good photocopier. Was that your experience? Where you pleased with the quality of what you paid for?

Davin: I’d be okay with calling Lulu a really good photocopier. That’s how we used it. I do believe they have other service options, though, so one could presumably get a more professional book if they were willing to pay more. With that in mind, though, I’m very happy with the results. Lulu tells you if the cover image you want to use is of high enough resolution. The actual text pages look beautiful, in my opinion. Perhaps the one downside to Lulu is that the cover quality doesn’t seem to be as nice as other books I’ve purchased. The glue that holds the pages together is not quite perfect, but not a big problem either.

Michelle: Overall, I’ve been impressed with the quality for the price. Mostly, I’m happy with how simple and easy-to-use it was—especially if someone doesn’t have a lot of design experience. Lulu made it easy to design a cover and have it look decent (and even better if you know what you’re doing), and it was easy to upload the file straight from Word. Lulu converts it to PDF printable format for you. I dealt with my university’s press when I was in school working as the editor-in-chief on the literary journal, and the printing wasn’t as nice as Lulu’s. Quite frankly, I was surprised when I saw a book printed from Lulu. I thought the quality would be less that it is.

How did you like working with Lulu, personally? Did you find them pleasant and helpful, informative, really inspiring? Or simply business-like? Or did the service kind of suck, but it was worth it for what you got? Would you recommend others use them, and would you use them again yourselves?

Davin: For me they are pretty business-like. I think they do their job and they do it well. We also didn’t require hardly any assistance on their part, so it’s a bit difficult to evaluate. I’d use them again, especially as I feel more comfortable with the process.

Michelle: We didn’t really run into any problems with this printing from Lulu, so I didn’t personally have to deal with their service. I’m impressed with the turnaround, though, and how well the site is designed. I’m already planning on using Lulu to print out a copy of my current novel so my husband can read it and not complain about staring at his computer screen for hours. I’m excited to design my own cover and get the book in the mail. It will take a little of that “need to get published right this second” edge off so that I can be patient with revisions and querying the book in the future.

Michelle Davidson Argyle can be found at both the Literary Lab and her personal blog, The Innocent Flower.

Davin Malasarn can be found at both the Literary Lab and a science blog he shares with fellow lab scientists, The Triplicate.