The long-anticipated day is upon us! Twenty Epics is finally available for purchase. (Lulu | Amazon) You'll be hearing more about it in the next week or two--it looks like we're having an online launch party soon--but there's one thing I wanted to address first. The ever-fabulous John Scalzi posted about the book, and in the comments on his entry, someone asked why we chose to publish through Lulu. It's a good question, and one that a number of people have asked, and I figure it deserves an answer.
The book was originally scheduled to be published by Wheatland Press. Wheatland is small, but well-respected, and they've developed a good reputation for quirky anthologies. (Including the first All-Star Stories book, All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.) David and I went through the whole Twenty Epics process assuming that we were publishing with Wheatland, and then at a fairly late stage in the game (somewhere right around when we were sending galleys to the authors), we found out that Wheatland was having financial difficulties and was going to have to cancel the book.
At that point, we were in a kind of awkward place. We had a book. The authors had already been paid, the cover art had already been designed, we'd been fielding review requests and advance purchase queries for a couple of months. Not only did we have a book, we had a book that we were confident was a -good- book. We just didn't have a publisher. David and I made a few queries to other small presses, had a couple of promising leads, but ultimately those leads didn't go anywhere. Somewhere during that process, we floated the idea of just publishing it ourselves. This is the age of miracles and wonders, after all, or at least the age of the rapidly-proliferating small press operation, and when you get right down to it, why -can't- All Star Stories be a publisher? Most of the small press publishers (at least the young ones) are using print-on-demand anyway, and we'd already done so much of the work, why not take that last step?
There are, of course, a lot of reasons not to take that last step. Publishing it ourselves means taking a much bigger financial risk, and it means that we're going to have to do a lot more legwork for publicity and whatnot. In the end, though, it seemed like a good choice for us. I love this book to bits and pieces, so I'm happy to put a lot of time and effort into publicity. David and I both have (we hope) some credibility in the field, which should go a long way towards discounting the "any idiot can publish any old crap" stigma of self-publishing. The print-on-demand service we're using, Lulu.com, lists books with Amazon (facilitating online sales) and with Ingram (making it easier for bookstores to order). Yes, it's possible that going this route is going to cause us to have lower sales numbers than if we had kept shopping around for a small press to take us on, but honestly, I've seen the sales figures for similar types of anthologies, and it's not as though we were going to be making the big bucks under any circumstances. This was never an enterprise that was going to make us rich.
So that's where we are. Like I said, expect to hear more (much more) about this book in the coming weeks.
I've got a book on Lulu, and as far as printers go, they do a nice job. Their storefront is functional as well.
My problem (which it sounds like you solved) is promotion. More accurately, lack of promotion.
I wish you luck!
Posted by: Chris Gerrib | 11 July 2006 at 09:27 AM