How to Publish a Book Readers,

A couple of weeks ago I had a very interesting how to publish a book discussion at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina with a former E! Entertainment Network Executive Producer on the topic of how to be a television producer.  Beyond how to publish a book and how to be a television producer, we talked a lot about how to get into television as a career, how to be a television personality, and how executive producers find and develop new on-air talent.

If you've ever watched a TV show and thought I could do what he does, this how to publish a book video will be very interesting to you. While not directly talking about how to publish a book per se, this interview highlights a central point of my developing personal philosophy regarding how to publish a book in the 21st Century.

That how to publish a book philosophy goes something like this: It isn't enough to write and publish a book anymore. Literally hundreds of thousands of people do that every year. To excel as a writer, I believe that authors should be multi-media savvy and aggressively develop audiences through other channels beyond simply writing and publishing a book.

I think I first noticed this with a first-wave of internet authors about ten years ago. Dave Eggers built an audience online with McSweeny's back in 2000 and 2001, which led to his bestselling memoir publication a couple years later. Soon thereafter, a number of savvy Internet authors realized the power of creating an audience via the Internet, and it became an integral part of how to publish a book.

Similarly, I have developed this how to publish a book website and media hub into a next-generation version of that. (Or at least I'm trying to.) We largely utilize video production as a means of discussing how to publish a book. Many of you probably found your way to this site by searching for "How to Publish a Book" in Google, Yahoo, or whatever search engine you use.

I think online video media is going to be the big thing for the next 3-5 years (at least), and I see a massive hole in book-related video content. On my television at home, there is no single channel (out of like 500 channels) dedicated to book content. I see this as an opportunity to develop video media related to books, authors, and topics like how to publish a book.

At any rate, all of this kind of leads back to this week's video for How to Publish a Book. My first question to Executive Producer Billy Warden goes something like this: Is television going to be relevant in 10 or 20 years?

Enjoy the discussion, and feel free to drop me a line, folks.

Thanks so much.

Stacey 

Dear How to Publish a Book Readers,

Well, I've been keeping a low profile for a couple of weeks, and then this weekend kind of exploded on me. On Friday, I had two in-studio TV interviews. On Saturday, I moderated a discussion at Quail Ridge Books. On Sunday, I drove down to Wilmington and interviewed an author at Pomegranate Books. And on Monday, I met with my critique group to workshop a section from my current novel.

Nearly all of this I filmed and have uploaded to the internet.

I'm kind'a torn which video to put online first because they were all very good, but I think the one that'll be most helpful to folks trying to decide how to publish a book is the the discussion from Wilmington on Sunday.

In Wilmington, I interviewed local bestselling author Jacqueline DeGroot. Jackie is something of a phenomenon. She is a true self-publishing success story and is the kind of person who re-defines how to publish a book.

She earns about 40,000 dollars per year purely from self-published novels, which she sells locally up and down the Carolina coast. I was impressed with a number of her marketing strategies.

More than any other self-published author I've met, she understands how to self publish a book and make money from it. She understands the value of low printing costs, and she understands the power of her local media.

In the next week or so, I'll most likely put online the other videos from the events mentioned above, but I think Jackie's discussion of how to publish a book with Lightning Source is pretty remarkable. Lightning Source was literally where Print-on-Demand began.

Today, nearly every major publisher from Simon & Schuster to Tor/Forge has embraced the power of print-on-demand and have incorporated it into their traditional distribution models for books.

If you're considering how to publish a book, you could do far worse than to explore Lightning Source, the lowest priced Print-on-Demand service in the United States.

Enjoy the video, folks!

Stacey