Smarty Pants Fun – Free Printable Crafts

You will be published!

I know this isn’t a craft. We will have a new one up this next week, but I’m to  excited about this info.   You are going to love this article! Also see The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote and Sell Your Own Book

Just found out about the best thing in book publishing…. Now I know many of you have thought about wanting to publish a book at some point in your life. I know that I had many times.

1.  I knew I had something to share with the world, or could think of something to share with the world.
2.  I knew I could make it awesome, or find people to help me make it awesome.
3. I knew I had the desire and drive, or could muster that up.
4. I knew my daughter wanted to also. But…….

How do I get published?  That was the big question. I had always heard stories of how impossible it was to get a publisher to look at a manuscript. Also, book stores usually only buy from the big publishers. So without an ‘in’ with a publisher, how would anyone get their books or poems published.

• Without a publisher, you usually have to come up with the money to print at least 1000 books for your first order. And, the printing costs a bit to set up, so it is more expensive to print only 1000 on your first run. You get a much better deal on the printing of your book if you do more like 10,000 on the first run. Well times that by about $5.00 per book and you need alot of  ‘mula’ $$$ to start with.
• Next you would have to finance your own advertising campaign, or no one would know there was a book to buy.
• You would have to set up a business license, bank and merchant accounts to be able to sell and accept credit cards.
• You would have to do all the shipping of the orders.

All of this costs a whole lot of time and money. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t have an extra $50,000 dollars laying around for the first print. So…. ‘How do I publish my own childrens book?’ or ‘How do I publish my own poems?’ of ‘How do I publish my own awesome whatever?

Found the answer…. It is a new invetion in printing called POD or Print on Demand. This uses digital printers instead of offset printers. Which means, you can print just one book for your first run, or five or 500, whatever you want. There are alot of POD companies out there now. but guess which one got my favorite POD award… No surprise, Amazon.

They have a company called Createspace at createspace.com where you can upload your book in almost any format and they will:

• Print as many books as you want.
• Full Color or Black and White.
• They will help you create a cover, or upload one of your own.
• They will give you an ISBN and barcode for the back
• They will put it on Amazon.
• They have options to add other channels so major bookstores like Barnes and Noble could buy them for their shelves.
• Amazon will handle the sell, collect the money, print the book and ship it to the buyer
• And all this for about the cost per book as a regular offset printing company.

This is so easy and wonderful, that we, my daughter Britany and I’ will have children’s craft book ready to sell in about a week here, and it has not cost me any more than $35 so far. It will be on our site soon. In the mean time…..

If you want to make some money and have a great childrens or adult book idea….. Dot it! I know you can. I’m going to post everything I have learned about publishing in some future posts, so check back or subscribe to my email for more info. In the meantime, there is a great book that will help you with the ins and outs of publishing your own. It even has a section on POD Printing or finding your own publisher. Super informative. It is called The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote and Sell Your Own Book Great investment. Make some money!
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