With a big thanks to Nina Munteanu, whose blog post last week brought it to my attention, I want to talk about a new Blogger widget that allows visitors to your blog to purchase your entire archived posts as a bound book. Please note that for reasons I will make clear the button below is only an image and has no active link.
From the information in Nina’s post and other information gathered at the web site, I first learned that the retail price for the book is $19.95 soft cover/ $24.95 hardcover of which the blog owner receives a flat 20% royalty on all sales, regardless of volume. In mainstream book retailing, $20 would be High for a trade paperback, and at that price point readers would expect a pretty substantial volume to feel they have gotten their money’s worth. While it is not exactly buried in fine print, the much less publicized fact is that the theoretical book used in the example is only 20 pages in length, and each 2 additional pages add an additional $ 1 to the retail price. (Please note that I do not say the cover price; in my testing no price appeared anywhere on the book’s cover or pages.) There is a limit of 200 total pages per book. If my math is correct ($19.95 + ((180/2)*$1)= $109.95 retail for a 200 page trade paperback book. Speaking as someone with long experience in selling books, I state categorically that this is not a viable price point for any customer other than those traditionally served by vanity presses.
Self publishing an identical book with the publishing service Lulu.com would cost a base $34.53 per unit, plus whatever the author chooses to have added to that base price as their payment. For the sake of argument, add in the $21.99 that the blog owner would theoretically receive on sales (I can’t imagine there would be many) of the $109.95 book and you have a retail of $56.52. This is still more than any reader who does not personally know the author would ever pay for a book. With Lulu, you would have the option of getting that price down, however, first by selecting black and white printing rather than full color Base cost $8.53, then add a flat $5.46 author payment, which in traditional publishing would be a phenomenal net payment for an unknown author of a title with limited distribution potential, and you have a $13.95 cover priced paperback which you can realistically hope to sell to most anyone who can be made interested in what you write.
Additionally, I am very sorry to report that the SharedBook software is not ready for prime time. In my testing, which I repeated twice, my oldest blog posting was dated May 30th and my newest September 21st. I selected the option to publish All rather than specify a date range. This was the only user-available option prior to automatically generating my book. After a long but not unreasonable wait, the site prompted me to download the images of my book covers and pages in an 8MB .pdf file. First, and perhaps most seriously Blog2Print for unknown arbitrary reasons included only posts from July 21st to September 21st in my 40 page ($29.95 retail includes a $5.99 author payment) book. Despite repeating the generation and download steps and insuring that Publish All was selected, I was never able to get Blog2Print to include my May and June posts. An even greater concern is that Blog2Print, apparently choosing at random from images within my blog posts that were of an appropriate scale and shape, printed the front cover of Poppy Z. Brite’s D*U*C*K on the front cover of my book and the front cover of John F. Hunt’s Stuff Guys Need To know on my back cover.
This is extremely unacceptable, not only to my own tastes and sensibilities (I pan both of these books between those covers), but more importantly because it is a clear cut infringement of the copyright rights of Ms. Brite, Mr. Hunt and their respective publishers which could expose both me and Blog2Print to liability were I to actually have this thing printed and distributed as they have prepared it.
Having discussed Lulu as an alternative, I need to make clear some important differences between self-publishing with Lulu and auto-publishing through the Blog2Print widget. With Lulu, the author is responsible for manually preparing the .pdf files from which the book is professionally printed, and this is not a trivial undertaking. However, given that the data to be published is already in precisely formatted HTML, the task is not beyond the reasonably assumed technical reach of a blogger who has progressed to the point of having 200 pages of posts worth preserving in a book. Another important difference is that to publish through Lulu you will have to pay a $100 fee to Lulu that covers things such as getting your book assigned an ISBN and getting the book and it’s ISBN loaded into the standard industry distribution channels that will make it available from wholesalers and retailers such as Amazon.com. You will also be required to buy a copy (at the base price) after you have made all final changes and before the book is irrevocably "set" to insure that the finished product is as you expect while it is still possible to make further corrections and changes should they be needed. (Think of this as a "proof" copy as it is called in traditional publishing.)
It is entirely realistic to believe that you have or will accumulate a sufficient number of sufficiently high quality blog posts to publish a book, and there are realistic means of doing so. Unfortunately, at this time, Blog2Print is NOT one of them.
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