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Publish And Be Damned Interview
Posted on 02 April 2004. © Copyright 2004-2024 WriteWords
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WriteWords talks to Publish And Be Damned, (PABD), a new print on demand company. 'We supply the author with all the building blocks to create an individual book of the highest possible quality.'
Your Print On Demand company is relatively new. Why and how did you start it?
The way we see it is that PABD is much more a publishing tools provider than just a simple POD company. We supply the author with all the building blocks they need to create an individual book of the highest possible quality.
PABD got conceived when we were trying to self publish a cookery book with a group of friends . Being a designer by trade I was disappointed equally by quality of the books shown and the prices quoted by most self-publishing companies. There had to be a better way. We researched the issue for over 10 months, built a website, sourced the best suppliers we could find. PABD is the result.
The obvious problem with self-publishing is marketing. What do you do to help your customers to market their books?
Promotion and marketing is certainly a major issue for writers to publish their book. It’s perhaps one of the areas where the over-promises made by Vanity Publishers most hurt the writer. It is incredibly difficult to get onto book shop shelves and get your book reviewed in the relevant publications. It is one of the saddest facts of life that the publishing industry is still caught in a time warp where the publishers, distributors and book shops have all the power and the writer finds themselves at the bottom of the pile. However, the new technologies such as Print on Demand and the Internet can help redress a little of this balance. Although we say that marketing is primarily the author’s responsibility, we do give our authors a hand by supplying them with a free web based Personal Selling Page where people can buy their book directly and they are included in the exclusive PABD on-line bookstore. We are very active in promoting PABD and any of the considerable interest we’re generating will benefit our authors.
What printing and binding equipment do you use?
Our books are produced in the UK by Selwood Printing Ltd. Selwood have won the prestigious Printweek ‘Book Printer of the Year’ award for six of the last seven years. We use the most modern equipment available on the market today, both for our black and white and colour picture books.
What’s the best format for authors to present their scripts to you?
All the author has to do is save their manuscript as a Microsoft Word document (.doc) or alternatively as a Rich Text File. (.rtf) If the author wishes to include graphs or black and white images into the book all they have to do is to embed these into the document, following the guidelines on our site.
Do you offer help with typesetting and what about final editing, text style and layout?
Yes we do. All the typesetting and layout design is done by us, ensuring consistent quality. The author can choose from a wide range of templates to suit everybody’s taste.
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Comments by other Members
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 Zigeroon at 13:16 on 07 April 2004
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Interesting concept. It is still difficult not to equate self publishing with vanity publishing although I don't know enough about either to really comment, just an outside observers view.
Having said all that I'm off to the web site to discover more.
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sue n at 22:28 on 21 April 2004
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Having been rejected by almost all of the agents and publishers in the Writer's Handbook, I am tempted. Anyone tried this?
Sue
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