I’ll probably be talking about my book publishing ventures in upcoming weeks, so I thought I had better share a little background on how it all started.

A few years ago, when I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, a friend and I experimented with selling e-Books on eBay.

I tried to branch out by writing what was to be an e-book on a travel-related topic. But once I had the e-Book written, I decided I really wanted to go with publishing paper books.

This is my reasoning.

Why I Chose Paper Books Instead of eBooks

Paper books are better suited for longer books. It isn’t that I dislike eBooks– I absolutely love the free availability of information on the internet. But, in my opinion, eBooks are more suited for shorter documents (20 pages or less) because they are generally more costly to the consumer, either in screen reading difficulty or in the cost of printing it out themselves.

It is a tangible product. This is a personal choice, mind you, but I liked the idea of selling a physical item more than a virtual one. I felt good about it, and I felt like my customers were buying a proper product– with its own ISBN number and everything. Plus, it let me target my product towards a demographic that may not have bought an e-Book.

Less risk of lost sales due to piracy. Hand in hand with the feeling of a tangible product is that a paper book can’t be distributed to millions of non-buyers in seconds. Unless someone is committed enough to scan in the hundreds of pages.

There are barriers to entry. From a competitive point of view, I think paper books make sense. Yes, it is “cooler” to say that you sell e-Books– but there are no barriers to entry in that business. Anyone can do it.

There is money to be made. Since I wrote my book, printed it, and bound it myself, the cost to me was a dollar or two plus shipping. But we sold it for anywhere from $15 to $25. And my customers were satisfied. Less of a profit margin than eBooks, but a good amount of profit nonetheless.

If you want to do it right, it isn’t cheap. But printing a book can cost thousands, and it often requires hiring people to do page layout, cover design, etc. Since you often must print at least 5,000 to get a reasonable price quote, you also have to consider where you will put five thousand books.

For me, that road just hasn’t been plausible yet. Until now. But I’m still not sure I want to do it.

What The Future Holds

As I move forward to take this business venture up a notch, I am considering three options:

1. Keep printing and binding myself. In the past, we printed the books, covers, and barcodes in our office and shipped them in a “print on demand” fashion. I’m thinking about upgrading our operations to include a glue-binding machine instead of the comb-binding machine were were using in the past. The down side– it wastes a lot of our time doing manual labor when we could be focusing on other aspects of the business, and it makes it very difficult to distribute through established booksellers.
2. Use print on demand. I have researched a few companies that do this and am not quite convinced of it yet. But I am still looking around. The thing I don’t like about this is that the cost per book is often much higher than just having a proper book printer do it– and it really shaves down the potential profit margin.
3. Just suck it up and print 5,000 copies of the book. Despite the up front cost, this is still my favorite choice. You can sell your book at a 50% discount and still make a decent profit per book, especially if you happen to be the author. The down side? Either learn how to do every aspect of what you need to provide camera-ready copy or be forced to pay good money for someone to do your editing, page layout, and cover design– on top of spending $10,000 or more doing your initial print run.

As you can see, I’m still working some things out.

If you are interested in the book publishing business, I strongly recommend you buy and read The Complete Guide To Self-Publishing by Tom & Marilyn Ross. The book literally tells you everything you need to do to start a business, and is a great reference.