Has Anyone Published A Hardcopy Book?

[Palanan]

I know there are a number of folks hereabouts who have published e-books, but for my purposes I’d be especially interested in whether anyone has published a book with a physical print run.

Ideally I’d like to hear from people who have done this through traditional publishers (Tor, Stackpole, Springer-Verlag, you name it) but I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who’s done this through print-on-demand or other services.

[tomandtish]

You could reach out to Muz, who has published five. But i see he hasn't been on in a while. Don't know if he'd get an email notification if you PM'd him. You might also be able to get him through his website.

[Aedilred]

I was involved for a while in a community project which published three anthologies, initially as e-books and subsequently as hard copies. I know that we had editors and authors from both the UK and the US, although I'm not sure if the hard copies were published in both countries.

Although the venture was essentially pretty amateur in nature, it did nevertheless have a proper pitch process and formal editing and raised some modest revenue. Some of the authors published in the anthologies were previously published professionals; others were first-timers.

My involvement with it was pretty marginal so I'm not sure about any of the practicalities of setting up the printing element of it, but I am still in contact with the people who did run that side of things and could probably put you in touch with them if you wanted to discuss it.

[Algeh]

I have not, but I know several people who have. Most of what I do know comes from people who write science fiction and fantasy, so the further away what you're doing is from that the less helpful some of this will be.

What kind of book (fiction versus nonfiction, genre/topic, reading level) makes a difference in which publishers will be interested. A textbook publisher won't want your mystery novel, even if it is the best mystery novel ever written. The process and norms will be pretty different in different parts of the industry, so try to find advice about the kind of book you have in mind.

Broadly, traditional hardcopy publishers come in two kinds: (a) the kind where they license the rights to publish your book from you, then print it and try to sell it to people and (b) the kind where you pay them money to print your book and then you try to sell copies yourself. The second kind were traditionally pretty much scams if you're approaching this as a money-making opportunity and treating it like they've "hired" you (if what you actually want are a bunch of printed copies of, say, a family history to distribute to family members and want to pay someone to print it for you, a pay-to-publish place would not be so much a "scam" since you're getting what you wanted but you should also check with printers rather than "publishers" to make sure you're getting a good deal on printing costs at that point). The internet has changed this in that some of the POD/self-publishing places are not scams, but conventional "vanity presses" still exist and it's something to keep in mind. Their business model is to prey on the hopes of people who want to be published writers and make money from those hopeful writers, whereas a proper traditional publisher and the good POD places make money from the readers who buy the books rather than the prospective authors. Beware of anyone who wants you to pay a bunch of money up front for anything, and thoroughly check out the reputation of anyone you're thinking of paying money to.

If you are trying to make money as an author (rather than get a bunch of copies of something printed for personal reasons, like the family history example earlier), you should start by carefully researching the specific market for that type of book. Who publishes that type of thing, what are their submission guidelines, do you need an agent, etc. For SF books, one way to learn more about that process is to attend literary SF cons, most of which have lots of panels that give advice on the subject. (I attend such cons for unrelated reasons, but have pretty much absorbed what I know about getting published by going to those cons.) I have no idea if other genres have similar cons. You might also see if any of the authors you like who write books in the genre you plan to write in have places where they wrote about the process they went though to find a publisher, the more recent the better.

[The Glyphstone]

Saph has written a seven or eight-book series so far.