Comments on: Publish and perish

By: Rusty

Rusty — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 03:17:55 +0000

I think that you either publish to make money, or you publish to make public (which is where the word comes from, after all).

The most cost effective way of making a book public is to put it online, both as pdf and as html.

I have been tangentally involved in legal publishing and expensive print based reports are giving way to freely available online documents because it is more important that these documents be public than they be profitable to the publisher.

Btw, if the works are out of copyright, I would suggest giving them to Project Gutenberg as well as putting them on your own site. There is great synergy in what they are doing.

By: roger butts

roger butts — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 23:30:07 +0000

I sure think that you’ve found a very good thing in publishing Universalist texts on line.
The other thing that I’ve been thinking about is publishing online the whole of the meditation manuals. The Strangeness of This Business by Clarke Well(s?) is just so great. It would be interesting to see how language, images, style, etc changed over the life of those meditation manuals.

Sign me up as one of your 200 interested customers.

By: Eric Stetson

Eric Stetson — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 03:45:40 +0000

Is it really true that self-published books are pointless? I have been working on a book about my view of Christian Universalism, and I pretty much know and accept that I won’t be able to get a commercial publisher to publish it. (After all, it’s virtually impossible for a new author to break through, and I am not a professor or something like that.) I figure I will have to use a self-publishing company and then just promote the book through my website, and hope it will spread by word of mouth if people think it’s a good book. But just because I realize how hard it is to get published does not mean I won’t bother to try to write books if I feel I have something valuable to say. In this day and age, anyone can get something into print and promote it through the internet. You don’t necessarily sell a lot of copies that way, but people who are truly interested in the subject matter will be able to find it and buy it. Isn’t modern technology great? I don’t think the stigma against self-published books is that strong anymore, as it used to be. At least I hope it isn’t, in this age when self-publishing has become ubiquitous in cyberspace. If anyone can create a website, why can’t anyone publish a physical book? I honestly don’t even see the point of traditional commercial publishers, to tell the truth. Nobody actually gets things published that way anyway, unless they are famous or extremely lucky. What’s the point of sending off a manuscript to 50 publishers only to get 50 rejection slips, when there is a cheap and easy “vanity” press just waiting to print your manuscript. Just a few thoughts….

By: Derek

Derek — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 13:56:25 +0000

I would be VERY interested in some Universalist stuff that I can’t obtain elsewhere in print. Which titles are you thinking about publishing as PDF-docs?

As far as self-publishing goes… While it is often viewed as vanity publishing, I do believe there are some valid reasons to use self-publishing outfits.

(1) The commercial market is VERY small. This is especially true of poetry these days. But it can also include public domain works that are out of print, and which no commercial publisher wishes to re-print.
(2) Items of very local interest. Local church histories. Biographies of persons of mostly local interest. Family genealogies and histories.
(3) Items of very specialized use. Manuals for specialized and/or proprietary technology. RE materials for a narrow population (eg. African-American Quaker teens). Custom hymnals designed to meet a special needs congregation (eg. a small UU fellowship without any access to musical accompaniment - thus a collection of very easy hymns that can be sung acapella).
(4) And the occasional controversial work that no publisher wants to pick up. While this can easily lapse into vanity, quite a few liberal theological texts/tracts originated this way, with the author printing and distributing the literature.