POD and an interview.

POD and an interview.


My blogging buddy Tee, (Teresa Geering) has been offered a chance to publish her book, “The Eye of Erasmus“. The company interested are called Night Publishing and have a very positive mission statement, “Good books must be published”.
I’m over the moon for The Teester and I hope it all goes down well but I do have a couple of crungles about Print on Demand publishing.

Print on Demand is exactly what its name implies. You send your manuscript off to the POD Company and they hold it in data form until somebody orders the book. A copy is then printed and sent off to the person who ordered it. Amazon.com have their own POD press and it’s slowly making headway into being accepted as a viable form of publication.

However…

If you’re pants at formatting and editing your work you could end up with book that borders on the laughable; sort of like the Quasimodo-meets-Monty Python of the literary world. Spelling mistakes, chapters finishing and ending on the same page, pictures not reproduced properly due to the wrong format being used, blah blah fishcakes, I could go on.
So, although it would be nice to think of it as an easy way to publication and literary success, it does have its pitfalls and dangers.

In fact, apart from its accessibility, the only other positive with POD is the royalties, which are around 70% to the author, (compared to about 40% when one publishes with a traditional publisher).

Personally, I want to continue with the tried, tested and condemned method of, “write book, send book, receive rejection, ad infinitum, ad nauseum…” until one day a miracle happens and you’re accepted :-)



On a slightly different note, (actually, it couldn’t be more different if you put a scarf on it, shoved it in a Tardis and called it The Doctor) I’ve done my first interview.
It would be nice to write that because I’m so interesting it was I who was interviewed but alas, as grey and monotonous as I am, I was the interviewer. :-(

The website, Struggling Authors.com suggested I interview a very nice chap called Ian Weaver. Ian is an ex Navy and Air Force Tornado navigator who had a very bad accident and was medically discharged from the armed forces. A head on crash with another Tornado left him mangled and bed ridden for a very long time, (about a year I think, I’ll have to check the website). Now this would tempt most people to wallow in the easy misery of their self pity and misfortune until Gabriel boogies on his bugle; but not so Ian. He used his experiences in the military air wing to write a book which has been published on Paul Mould Publishing.

A very approachable guy, when the interview comes up I’ll pop it on the Blog.

Right, that’s it for now, off to peel some spuds and wash up.

A Welshman’s work is never done…

Reg 