A helping hand for self-publishers

By Jennigay Coetzer

Self-publishing a book can be a daunting task, especially if you are planning to source all your own suppliers and manage the production and printing yourself, as I did with my first book A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, which is about writing effective press releases.

But I recently discovered Electric Book Works, a company that will handle the entire self-publishing process from obtaining an ISBN number from the National Library to editing, design, layout, printing and distribution or any parts of the process, but the author retains control and is still the publisher.

If your book has already been edited you would give an electronic file of it to them in a Word or PDF document format and they will take it from there. What’s more they will print copies of the book on an on-demand basis, or if you want to having it printed yourself will give you the file once it is laid out.

“We will print five to 10 copies at a time and warehouse them and then print on demand,” says publishing director Arthur Attwell. Authors can also request larger print runs if they need them. This is important for people like me who want to use their books as supporting material for training courses.

Once the book is published, the company will arrange for it to be listed with international distributor Ingram and notify the local online and bricks and mortar bookstores that the book is available.  The licensing rights to the book remain with the author, who has total control of who produces and prints the book, with no exclusivity for production or distribution and he or she gets all the revenues after costs.

In other words, the author pays for a service as opposed to signing a contract with a publisher and handing over rights to the book. “An author might want to use us for local distribution, but use an overseas publisher like Lulu,” says Attwell. Examples of books Electric Book Works has produced can be found at Mousehand.

Authors that have already published a book in hard copy, can send it to the company in electronic format and it will produce an e-book version and handle the distribution, as it has done for me with my first book.

With the e-book version, if the author has a blog or website, Electric Book Works will provide a piece of code to set up a Buy now! button that will take the buyer to Paypal to complete the payment process. Once the payment is made, the buyer can download the book.

For further information about this service contact arthur@electricbookworks.com or phone him on +27-21-4488336.

Related posts:

1. Tips on self-publishing a book When I wrote my first book A Perfect Press Release...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: Arthur Attwell, e-book, Electric Book Works, press release, publishing, self publishers